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
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