Helmuth, looking forward into another night of dreams, said: “That’s the way I look at it now.”
m
There were three yellow “Critical” signals lit on the long gang board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrat-ed on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin namesuch once-valid tickets no longer meant anything among Earth’s uniformly mixed-race populationwas a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to become enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it all, precisely at the moments when cold analysis and split-second decisions were most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit except as an observer, and donned the co-operator’s helmet.
The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being around him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hundred feet up along its slanted sidesbreakers that never subsided, but simply were torn away into flying spray.
There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north face of the caisson, crawling slowly towards the pediment of the nearest truss. Catalysis
Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. On this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even the tiny specks of calcium carbide were deadly. At these wind velocities, such specks imbedded themselves in everything; and at fifteen million pounds per square inch, pressure ice catalyzed by sodium took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building pro-tein-like compounds in a rapid, deadly chain of decay: H~NCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN….