whole thing terrifying.”
“Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Helmuth said, with quiet
exultation. “But terror and fright are two different things, as
I’ve just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was
wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You
were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“All right, let’s put it this way: The work the Bridge was
doing was worth-while, as I know nowso I was wrong in
being frightened of it, in calling it a bridge to nowhere.
“But you no more saw where it was going than I, and you
made the Bridge the be-all and end-all of your existence.
“Now, there’s a place to go to; in fact there are places
hundreds of places. They’ll be Earth-like places. Since the
Soviets are about to win Earth, those places will be more
Earth-like than Earth itself, for the next century or so at
least!”
She said, “Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace
between us?”
“I’m going to take on this job, Evita, if you’ll go along?”
She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvellous
fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells
in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with
a jangle of pure horror.
“Posts!” the speaker above Eva’s bed roared, in a distort-
ed, gigantic version of Charity Dillon’s voice. “Peak storm
overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has
already topped all previous records, and part of the land mass
has begun to settle. This is an A-l overload emergency.”
Behind Charity’s bellow, the winds of Jupiter made a