The end of the Bridge.
Wrecked.
Helmuth grunted mvoluntarily and backed the beetle away. The flare dimmed; the light poured down the sky and fell away into the raging sea below. The scanner clucked with satisfaction as the beetle recrossed the line into Zone 113.
He turned the body of the vehicle 180, presenting its back to the dying torrent. There was nothing further that he could do at the moment on the Bridge. He scanned his control boarda ghost image of which was cast across the scene on the Bridgefor the blue button marked Garage, punched it savagely, and tore off his helmet.
Obediently, the Bridge vanished.
Dillon was looking at him.
“Well?” the civil engineer said. “What’s the matter, Bob?
Is it bad?”
Helmuth did not reply for a moment. The abrupt transition from the storm-ravaged deck of the Bridge to the quiet, plac-id air of the control shack on Jupiter V was always a shock.
He had never been able to anticipate it, let alone become accustomed to it; it was worse each time, not better.
He put the helmet down carefully in front of him and got up, moving carefully upon shaky legs; feeling implicit in his own body the enormous pressures and weights his guiding intelligence had just quitted. The fact that the gravity on the foreman’s deck was as weak as that of most of the habitable asteroids only made the contrast greater, and his need for caution in walking more extreme.
He went to the big porthole and looked out. The unworn, tumbled, monotonous surface of airless Jupiter V looked almost homey after the perpetual holocaust of Jupiter itself.