“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said. At this moment she seemed to have been cut from pressure-ice. “I’ll leave you something to charge your mind with, too, Robert Helmuth.
I’ll leave you sprawled here under your precious book…
what is Madame Bovary to you, anyhow, you unadventurous 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.