by Mike Ashley
“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.”
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 judged incapable of forming permanent emotional attachments, and capable of such alliances as we found attractive without going unbalanced when the attraction diminished 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 so. 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 was trembling with rage. “You really don’t, too. 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. In short, Eva, as far as I’m concerned you can have as many 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, scarcely any head. A man in terror, a man crying Mamma! Mamma! all the stellar days and nights long!”
“Parlour diagnosis!”
“Parlour labelling! Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm woolly blanket in tight about 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 Helmuth’s brain, 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 require 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 clouds; four times the tense voices of pilots and engineers had muttered in Helmuth’s ears; four times there were shouts and futile orders and the snapping of cables and someone screaming endlessly against the eternal howl of the Jovian sky.
It had cost, altogether, nine ships and 231 men, to get one of five laboriously shaped asteroids planted in the shifting slush that was Jupiter’s surface. 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, tanklike 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 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 scientific 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 testing up without a flaw – like vacuum tubes in waiting life.
That was what Helmuth’s set was about to do. He crouched inside his personal womb, above the boiling sea, the clouds raging about him, lit by a plume of hydrogen flame, and waited to feel his weight suddenly become eight times greater than normal. He knew what would happen to him then.
It happened.
Helmuth greeted morning on Jupiter V with his customary scream.
5
The ship that landed as he was going on duty did nothing to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not distinguishable from any of the long-range cruisers which ran the legs of the Moon-Mars-Belt-Ganymede trip. But it grounded its huge bulk with less visible expenditures of power than one of the little inter-satellary boats.
That landing told Helmuth that his dream was well on its way to coming true. If the high brass had had a real antigravity, there would have been no reason why the main jets should have been necessary at all. Obviously, what had been discovered was some sort of partial screen, which allowed a ship to operate with far less jet action than was normal, but which still left it subject to a sizeable fraction of the universal stress of space.
Nothing less than a complete and completely controllable antigravity would do on Jupiter.
He worked mechanically, noting that Charity was not in evidence. Probably he was conferring with the senators, receiving what would be for him the glad news.
Helmuth realized suddenly that there was nothing left for him to do now but to cut and run.
There could certainly be no reason why he should have to re-enact the entire dream, helplessly, event for event, like an actor committed to a play. He was awake now, in full control of his own senses, and still at least partially sane. The man in the dream had volunteered – but that man would not be Robert Helmuth. Not any longer.
While the senators were here, he would turn in his resignation. Direct, over Charity’s head.
“Wake up, Helmuth,” a voice from the gang deck snapped suddenly. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have run yourself off the end of the Bridge. You had all the automatic stops on that beetle cut out.”
Helmuth reached guiltily and more than a little too late for the controls. Eva had already run his beetle back beyond the danger line.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Thanks, Eva.”
“Don’t thank me. If you’d actually been in it, I’d have let it go. Less reading and more sleep is what I recommend for you, Helmuth.”
“Keep your recommendations to yourself,” he snapped.
The incident started a new and even more disturbing chain of thought. If he were to resign now, it would be nearly a year before he could get back to Chicago. Antigravity or no antigravity, the senators’ ship would have no room for unexpected passengers. Shipping a man back home had to be arranged far in advance. Space had to be provided, and a cargo equivalent of the weight and space requirements he would take up on the return trip had to be deadheaded out to Jupiter.
A year of living in the station on Jupiter V without any function – as a man whose drain on the station’s supplies no longer could be justified in terms of what he
did. A year of living under the eyes of Eva Chavez and Charity Dillon and the other men and women who still remained Bridge operators, men and women who would not hesitate to let him know what they thought of his quitting.
A year of living as a bystander in the feverish excitement of direct, personal exploration of Jupiter. A year of watching and hearing the inevitable deaths while he alone stood aloof, privileged, and useless. A year during which Robert Helmuth would become the most hated living entity in the Jovian system.
And, when he got back to Chicago and went looking for a job – for his resignation from the Bridge gang would automatically take him out of government service – he would be asked why he left the Bridge at the moment when work on the Bridge was just reaching its culmination.
He began to understand why the man in the dream had volunteered.
When the trick-change bell rang, he was still determined to resign, but he had already concluded bitterly that there were, after all, other kinds of hells besides the one on Jupiter.
He was returning the board to neutral as Charity came up the cleats. Charity’s eyes were snapping like a skyful of comets. Helmuth had known that they would be.
“Senator Wagoner wants to speak to you, if you’re not too tired, Bob,” he said. “Go ahead; I’ll finish up there.”
“He does?” Helmuth frowned. The dream surged back upon him. No. They would not rush him any faster than he wanted to go. “What about, Charity? Am I suspected of unWestern activities? I suppose you’ve told them how I feel.”
“I have,” Dillon said, unruffled. “But we’re agreed that you may not feel the same after you’ve talked to Wagoner. He’s in the ship, of course. I’ve put out a suit for you at the lock.”
Charity put the helmet over his head, effectively cutting himself off from further conversation, or from any further consciousness of Helmuth at all.
Helmuth stood looking at him a moment. Then, with a convulsive shrug, he went down the cleats.
Three minutes later, he was plodding in a spacesuit across the surface of Jupiter V, with the vivid bulk of Jupiter splashing his shoulders with colour.
A courteous Marine let him through the ship’s air lock and deftly peeled him out of the suit. Despite a grim determination to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possible consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was conducted up towards the bow.
But the ship was like the ones that had brought him from Chicago to Jupiter V – it was like any spaceship: there was nothing in it to see but corridor walls and stairwells, until you arrived at the cabin where you were needed.
Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no more than sixty-five at most, not at all portly, and he had the keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen. He received Helmuth alone, in his own cabin – a comfortable cabin as spaceship accommodations go, but neither roomy nor luxurious. He was hard to match up with the stories Helmuth had been hearing about the current Senate, which had been involved in scandal after scandal of more than Roman proportions.
Helmuth looked around. “I thought there were several of you,” he said.
“There are, but I didn’t want to give you the idea that you were facing a panel,” Wagoner said, smiling. “I’ve been forced to sit in on most of these endless loyalty investigations back home, but I can’t see any point in exporting such religious ceremonies to deep space. Do sit down, Mr Helmuth. There are drinks coming. We have a lot to talk about.”
Stiffly, Helmuth sat down.
“Dillon tells me,” Wagoner said, leaning back comfortably in his own chair, “that your usefulness to the Bridge is about at an end. In a way, I’m sorry to hear that, for you’ve been one of the best men we’ve had on any of our planetary projects. But, in another way, I’m glad. It makes you available for something much bigger, where we need you much more.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ll explain in a moment. First, I’d like to talk a little about the Bridge. Please don’t feel that I’m quizzing you, by the way. You’re at perfect liberty to say that any given question is none of my business, and I’ll take no offence and hold no grudge. Also, ‘I hereby disavow the authenticity of any tape or other tapping of which this statement may be part.’ In short, our conversation is unofficial, highly so.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s to my interest; I’m hoping that you’ll talk freely to me. Of course my disavowal means nothing, since such formal statements can always be excised from a tape; but later on I’m going to tell you some things you’re not supposed to know, and you’ll be able to judge by what I say then that anything you say to me is privileged. Okay?”
A steward came in silently with the drinks, and left again. Helmuth tasted his. As far as he could tell, it was exactly like many he had mixed for himself back in the control shack, from standard space rations. The only difference was that it was cold, which Helmuth found startling, but not unpleasant after the first sip. He tried to relax. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
“Good enough. Now: Dillon says that you regard the Bridge as a monster. I’ve examined your dossier pretty closely, and I think perhaps Dillon hasn’t quite the gist of your meaning. I’d like to hear it straight from you.”
“I don’t think the Bridge is a monster,” Helmuth said slowly. “You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the Bridge to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of adverse conditions ever will stop man for long, and there I’m in agreement with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress, personified. He can’t admit – you asked me to speak my mind, senator – that the West is a decadent and dying culture. All the other evidence that’s available shows that it is. Charity likes to think of the Bridge as giving the lie to that evidence.”
“The West hasn’t many more years,” Wagoner agreed, astonishingly. “Still and all, the West has been responsible for some really towering achievements in its time. Perhaps the Bridge could be considered as the last and the mightiest of them all.”
“Not by me,” Helmuth said. “The building of gigantic projects for ritual purposes – doing a thing for the sake of doing it is the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or an even more idiotic and more enormous example, bigger than anything human beings have accomplished yet, the laying out of the ‘Diagram of Power’ over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had put all that energy into survival instead, they’d probably be alive yet.”
“Agreed,” Wagoner said.
“All right. Then maybe you’ll also agree that the essence of a vital culture is its ability to defend itself. The West has beaten off the Soviets for a century now – but as far as I can see, the Bridge is the West’s ‘Diagram of Power’, its pyramids, or what have you. All the money and the resources that went into the Bridge are going to be badly needed, and won’t be there, when the next Soviet attack comes.”
“Which will be very shortly, I’m told,” Wagoner said, with complete calm. ‘Furthermore, it will be successful, and in part it will be successful for the very reasons you’ve outlined. For a man who’s been cut off from the Earth for years, Helmuth, you seem to know more about what’s going on down there than most of the general populace does.”
“Nothing promotes an interest in Earth like being off it,” Helmuth said. “And there’s plenty of time to read out here.” Either the drink was stronger than he had expected, or the senator’s calm concurrence in the collapse of Helmuth’s entire world had given him another shove towards nothingness; his head was spinning.
Wagoner saw it. He leaned forward suddenly, catching Helmuth flat-footed. “However,” he said, “it’s difficult for me to agree that the Bridge serves, or ever did serve, a ritual purpose. The Bridge served a huge practical purpose which is now fulfilled – the Bridge, as such, is now a defunct project.”
“Defunct?” Helmuth repeated faintly.
“Quite. Of course we’ll continue to operate it for a while, simply because
you can’t stop a process of that size on a dime, and that’s just as well for people like Dillon who are emotionally tied up in it. You’re the one person with any authority in the whole station who has already lost enough interest in the Bridge to make it safe for me to tell you that it’s being abandoned.”
“But why?”
“Because,” Wagoner went on quietly, “the Bridge has now given us confirmation of a theory of stupendous importance – so important, in my opinion, that the imminent fall of the West seems like a puny event in comparison. A confirmation, incidentally, which contains in it the seeds of ultimate destruction for the Soviets, whatever they may win for themselves in the next fifty years or so.”
“I suppose,” Helmuth said, puzzled, “that you mean anti-gravity?”
For the first time, it was Wagoner’s turn to be taken aback. “Man,” he said at last, “do you know everything I want to tell you? I hope not, or my conclusions will be mighty suspicious. Surely Charity didn’t tell you we had antigravity; I strictly enjoined him not to mention it.”
“No, the subject’s been on my mind,” Helmuth said. “But I certainly don’t see why it should be so world-shaking, any more than I see how the Bridge helped to bring it about. I thought it had been developed independently, for the further exploitation of the Bridge, and would step up Bridge operation, not discontinue it.”
“Not at all. Of course, the Bridge has given us information in thousands of different categories, much of it very valuable indeed. But the one job that only the Bridge could do was that of confirming, or throwing out, the Blackett-Dirac equations.”
“Which are – ?”
“A relationship between magnetism and the spinning of a massive body – that much is the Dirac part of it. The Blackett equation seemed to show that the same formula also applied to gravity. If the figures we collected on the magnetic field strength of Jupiter forced us to retire the Dirac equations, then none of the rest of the information we’ve gotten from the Bridge would have been worth the money we spent to get it. On the other hand, Jupiter was the only body in the solar system available to us which was big enough in all relevant respects to make it possible for us to test those equations at all. They involve quantities of enormous orders of magnitudes.