But there was an overpowering reminder of that holocaust for through the thick quartz the face of the giant planet stared at him, across only one hundred and twelve thousand and six hundred miles: a sphere-section occupying almost all of the sky except the near horizon. It was crawling with colour, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poisonous storming of its atmosphere, spotted with the deep planet-sized shadows of farther moons.
Somewhere down there, six thousand miles below the clouds that boiled in his face, was the Bridge. The Bridge was thirty miles high and eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles longbut it was only a sliver, an intricate and fragile arrangement of ice-crystals beneath the bulging, racing tornadoes.
On Earth, even in the West, the Bridge would have been the mightiest engineering achievement of all history, could the Earth have borne its weight at all. But on Jupiter, the Bridge was as precarious and perishable as a snowflake.
“Bob?” Dillon’s voice asked. “You seem more upset than usual. Is it serious?” Helmuth turned. His superior’s worn young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already beginning to grey at the temples, was alight both with love for the Bridge and the consuming ardour of the responsibility he had to bear. As always, it touched Helmuth, and reminded him that the implacable universe bed, after all, provided one warm corner in which human beings might huddle together.
“Serious enough,” he said, forming the words with dif-ficulty against the frozen inarticulateness Jupiter forced upon him. “But not fatal, as far as I could see. There’s a lot of hydrogen vulcanism on the surface, especially at the northwest end, and it looks like there must have been a big blast under the cliffs. I saw what looked like the last of a series of fireballs.”