the mightiest engineering achievement of all history, could the
Earth have borne its weight at all. But on Jupiter, the Bridge
was as precarious and perishable as a snowflake.
“Bob?” Dillon’s voice asked. “You seem more upset than
usual. Is it serious?” Helmuth turned. His superior’s worn
young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already
beginning to grey at the temples, was alight both with love
for the Bridge and the consuming ardour of the responsibility
he had to bear. As always, it touched Helmuth, and re-
minded him that the implacable universe bed, after all,
provided one warm corner in which human beings might hud-
dle together.
“Serious enough,” he said, forming the words with dif-
ficulty against the frozen inarticulateness Jupiter forced upon
him. “But not fatal, as far as I could see. There’s a lot of
hydrogen vulcanism on the surface, especially at the north-
west end, and it looks like there must have been a big blast
under the cliffs. I saw what looked like the last of a series
of fireballs.”
Dillon’s face relaxed while Helmuth was talking, slowly,
line by engraved line. “Oh. Just a flying chunk, then.”
“I’m almost sure that’s what it was. The cross-draughts
are heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each
other some time next week, aren’t they? I haven’t checked,
but I can feel the difference in the storms.”
“So the chunk got picked up and thrown through the end
of the Bridge. A big piece?”
Helmuth shrugged. “That end is all twisted away to the left,
and the deck is burst to flinders. The scaffolding is all gone,