Had any real damage ever been done, it would never have been repaired. There was no one on Jupiter to repair it.
The Bridge, actually, was building itself. Massive, alone, and lifeless, it grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.
The Bridge had been well-planned. From Helmuth’s point of view almost nothing could be seen of it, for the beetle tracks ran down the center of the deck, and in the darkness and perpetual storm even ultrawave-assisted vision could not penetrate more than a few hundred yards at the most. The width of the Bridge was eleven miles; it’s height, thirty miles; its length, deliberately unspecifled in the plans, fifty-four miles at the momenta squat, colossal structure, built with engineering principles, methods, materials and tools never touched before
For the very good reason that they would have been impossible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was made of ice: a marvellous structural material under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94C.
Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a fria-ble, talc-like powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar, transparent substance that splits at a tap.
Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps still later, on Uranus, too. But that had been politicians’ talk. The Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and its mechanisms were just barely manageable. The bottom of Saturn’s atmosphere had been sounded at sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight miles, and the temperature there was below 150C. There even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be worked with anything except itself. And as for Uranus …