As far as Helmuth was concerned, Jupiter was quite bad enough.
The beetle crept within sight of the end of the Bridge and stopped automatically. Helmuth set the vehicle’s eyes for high-est penetration, and examined the nearby beams.
The great bars were as close-set as screening. They had to be, in order to support even their own weight, let alone the weight of the components of the Bridge. The whole web-work was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale, but it had been designed to do that. Helmuth could never help being alarmed by the movement, but habit assured him that he had nothing to fear from it.
He took the automatics out of the circuit and inched the beetle forward manually. This was only Sector 113, and the Bridge’s own Wheatstone-bridge scanning systemthere was no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was impossible to maintain a vacuum on Jupitersaid that the trouble was in Sector 114. The boundary of Sector 114 was still fully fifty feet away.
It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red beard. Evidently there was really cause for alarmreal alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he always felt while working on the Bridge. Any damage serious enough to halt the beetle a full sector short of the trouble area was bound to be major. ~
It might even turn out to be the disaster which he had felt lurking ahead of him ever since he had been made foreman of the Bridgethat disaster which the. Bridge itself could not repair, sending man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.