by James Blish
And there were plenty of people scattered about the satellites who needed the sound of a voice.
“… anybody know whether or not the senators are coming here? Doc Barth put in a report a while back on a fossil plant he found here, at least he thinks it was a plant. Maybe they’d like a look at it.”
“It’s the Bridge team they’re coming to see.” A strong voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in and out to the currents of an atmosphere; that would be Sweeney, on Ganymede. “Sorry to throw the wet blanket, boys, but I don’t think the senators’ll be interested in our rock-balls for their own lumpy selves. They’re only scheduled to stay here three days.”
Helmuth thought grayly: Then they’ll stay on Callisto only one.
“Is that you, Sweeney? Where’s the Bridge tonight?”
“Dillon’s on duty,” a very distant transmitter said. “Try to raise Helmuth, Sweeney.”
“Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy beetle-gooser! Come in, Helmuth!”
“Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us a little. We’re feeling cheerful.”
Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike, from where it lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But before he had completed the gesture, the door to his room swung open.
Eva came in.
She said: “Bob, I want to tell you something.”
“His voice is changing!” the voice of the Callisto operator said. “Sweeney, ask him what he’s drinking!”
Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed—in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter V—and Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this hour, half-way between her sleep period and her trick. Her hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of the way she had looked when they had been lovers, before the Bridge had come to bestride his bed instead. He put the memory aside.
“All right,” he said. “I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, sugar and the other stuff are in the locker … you know where it is. Shot-cans are there, too.”
The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which, Helmuth knew, meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.
“I don’t need a drink,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been turning my lux-R’s back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for me—by showing me what a mind looks like that’s hiding from itself.”
“Evita, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously you’re advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won’t you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?”
“Now you’re being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn’t a vitamin. And I didn’t come to talk about that. I came to tell you something I think you ought to know.”
“Which is—?”
She said: “Bob, I mean to have a child here.”
A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exasperation, jack-knifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading. Eva twisted to look at it, but the page was already dimming and vanishing.
“Women!” Helmuth said, when he could get his breath back. “Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environment can change a human being much, after all.”
“Why should it?” she said suspiciously, looking back at him. “I don’t see the joke. Shouldn’t a woman want to have a child?”
“Of course she should,” he said, settling back. The pages began to flip across the wall again. “It’s quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock garden like Jupiter V, to pluck fossils and make dust-castles and get quaintly starburned. How cosy to tuck the blue little body back into its corner that night, and give it its oxygen bottle, promptly as the sound of the trick-change bell! Why it’s as natural as Jupiter-light—as Western as freeze-dried apple pie.”
He turned his head casually away. “Congratulations. As for me, though, Eva, I’d much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here.”
Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.
“You reedy male platitude!” she said, in a low grinding voice. “How you could see almost the whole point, and make so little of it— Women, is it? So you think I came creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences in bed!”
He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away. “What else?” he demanded, trying to imagine how it would feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these Bridge-robots. “None of us need bother with games and excuses. We’re here, we’re isolated, we were all chosen because, among other things, we were quite incapable of forming permanent emotional attachments and capable of any alliances we liked without going unbalanced when the attraction died and the alliance came unstuck. None of us have to pretend that our living arrangements would keep us out of jail in Boston, or that they have to involve any Earth-normal excuses.”
She said nothing. After a while he asked, gently: “Isn’t that so?”
“Of course it’s not so,” Eva said. She was frowning at him; he had the absurd impression that she was pitying him. “If we were really incapable of making any permanent attachment, we’d never have been chosen. A cast of mind like that is a mental disease, Bob; it’s anti-survival from the ground up. It’s the conditioning that made us this way. Didn’t you know?”
Helmuth hadn’t known; or if he had, he had been conditioned to forget it. He gripped the arms of the chair tighter.
“Anyhow,” he said, “that’s the way we are.”
“Yes, it is. Also it has nothing to do with the matter.”
“It doesn’t? How stupid do you think I am? I don’t care whether or not you’ve decided to have a child here, if you really mean what you say.”
She, too, seemed to be trembling. “You really don’t, either. The decision means nothing to you.”
“Well, if I liked children, I’d be sorry for the child. But as it happens, I can’t stand children—and if that’s the conditioning, too, I can’t do a thing about it. In short, Eva, as far as I’m concerned you can have as many kids as you want, and to me you’ll still be the worst operator on the Bridge.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said. At this moment she seemed to have been cut from pressure-ice. “I’ll leave you something to charge your mind with, too, Robert Helmuth. I’ll leave you sprawled here under your precious book … what is Madame Bovary to you, anyhow, you unadventurous turtle? … to think about a man who believes that children must always be born into warm cradles—a man who thinks that men have to huddle on warm worlds, or they won’t survive. A man with no ears, no eyes, scarcely any head. A man in terror, a man crying: Mamma! Mamma! all the stellar days and nights long!”
“Parlor diagnosis.”
“Parlor labeling! Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm woolly blanket in tight around your brains, or some little sneeze of sense might creep in, and impair your—efficiency!”
The door closed sharply after her.
A million pounds of fatigue crashed down without warning on the back of Helmuth’s neck, and he fell back into the reading chair with a gasp. The roots of his beard ached, and Jupiters bloomed and wavered away before his closed eyes.
He struggled once, and fell asleep.
Instantly he was in the grip of the dream.
It started, as always, with commonplaces, almost realistic enough to be a documentary film-strip—except for the appalling sense of pressure, and the distorted emotional significance with which the least word, the smallest movement was invested.
It was the sinking of the first caisson of the Bridge. The actual event had been bad enough. The job demanded enough exactness of placement to requir
e that manned ships enter Jupiter’s atmosphere itself; a squadron of twenty of the most powerful ships ever built with the five-million-ton asteroid, trimmed and shaped in space, slung beneath them in an immense cat’s-cradle.
Four times that squadron had disappeared beneath the racing clouds; four times the tense voices of pilots and engineers had muttered in Helmuth’s ears, and he had whispered back, trying to guide them by what he could see of the conflicting trade-blasts from Jupiter V; four times there were shouts and futile orders and the snapping of cables and men screaming endlessly against the eternal howl of the Jovian sky.
It had cost, altogether, nine ships, and two hundred thirty-one men, to get one of five laboriously-shaped asteroids planted in the shifting slush that was Jupiter’s surface. Until that had been accomplished, the Bridge could never have been more than a dream. While the Great Red Spot had shown astronomers that some structures on Jupiter could last for long periods of time—long enough, at least, to be seen by many generations of human beings—it had been equally well known that nothing on Jupiter could be really permanent. The planet did not even have a “surface” in the usual sense; instead, the bottom of the atmosphere merged more or less smoothly into a high-pressure sludge, which in turn thickened as it went deeper into solid pressure-ice. At no point on the way down was there any interface between one layer and another, except in the rare areas where a part of the deeper, more “solid” medium had been thrust far up out of its normal level to form a continent which might last as long as two years or two hundred. It was on to one of these great ribs of bulging ice that the ships had tried to plant their asteroid—and, after four tries, had succeeded.
Helmuth had helped to supervise all five operations, counting the successful one, from his desk on Jupiter V. But in the dream he was not in the control shack, but instead on shipboard, in one of the ships that was never to come back—
Then, without transition, but without any sense of discontinuity either, he was on the Bridge itself. Not in absentia, as the remote guiding intelligence of a beetle, but in person, in an ovular, tank-like suit the details of which would never come clear. The high brass had discovered antigravity and had asked for volunteers to man the Bridge. Helmuth had volunteered.
Looking back on it in the dream, he did not understand why he had volunteered. It had simply seemed expected of him, and he had not been able to help it, even though he had known to begin with what it would be like. He belonged on the Bridge, though he hated it—he had been doomed to go there from the first.
And there was … something wrong … with the antigravity. The high brass had asked for its volunteers before the research work had been completed. The present antigravity fields were weak, and there was some basic flaw in the theory. Generators broke down after only short periods of use; burned out, unpredictably, sometimes only moments after having passed their production tests with perfect scores. In waking life, vacuum tubes behaved in that unpredictable way; there were no vacuum tubes anywhere on Jupiter, but machines on Jupiter burned out all the same, burned out at temperatures which would freeze Helmuth solid in an instant.
That was what Helmuth’s antigravity set was about to do. He crouched inside his personal womb, above the boiling sea, the clouds raging by him in little scouring crystals which wore at the chorion protecting him, lit by a plume of hydrogen flame—and waited to feel his weight suddenly become three times greater than normal, the pressure on his body go from sixteen pounds per square inch to fifteen million, the air around him take on the searing stink of poisons, the whole of Jupiter come pressing its burden upon him.
He knew what would happen to him then.
It happened.
Helmuth greeted “morning” on Jupiter V with his customary scream.
BOOK THREE
The layman, the “practical” man, the man in the street, says, What is that to me? The answer is positive and weighty. Our life is entirely dependent on the established doctrines of ethics, sociology, political economy, government, law, medical science, etc. This affects everyone consciously or unconsciously, the man in the street in the first place, because he is the most defenseless.
— ALFRED KORZYBSKI
ENTR’ACTE: WASHINGTON
4th January 2020
Dear Seppi,
Lord knows I have better sense than to mail this, send it to you by messenger, or leave it anywhere in the files—or indeed on the premises—of the Joint Committee; but if one is sensible about such matters these days, one never puts anything on paper at all, and then burns the carbons. As a bad compromise, I am filing this among my personal papers, where it will be found, opened and sent to you only after I will be beyond reprisals.
That’s not meant to sound as ominous as, upon rereading, I see it does. By the time you have this letter, abundant details of what I’ve been up to should be available to you, not only through the usual press garble, but through verbatim testimony. You will have worked out, by now, a rational explanation of my conduct since my re-election (and before it, for that matter). At the very least, I hope you now know why I authorized such a monstrosity as the Bridge, even against your very good advice.
All that is water over the dam (or ether over the Bridge, if you boys are following Dirac’s lead back to the ether these days. How do I know about that? You’ll see in a moment.). I don’t mean to rehash it here. What I want to do in this letter is to leave you a more specialized memo, telling you in detail just how well the research system you suggested to me worked out for us.
Despite my surface appearance of ignoring that advice, we were following your suggestion, and very closely. I took a particular interest in your hunch that there might be “crackpot” ideas on gravity which needed investigation. Frankly, I had no hope of finding anything, but that would have left me no worse off than I had been before I talked to you. And actually it wasn’t very long before my research chief came up with the Locke Derivation.
The research papers which finally emerged from this particular investigation are still in the Graveyard file, and I have no hope that they’ll be released to non-government physicists within the forseeable future. If you don’t get the story from me, you’ll never get it from anyone; and I’ve enough on my conscience now to be indifferent to a small crime like breaking Security. Besides, as usual, this particular “secret” has been available for the taking for years. A man named Schuster—you may know more about him than I do—wondered out loud about it as far back as 1891, before anybody had thought of trying to keep scientific matters a secret. He wanted to know whether or not every large rotating mass, like the Sun for instance, was a natural magnet. (That was before the sun’s magnetic field had been discovered, too. ) And by the 1940’s it was clearly established for small rotating bodies like electrons—a thing called the Lande factor with which I’m sure you’re familiar. I myself don’t understand Word One of it. (Dirac was associated with much of that part of the work. ) Finally, a man named W. H. Babcock of Mount Wilson, pointed out in the 1940’s that the Lande factor for the Earth, the Sun, and a star named 78 Virginius was identical, or damned close to it.
Now all this seemed to me to have nothing to do at all with gravity, and I said so to my team chief, who brought the thing to my attention. But I was wrong (I suppose you’re already ahead of me by now). Another man, Prof. P. M. S. Blackett, whose name was even familiar to me, had pointed out the relationship. Suppose, Blackett said (I am copying from my notes now), we let Pbe magnetic moment, or what I have to think of as the leverage effect of a magnet—the product of the strength of the charge times the distance between the poles. Let U be angular momentum—rotation to a slob like me; angular speed times moment of inertia to you. Then if C is the velocity of light, and G is the acceleration of gravity ( and they always are in equations like this, I’m told), then:
(B is supposed to be a constant amounting to about 0.25. Don’t ask me why. ) Admittedly this was all speculative; there would be no way to test it, except on another planet wit
h a stronger magnetic field than Earth’s—preferably about a hundred times as strong. The closest we could come to that would be Jupiter, where the speed of rotation is about 25,000 miles an hour at the equator—and that was obviously out of the question.
Or was it? I confess that I never thought of using Jupiter, except in wish-fulfillment daydreams, until this matter of the Locke Derivation came up. It seems that by a simple algebraic manipulation, you can stick G on one side of the equation, and all the other terms on the other, and come up with this:
To test that, you need a gravitational field little more than twice the strength of Earth’s. And there, of course, is Jupiter again. None of my experts would give the notion a nickel—they said, among other things, that nobody even knew who Locke was, which is true, and that his algebraic trick wouldn’t stand up under dimensional analysis, which turned out to be true—but irrelevant. (We did have to monkey with it a little after the experimental results were in. ) What counted was that we could make a practical use of this relationship.
Once we tried that, I should add, we were astonished at the accompanying effects: the abolition of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald relationship inside the field, the intolerance of the field itself to matter outside its influence, and so on; not only at their occurring at all—the formula doesn’t predict them—but at their order of magnitude. I’m told that when this thing gets out, dimensional analysis isn’t the only scholium that’s going to have to be revamped. It’s going to be the greatest headache for physicists since the Einstein theory; I don’t know whether you’ll relish this premonitory twinge or not.
Pretty good going for a “crackpot” notion, though.
After that, the Bridge was inevitable. As soon as it became clear that we could perform the necessary tests only on the surface of Jupiter itself, we had to have the Bridge. It also became clear that the Bridge would have to be a dynamic structure. It couldn’t be built to a certain size and stopped there. The moment it was stopped, Jupiter would tear it to shreds. We had to build it to grow—to do more than just resist Jupiter—to push back against Jupiter, instead. It’s double the size that it needed to be to test the Locke Derivation, now, and I still don’t know how much longer we’re going to have to keep it growing. Not long, I hope; the thing’s a monster already.