turtle?… to think about a man who believes that children
must always be born into warm cradlesa 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! Mammal all the stellar
days and nights long!”
“Parlour diagnosis!”
“Parlour labelling. Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm wooly
blanket in tight about your brains, or some little sneeze of
sense might creep in, and impair yourefficiency!”
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-stripexcept for the ap-
palling sense of pressure, and the distorted emotional signifi-
cance 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