Blish, James - Bridge

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BRIDGE

by James Blish

A SCREECHING tomado was rocking the Bridge when the

alarm sounded; it was making the whole structure shudder

and sway. This was normal and Robert Helmuth barely

noticed it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge.

The whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes, and worse.

The scanner on the foreman's board had given 114 as the

sector of the trouble. That was at the northwestern end of

the Bridge, where it broke off, leaving nothing but the raging

clouds of ammonia crystals and methane, and a sheer drop

thirty miles to the invisible surface. There were no ultraphone

"eyes" at that end which gave a general view of the area

in so far as any general view was possiblebecause both

ends of the Bridge were incomplete.

With a sigh Helmuth put the beetle into motion. The little

car, as flat-bottomed and thin through as a bed-bug, got slow-

ly under way on its ball-bearing races, guided and held firm-

ly to the surface of the Bridge by ten close-set flanged rails.

Even so, the hydrogen gales made a terrific siren-like shrieking

between the edge of the vehicle and the deck, and the impact

of the falling drops of ammonia upon the curved roof was as

heavy and deafening as a rain of cannon balls. As a matter

of fact, they weighed almost as much as cannon balls here,

though they were not much bigger than ordinary raindrops.

Every so often, too, there was a blast, accompanied by a dull

orange glare, which made the car, the deck, and the Bridge it-

self buck savagely.

These blasts were below, however, on the surface. While

they shook the structure of the Bridge heavily, they almost

never interfered with its functioning, and could not, in the

very nature of things, do Helmuth any harm.

Had any real damage ever been done, it would never

have been repaired. There was no one on Jupiter to repair it.

The Bridge, actually, was building itself. Massive, alone,

and lifeless, it grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.

The Bridge had been well-planned. From Helmuth's point

of view almost nothing could be seen of it, for the beetle

tracks ran down the center of the deck, and in the darkness

and perpetual storm even ultrawave-assisted vision could not

penetrate more than a few hundred yards at the most. The

width of the Bridge was eleven miles; it's height, thirty miles;

its length, deliberately unspecifled in the plans, fifty-four miles

at the momenta squat, colossal structure, built with engi-

neering principles, methods, materials and tools never touched

before

For the very good reason that they would have been im-

possible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was

made of ice: a marvellous structural material under a pres-

sure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94C.

Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a fria-

ble, talc-like powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar,

transparent substance that splits at a tap.

Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of

starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps still later,

on Uranus, too. But that had been politicians' talk. The

Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface

of Jupiter's atmosphere, and its mechanisms were just barely

manageable. The bottom of Saturn's atmosphere had been

sounded at sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/James%20Blish%20-%20Bridge.txt

miles, and the temperature there was below 150C. There

even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be

worked with anything except itself. And as for Uranus . . .

As far as Helmuth was concerned, Jupiter was quite bad

enough.

The beetle crept within sight of the end of the Bridge and

stopped automatically. Helmuth set the vehicle's eyes for high-

est penetration, and examined the nearby beams.

The great bars were as close-set as screening. They had

to be, in order to support even their own weight, let alone

the weight of the components of the Bridge. The whole web-

work was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale,

but it had been designed to do that. Helmuth could never

help being alarmed by the movement, but habit assured him

that he had nothing to fear from it.

He took the automatics out of the circuit and inched the

beetle forward manually. This was only Sector 113, and the

Bridge's own Wheatstone-bridge scanning systemthere was

no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was

impossible to maintain a vacuum on Jupitersaid that the

trouble was in Sector 114. The boundary of Sector 114 was

still fully fifty feet away.

It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red

beard. Evidently there was really cause for alarmreal

alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he al-

ways felt while working on the Bridge. Any damage serious

enough to halt the beetle a full sector short of the trouble

area was bound to be major. ~

It might even turn out to be the disaster which he had

felt lurking ahead of him ever since he had been made fore-

man of the Bridgethat disaster which the. Bridge itself could

not repair, sending man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.

The secondaries cut in and the beetle stopped again. Grim-

ly, Helmuth opened the switch and sent the beetle creeping

across the invisible danger line. Almost at once, the car tilted

just perceptibly to the left, and the screaming of the winds

between its edges and the deck shot up the scale, sirening in

and out of the soundless-dogwhistle range with an eeriness

that set Helmuth's teeth on edge. The beetle itself fluttered

and chattered like an alarm-clock hammer between the sur-

face of the deck and 'the flanges of the tracks.

Ahead there was still nothing to be seen but the horizontal

driving of the clouds and the hail, roaring along the length of

the Bridge, out of the blackness into the beetle's fanlights,

and onward into blackness again towards the horizon no

eye would ever see.

Thirty miles below, the fusillade of hydrogen explosions

continued. Evidently something really wild was going on on

the surface. Helmuth could not remember having heard so

much activity in years.

There was a flat, especially heavy crash, and a long line

of fuming orange fire came pouring down the seething at-

mosphere into the depths, feathering horizontally like the

mane of a Lipizzan horse, directly in front of Helmuth. In-

stinctively, he winced and drew back from the board, al-

though that stream of flame actually was only a little less

cold than the rest of the streaming gases, far too cold to

injure the Bridge.

In the momentary glare, however, he saw something-an

upward twisting of shadows, patterned but obviously un-

finished, fluttering in silhouette against the hydrogen cata-

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Blish, James - Bridge

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