A steward came in silently with the drinks, and left again. Helmuth tasted his. As far as he could tell, it was exactly like many he had mixed for himself back in the control shack, from standard space rations. The only difference was that it was cold, which Helmuth found startling, but not unpleasant after the first sip. He tried to relax. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
“Good enough. Now: Dillon says that you regard the Bridge as a monster. I’ve examined your dossier pretty closely, and I think perhaps Dillon hasn’t quite the gist of your meaning. I’d like to hear it straight from you.”
“I don’t think the Bridge is a monster,” Helmuth said slowly. “You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the Bridge to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of adverse conditions ever will stop man for long, and there I’m in agree-ment with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress, personi-fied. He can’t admityou asked me to speak my mind, senatorthat the West is a decadent and dying culture. All the other evidence that’s available shows that it is. Charity likes to think of the Bridge as giving the lie to that evidence.”
“The West hasn’t many more years,” Wagoner agreed, astonishingly. “Still and all, the West has been responsible for some really towering achievements in its time. Perhaps the Bridge could be considered as the last and the mightiest of them all.”
“Not by me,” Helmuth said. “The building of gigantic projects for ritual purposesdoing a thing for the sake of doing itis the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or an even more idiotic and more enormous example, bigger than anything human beings have accomplished yet, the laying out of the ‘Diagram of Power’ over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had put all that energy into survival instead, they’d probably be alive yet.”