Jupiter Read online

  Carl and Linda had been part of one of the most charming scientific projects I know of: the engraving, on the outer shell of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, of a message designed to be read and understood by alien creatures native to the planet of some other sun. Pioneer 10 was then only well launched, had not yet reached even the orbit of Mars; it was planned to visit the Jupiter system, take pictures and send back reports, and then go on forever, out of the solar system entirely. In a few million years it may approach another star, or be intercepted en route by some alien interstellar spaceship. If it is, and if the beings who collect it are half as bright as space-faring creatures should be, they will read a message from Earth, put there by Carl and Linda Sagan.

  However, the central wonder of Pioneer 10 to me was that, at last, some human eye would get a look at the planet Jupiter and its moons. Maybe only through a TV camera, and even that picture run through a computer to make it make sense—but still, a look from near at hand.

  Jupiter was always the great puzzle of the solar system in the science-fiction magazines that formed such a large part of my youthful reading. In those days we had one great hope. We knew one planet very well—the Earth—and as the Earth had breathable air and drinkable lakes and survivable climate ranges, we hoped that all the other planets, or anyway some of them, would be obligingly similar.

  Now we know more, and most of what we know about the living conditions elsewhere in our solar system is disappointing: too cold, too hot, too airless, too poisonous, whatever. The early sf writers, who had a tendency to write about Jupiter as though it were a fatter Earth, seem to have been so badly wrong that their stories don’t make sense any more.

  But there were also a lot of stories, written later and more carefully constructed in line with better astronomical observations.

  We wondered how well those other stories would square with what Pioneer 10 would find…and so we came off the cruise and began to plunge into blizzards of old magazines. And this book is the result. Betty Ballantine gave us the go-ahead, the authors gave us their blessing—and we give you the book.

  To make it complete, we insisted on an introduction from Isaac Asimov (another shipmate on that memorable cruise). You have already read it, no doubt. You may wonder why I, the male member of this team, should encourage an introduction from a person who slanders my good looks. I can explain that—it is simply for old friendship’s sake. Isaac and I go back a long way —to when we were both seventeen or so, and the world was new. That is well over a third of a century ago, and we have been friends all that time. In that time, I think, we have gained a good deal in wisdom, charm, maturity, and personality…on the average, of course.

  Frederik Pohl

  Carol Pohl

  Red Bank, April 1973

  JUPITER

  BRIDGE

  James Blish

  James Blish lives with his artist wife in a handsome old house near Oxford, England, whore he spends his time writing first-class science fiction. “Bridge” was one of the first scientifically accurate sf stories ever written about the “gas giants”—the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—and as a matter of fact Blish may have been responsible for bringing that term into the language of astronomy; he was the first to use it, in a series of scientific articles for an sf magazine, a quarter of a century or so ago.

  I

  A screeching tornado was rocking the Bridge when the alarm sounded; it was making the whole structure shudder and sway. This was normal and Robert Helmuth barely noticed it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge. The whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes, and worse.

  The scanner on the foreman’s board had given 114 as the sector of the trouble. That was at the northwestern end of the Bridge, where it broke off, leaving nothing but the raging clouds of ammonia crystals and methane, and a sheer drop thirty miles to the invisible surface. There were no ultraphone “eyes” at that end which gave a general view of the area—in so far as any general view was possible—because both ends of the Bridge were incomplete.

  With a sigh Helmuth put the beetle into motion. The little car, as flat-bottomed and thin through as a bedbug, got slowly under way on ball-bearing races, guided and held firmly to the surface of the Bridge by ten close-set flanged rails. Even so, the hydrogen gales made a terrific siren-like shrieking between the edge of the vehicle and the deck, and the impact of the falling drops of ammonia upon the curved roof was as heavy and deafening as a rain of cannon balls. As a matter of fact, they weighed almost as much as cannon balls here, though they were not much bigger than ordinary raindrops. Every so often, too, there was a blast, accompanied by a dull orange glare, which made the car, the deck, and the Bridge itself buck savagely.

  These blasts were below, however, on the surface. While they shook the structure of the Bridge heavily, they almost never interfered with its functioning, and could not, in the very nature of things, do Helmuth any harm.

  Had any real damage ever been done, it would never have been repaired. There was no one on Jupiter to repair it.

  The Bridge, actually, was building itself. Massive, alone, and lifeless, it grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.

  The Bridge had been well-planned. From Helmuth’s point of view almost nothing could be seen of it, for the beetle tracks ran down the center of the deck, and in the darkness and perpetual storm even ultrawave-assisted vision could not penetrate more than a few hundred yards at the most. The width of the Bridge was eleven miles; its height, thirty miles; its length, deliberately unspecified in the plans, fifty-four miles at the moment—a squat, colossal structure, built with engineering principles, methods, materials, and tools never touched before—

  For the very good reason that they would have been impossible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was made of ice: a marvelous structural material under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of—94°C. Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a friable, talc-like powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar, transparent substance that splits at a tap.

  Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps still later, on Uranus, too. But that had been politicians’ talk. The Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and its mechanisms were just barely manageable. The bottom of Saturn’s atmosphere had been sounded at sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight miles, and the temperature there was below—150°C. There even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be worked with anything except itself. And as for Uranus…

  As far as Helmuth was concerned, Jupiter was quite bad enough.

  The beetle crept within sight of the end of the Bridge and stopped automatically. Helmuth set the vehicle’s eyes for highest penetration, and examined the nearby beams.

  The great bars were as close-set as screening. They had to be, in order to support even their own weight, let alone the weight of the components of the Bridge, the whole webwork was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale, but it had been designed to do that. Helmuth could never help being alarmed by the movement, but habit assured him that he had nothing to fear from it.

  He took the automatics out of the circuit and inched the beetle forward manually. This was only Sector 113, and the Bridge’s own Wheatstone-bridge scanning system—there was no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was impossible to maintain a vacuum on Jupiter—said that the trouble was in Sector 114. The boundary of Sector 114 was still fully fifty feet away.

  It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red beard. Evidently there was really cause for alarm—real alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he always felt while working on the Bridge. Any damage serious enough to halt the beetle a full sector short of the trouble area was bound to be major.

  It might even turn out to be the disaster which he had felt lurking ahead of him ever since he had been made foreman of the Bridge—that disaster which the
Bridge itself could not repair, sending man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.

  The secondaries cut in and the beetle stopped again. Grimly, Helmuth opened the switch and sent the beetle creeping across the invisible danger line. Almost at once, the car tilted just perceptibly to the left, and the screaming of the winds between its edges and the deck shot up the scale, sirening in and out of the soundless-dogwhistle range with an eeriness that set Helmuth’s teeth on edge. The beetle itself fluttered and chattered like an alarm-clock hammer betweeen the surface of the deck and the flanges of the tracks.

  Ahead there was still nothing to be seen but the horizontal driving of the clouds and the hail, roaring along the length of the Bridge, out of the blackness into the beetle’s fanlights, and onward into blackness again towards the horizon no eye would ever see.

  Thirty miles below, the fusillade of hydrogen explosions continued. Evidently something really wild was going on on the surface. Helmuth could not remember having heard so much activity in years.

  There was a flat, especially heavy crash, and a long line of fuming orange fire came pouring down the seething atmosphere into the depths, feathering horizontally like the mane of a Lipizzan horse, directly in front of Helmuth. Instinctively, he winced and drew back from the board, although that stream of flame actually was only a little less cold than the rest of the streaming gases, far too cold to injure the Bridge.

  In the momentary glare, however, he saw something—an upward twisting of shadows, patterned but obviously unfinished, fluttering in silhouette against the hydrogen cataract’s lurid light.

  The end of the Bridge.

  Wrecked.

  Helmuth grunted involuntarily 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 board—a ghost image of which was cast across the scene on the Bridge—for the blue button marked Garage, punched it savagely, and tore off his helmet.

  Obediently, the Bridge vanished.

  II

  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, placid 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. 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 color, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poisonous storming of its atmosphere, spotted with the deep planetsized 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 long—but 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 ardor of the responsibility he had to bear. As always, it touched Helmuth, and reminded him that the implacable universe had, after all, provided one warm corner in which human beings might huddle together.

  “Serious enough,” he said, forming the words with difficulty 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.”

  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-drafts 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, Charity—two miles through at a minimum.” Dillon 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 STD—more than big enough to suck three Earths into deep-freeze—passed 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 being—a 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 landmasses.

  Helmuth watched Dillon with a certain compassion, tempered with mild envy. Charity Dillon’s unfortunate given name betrayed him as the son of a hangover, the only male child of a Witness family which dated back to the great Witness Revival of 2003. He was one of the hundreds of government-drafted experts who had planned the Bridge, and he was as obsessed by the Bridge as Helmuth was—but for different reasons.

  Helmuth moved back to the port, dropping his hand gently upon Dillon’s shoulder. Together they looked at the screaming straw yellows, brick reds, pinks, oranges, browns, even blues and greens that Jupiter threw across the ruined stone of its innermost satellite. On Jupiter V, even the shadows had color.

  Dillon did not move. He said at last: “Are you pleased, Bob?”

  “Pleased?” Helmuth said in astonishment. “No. It scares me white; you know that. I’m just glad that the whole Bridge didn’t go.”

  “You’re quite sure?” Dillon said quietly.

  Helmuth took his hand from Dillon’s shoulder and returned to his seat at the central desk. “You’ve no right to needle me for something I can’t help,” he said, his voice even lower than Dillon’s. “I work on Jupiter four hours a day—not actually, because we can’t keep a man alive for more than a split second down there—but my eyes and my ears and my mind are there, on the Bridge, four hours a day. Jupiter is not a nice place. I don’t like it. I won’t pretend I do.

 
“Spending four hours a day in an environment like that over a period of years—well, the human mind instinctively tries to adapt, even to the unthinkable. Sometimes I wonder how I’ll behave when I’m put back in Chicago again. Sometimes I can’t remember anything about Chicago except vague generalities, sometimes I can’t even believe there is such a place as Earth—how could there be, when the rest of the universe is like Jupiter, or worse?”

  “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.”