Dillon’s face relaxed while Helmuth was talking, slowly, line by engraved line. “Oh. Just a flying chunk, then.”
“I’m almost sure that’s what it was. The cross-draughts are heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each other some time next week, aren’t they? I haven’t checked, but I can feel the difference in the storms.”
“So the chunk got picked up and thrown through the end of the Bridge. A big piece?”
Helmuth shrugged. “That end is all twisted away to the left, and the deck is burst to flinders. The scaffolding is all gone, too, of course. A pretty big piece, all right, Charitytwo miles through at a minimum.”
DiUon sighed. He, too, went to the window, and looked out. Helmuth did not need to be a mind reader to know what he was looking at. Out there, across the stony waste of Jupiter V plus one hundred and twelve thousand and six hundred miles of space, the South Tropical Disturbance was streaming towards the great Red Spot. and would soon overtake it.
When the whirling funnel of the STDmore than big enough to suck three Earths into deep-freezepassed the planetary island of sodium-tainted ice which was the Red Spot, the Spot would follow it for a few thousand miles, at the same time rising closer to the surface of the atmosphere.
Then the Spot would sink again, drifting back towards the incredible jet of stress-fluid which kept it in beinga jet fed by no one knew what forces at Jupiter’s hot, rocky, twenty-two-thousand-mile core, under sixteen thousand miles of eternal ice. During the entire passage, the storms all over Jupiter became especially violent; and the Bridge had been forced to locate in anything but the calmest spot on the planet, thanks to the uneven distribution of the few permanent land-masses.