“I know,” Dillon said. “I’ve tried several times to show you that isn’t a very reasonable frame of mind.”
“I know it isn’t. But I can’t help how I feel. No, I don’t think the Bridge will last. It can’t last; it’s all wrong. But I don’t want to see it go. I’ve just got sense enough to know that one of these days Jupiter is going to sweep it away.”
He wiped an open palm across the control boards, snapping all the toggles “Off” with a sound like the fall of a double-handful of marbles on a pane of glass. “Like that. Charity! And I work four hours a day, every day, on the Bridge.
One of these days, Jupiter is going to destroy the Bridge.
It’ll go flying away in little flinders into the storms. My mind will be there, supervising some puny job, and my mind will go flying away along with my mechanical eyes and ears still trying to adapt to the unthinkable, tumbling away into the winds and the flames and the rains and the darkness and the pressure and the cold.”
“Bob, you’re deliberately running away with yourself. Cut it out. Cut it out, I say!”
Helmuth shrugged, putting a trembling hand on the edge of the board to steady himself. “All right. I’m all right, Charity. I’m here, aren’t I? Right here on Jupiter V, in no danger, in no danger at all. The Bridge is one hundred and twelve thousand and six hundred miles away from here. But when the day comes that the Bridge is swept away “Charity, sometimes I imagine you ferrying my body back to the cosy nook it came from, while my soul goes tumbling and tumbling through millions of cubic miles of poison. All right. Charity, I’ll be good. I won’t think about it out loud; but you can’t expect me to forget it. It’s on my mind; I can’t help it, and you should know that.”