Jupiter Read online

  But Helmuth let his mix go flat, and did not notice the book, which had turned itself on, at the page where he had abandoned it last, when he had fitted himself into the chair. Instead, he listened to the radio.

  There was always a great deal of ham radio activity in the Jovian system. The conditions were good for it, since there was plenty of power available, few impeding atmosphere layers, and those thin, no Heaviside layers, and few official and no commercial channels with which the hams could interfere.

  And there were plenty of people scattered about the satellites who needed the sound of a voice.

  “…anybody know whether the senators are coming here? Doc Barth put in a report a while back on a fossil plant he found here, at least he thinks it was a plant. Maybe they’d like a look at it.”

  “They’re supposed to hit the Bridge team next.” A strong voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in and out; that would be Sweeney, on Ganymede. “Sorry to throw the wet blanket, boys, but I don’t think the senators are interested in our rock-balls for their own lumpy selves. We could only hold them here three days.”

  Helmuth thought greyly: Then they’ve already left Callisto.

  “Is that you, Sweeney? Where’s the Bridge tonight?”

  “Dillon’s on duty,” a very distant transmitter said. ’Try to raise Helmuth, Sweeney.”

  “Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy beetle-gooser! Come in, Helmuth!”

  “Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us.”

  Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike, where it lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But the door to his room opened before he had completed the gesture.

  Eva came in.

  She said, “Bob, I want to tell you something.”

  “His voice is changing!” the voice of the Callisto operator said. “Ask him what he’s drinking, Sweeney!” Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed—in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter V—and Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this hour, halfway between her sleep period and her trick. Her hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of the way she had looked when they first met.

  “All right,” he said. “I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, sugar and the other stuff is in the locker…you know where it is. Shot-cans are there, too.”

  The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which Helmuth knew meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.

  “I don’t need a drink,” she said. “As a matter of fact, lately I’ve been turning my lux-R’s back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for me—by showing me what a mind looked like that is hiding from itself.”

  “Eva, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously, you’ve advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won’t you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?”

  “Now you’re being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn’t a vitamin. And I didn’t come to talk about that. I came to tell you something I think you ought to know.”

  “Which is?”

  She said, “Bob, I mean to have a child here.”

  A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exasperation, jackknifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading, and the page vanished.

  “Women!” he said, when he could get his breath back. “Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environment can change a human being much, after all.”

  “Why should it?” she said suspiciously. “I don’t see the joke. Shouldn’t a woman want to have a child?”

  “Of course she should,” he said, settling back. The flipping pages began again. “It’s quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock-garden, to pluck fossils and get quaintly star-burned. How cosy to tuck the little blue body back into its corner that night, promptly at the sound of the trick-change bell! Why, it’s as natural as Jupiter-light—as Earthian as vacuum-frozen apple pie.”

  He turned his head casually away. “As for me, though, Eva, I’d much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here.”

  Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.

  “You reedy male platitude!” she said, in a low grinding voice. “How you could see almost the whole point and make so little of it—Women, is it? So you think I came creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences.”

  He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away. “What else?” he demanded, trying to imagine how it would feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these Bridge-robots. “None of us need bother with games and excuses. We’re here, we’re isolated, we were all chosen because, among other things, we were judged incapable of forming permanent emotional attachments, and capable of such alliances as we found attractive without going unbalanced when the attraction diminished and the alliance came unstuck. None of us have to pretend that our living arrangements would keep us out of jail in Boston, or that they have to involve any Earth-normal excuses.”

  She said nothing. After a while he asked, gently, “Isn’t that so?”

  “Of course it’s so. Also it has nothing to do with the matter.”

  “It doesn’t? How stupid do you think I am? I don’t care whether or not you’ve decided to have a child here, if you really mean what you say.”

  She was trembling with rage. “You really don’t, too. The decision means nothing to you.”

  “Well, if I liked children, I’d be sorry for the child. But as it happens, I can’t stand children. In short, Eva, as far as I’m concerned you can have as many as you want, and to me you’ll still be the worst operator on the Bridge.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said. At this moment she seemed to have been cut from pressure-ice. “I’ll leave you something to charge your mind with, too, Robert Helmuth. I’ll leave you sprawled here under your precious book…what is Madame Bovary to you, anyhow, you unadventurous turtle?…to think about a man who believes that children must always be born into warm cradles—a man who thinks that men have to huddle on warm worlds, or they won’t survive. A man with no ears, no eyes, scarcely any head. A man in terror, a man crying Mamma! Mamma! ail the stellar days and nights long!”

  “Parlor diagnosis!”

  “Parlor labeling. Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm wooly blanket in tight about your brains, or some little sneeze of sense might creep in, and impair your—efficiency!”

  The door closed sharply after her.

  A million pounds of fatigue crashed down without warning on Helmuth’s brain, and he fell back into the reading chair with a gasp. The roots of his beard ached, and Jupiters bloomed and wavered away before his closed eyes.

  He struggled once, and fell asleep.

  Instantly he was in the grip of the dream.

  It started, as always, with commonplaces, almost realistic enough to be a documentary film-strip—except for the appalling sense of pressure, and the distorted emotional significance with which the least word, the smallest movement was invested.

  It was the sinking of the first caisson of the Bridge. The actual event had been bad enough. The job demanded enough exactness of placement to require that manned ships enter Jupiter’s atmosphere itself: a squadron of twenty of the most powerful ships ever built, with the five-million-ton asteroid, trimmed and shaped in space, slung beneath them in an immense cat’s cradle.

  Four times that squadron had disappeared beneath the clouds; four times the tense voices of pilots and engineers had muttered in Helmuth’s ears; four times there were shouts and futile orders and the snapping of cables and someone screaming endlessly against the eternal ho
wl of the Jovian sky.

  It had cost, altogether, nine ships and two hundred and thirty-one men, to get one of five laboriously shaped asteroids planted in the shifting slush that was Jupiter’s surface. Helmuth had helped to supervise all five operations, counting the successful one, from his desk on Jupiter V; but in the dream he was not in the control shack, but instead on shipboard, in one of the ships that was never to come back—

  Then, without transition, but without any sense of discontinuity either, he was on the Bridge itself. Not in absentia, as the remote guiding intelligence of a beetle, but in person, in an ovular, tank-like suit the details of which would never come clear. The high brass had discovered antigravity, and had asked for volunteers to man the Bridge. Helmuth had volunteered.

  Looking back on it in the dream, he did not understand why he had volunteered. It had simply seemed expected of him, and he had not been able to help it, even though he had known what it would be like. He belonged on the Bridge, though he hated it—he had been doomed to go there, from the first.

  And there was…something wrong…with the antigravity. The high brass had asked for its volunteers before the scientific work had been completed. The present antigravity fields were weak, and there was some basic flaw in the theory. Generators broke down after only short periods of use, burned out, unpredictably, sometimes only moments after testing up without a flaw—like vacuum tubes in waking life.

  That was what Helmuth’s set was about to do. He crouched inside his personal womb, above the boiling sea, the clouds raging about him, lit by a plume of hydrogen flame, and waited to feel his weight suddenly become eight times greater than normal. He knew what would happen to him then.

  It happened.

  Helmuth greeted morning on Jupiter V with his customary scream.

  V

  The ship that landed as he was going on duty did nothing to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not distinguishable from any of the long-range cruisers which ran the legs of the Moon-Mars-Belt-Ganymede trip. But it grounded its huge bulk with less visible expenditures of power than one of the little inter-satellary boats.

  That landing told Helmuth that his dream was well on its way to coming true. If the high brass had had a real antigravity, there would have been no reason why the main jets should have been necessary at all. Obviously, what had been discovered was some sort of partial screen, which allowed a ship to operate with far less jet action than was normal, but which still left it subject to a sizeable fraction of the universal stress of space.

  Nothing less than complete and completely controllable antigravity would do on Jupiter.

  He worked mechanically, noting that Charity was not in evidence. Probably he was conferring with the senators, receiving what would be for him the glad news.

  Helmuth realized suddenly that there was nothing left for him to do now but to cut and run.

  There could certainly be no reason why he should have to reenact the entire dream, helplessly, event for event, like an actor committed to a play. He was awake now, in full control of his own senses, and still at least partially sane. The man in the dream had volunteered—but that man would not be Robert Helmuth. Not any longer.

  While the senators were here, he would turn in his resignation. Direct, over Charity’s head.

  “Wake up, Helmuth,” a voice from the gang deck snapped suddenly. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have run yourself off the end of the Bridge. You had all the automatic stops on that beetle cut out.”

  Helmuth reached guiltily and more than a little too late for the controls. Eva had already run his beetle back beyond the danger line.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Thanks, Eva.”

  “Don’t thank me. If you’d actually been in it, I’d have let it go. Less reading and more sleep is what I recommend for you, Helmuth.”

  “Keep your recommendations to yourself,” he snapped.

  The incident started a new and even more disturbing chain of thought. If he were to resign now, it would be nearly a year before he could get back to Chicago. Antigravity or no antigravity, the senators’ ship would have no room for unexpected passengers. Shipping a man back home had to be arranged far in advance. Space had to be provided, and a cargo equivalent of the weight and space requirements he would take up on the return trip had to be dead headed out to Jupiter.

  A year of living in the station on Jupiter V without any function—as a man whose drain on the station’s supplies no longer could be justified in terms of what he did. A year of living under the eyes of Eva Chavez and Charity Dillon and the other men and women who still remained Bridge operators, men and women who would not hesitate to let him know what they thought of his quitting.

  A year of living as a bystander in the feverish excitement of direct, personal exploration of Jupiter. A year of watching and hearing the inevitable deaths—while he alone stood aloof, privileged and useless. A year during which Robert Helmuth would become the most hated living entity in the Jovian system.

  And, when he got back to Chicago and went looking for a job—for his resignation from the Bridge gang would automatically take him out of government service—he would be asked why he left the Bridge at the moment when work on the Bridge was just reaching its culmination.

  He began to understand why the man in the dream had volunteered.

  When the trick-change bell rang, he was still determined to resign, but he had already concluded bitterly that there were, after all, other kinds of hells besides the one on Jupiter.

  He was returning the board to neutral as Charity came up the cleats. Charity’s eyes were snapping like a skyful of comets. Helmuth had known that they would be.

  “Senator Wagoner wants to speak to you, if you’re not too tired, Bob,” he said. “Go ahead; I’ll finish up there.”

  “He does?” Helmuth frowned. The dream surged back upon him. NO. They would not rush him any faster than he wanted to go. “What about, Charity? Am I suspected of unWestern activities? I suppose you’ve told them how 1 feel.”

  “I have,” Dillon said, unruffled. “But we’re agreed that you may not feel the same after you’ve talked to Wagoner. He’s in the ship, of course. I’ve put out a suit for you at the lock.”

  Charity put the helmet over his head, effectively cutting himself off from further conversation, or from any further consciousness of Helmuth at all.

  Helmuth stood looking at him a moment. Then, with a convulsive shrug, he went down the cleats.

  Three minutes later, he was plodding in a spacesuit across the surface of Jupiter V, with the vivid bulk of Jupiter splashing his shoulders with color.

  A courteous Marine let him through the ship’s air lock and deftly peeled him out of the suit Despite a grim determination to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possible consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was conducted up towards the bow.

  But the ship was like the ones that had brought him from Chicago to Jupiter V—it was like any spaceship: there was nothing in it to see but corridor walls and stairwells, until you arrived at the cabin where you were needed.

  Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no more than sixty-five at most, not at all portly, and he had the keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen. He received Helmuth alone, in his own cabin—a comfortable cabin as spaceship accommodations go, but neither roomy nor luxurious. He was hard to match up with the stories Helmuth had been hearing about the current Senate, which had been involved in scandal after scandal of more than Roman proportions.

  Helmuth looked around. “I thought there were several of you,” he said.

  “There are, but I didn’t want to give you the idea that you were facing a panel,” Wagoner said, smiling. “I’ve been forced to sit in on most of these endless loyalty investigations back home, but I can’t see any point in exporting such religious ceremonies to deep space. Do sit down, Mr. Helmuth. There are drinks coming. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Stiffly, He
lmuth sat down.

  “Dillon tells me,” Wagoner said, leaning back comfortably in his own chair, “that your usefulness to the Bridge is about at an end. In a way, I’m sorry to hear that, for you’ve been one of the best men we’ve had on any of our planetary projects. But, in another way, “I’m glad. It makes you available for something much bigger, where we need you much more.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ll explain in a moment. First, I’d like to talk a little about the Bridge. Please don’t feel that I’m quizzing you, by the way. You’re at perfect liberty to say that any given question is none of my business, and I’ll take no offense and hold no grudge. Also, ‘I hereby disavow the authenticity of any tape or other tapping of which this statement may be a part.’ In short, our conversation is unofficial, highly so.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s to my interest; I’m hoping that you’ll talk freely to me. Of course my disavowal means nothing, since such formal statements can always be exercised from a tape; but later on I’m going to tell you some things you’re not supposed to know, and you’ll be able to judge by what I say then that anything you say to me is privileged. Okay?”

  A steward came in silently with drinks, and left again. Helmuth tasted his. As far as he could tell, it was exactly like many he had mixed for himself back in the control shack, from standard space rations. The only difference was that it was cold, which Helmuth found startling, but not unpleasant after the first sip. He tried to relax. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  “Good enough. Now: Dillon says that you regard the Bridge as a monster. I’ve examined your dossier pretty closely, and I think perhaps Dillon hasn’t quite the gist of your meaning. I’d like to hear it straight from you.”

  “I don’t think the Bridge is a monster,” Helmuth said slowly. “You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the Bridge to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of adverse conditions ever will stop man for long, and there I’m in agreement with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress, personified. He can’t admit—you asked me to speak my mind, senator—that the West is a decadent and drying culture. All the other evidence that’s available shows that it is. Charity likes to think of the Bridge as giving the lie to that evidence.”