“Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Helmuth said, with quiet exultation. “But terror and fright are two different things, as I’ve just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“All right, let’s put it this way: The work the Bridge was doing was worth-while, as I know nowso I was wrong in being frightened of it, in calling it a bridge to nowhere.
“But you no more saw where it was going than I, and you made the Bridge the be-all and end-all of your existence.
“Now, there’s a place to go to; in fact there are places hundreds of places. They’ll be Earth-like places. Since the Soviets are about to win Earth, those places will be more Earth-like than Earth itself, for the next century or so at least!”
She said, “Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace between us?”
“I’m going to take on this job, Evita, if you’ll go along?”
She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvellous fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with a jangle of pure horror.
“Posts!” the speaker above Eva’s bed roared, in a distorted, gigantic version of Charity Dillon’s voice. “Peak storm overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has already topped all previous records, and part of the land mass has begun to settle. This is an A-l overload emergency.”
Behind Charity’s bellow, the winds of Jupiter made a spectrum of continuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge was responding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp, percussive tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way through a forest of huge steel tuning-forks. Helmuth had never heard that sound before, but he knew what it was.