“I do,” Dillon said, with a kind of eagerness. “I do, Bob.
I’m only trying to help, to make you see the problem as it is.
The Bridge isn’t really that awful, it isn’t worth a single nightmare.”
“Oh, it isn’t the Bridge that makes me yell out when I’m sleeping,” Helmuth said, smiling bitterly. “I’m not that ridden by it yet. It’s while I’m awake that I’m afraid the Bridge will be swept away. What I sleep with is a fear of myself.”
“That’s a sane fear. You’re as sane as any of us,” Dillon insisted, fiercely solemn. “Look, Bob. The Bridge isn’t a monster. It’s a way we’ve developed for studying the behaviour of materials under specific conditions of temperament, pressure, and gravity. Jupiter isn’t Hell, either; it’s a set of conditions. The Bridge is the laboratory we set up to work with those conditions.”
“It isn’t going anywhere. It’s a bridge to no place.”
“There aren’t many places on Jupiter,” Dillon said, missing Helmuth’s meaning entirely. “We put the Bridge on an island in the local sea because we needed solid ice we could sink the caissons in. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered where we put it. We could have floated it on the sea itself, if we hadn’t wanted to fix it in order to measure storm velocities and such things.”
“I know that,” Helmuth said.
“But, Bob, you don’t show any signs of understanding it.
Why, for instance, should the Bridge go any place? It isn’t even, properly speaking, a bridge at all. We only call it that because we used some bridge engineering principles in building it. Actually, it’s much more like a travelling cranean extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn’t going anywhere because it hasn’t any place interesting to go, that’s all.