Jupiter Read online

  “The West hasn’t many more years,” Wagoner agreed, astonishingly. “Still and all, the West has been responsible for some really towering achievements in its time. Perhaps the Bridge could be considered as the last and the mightiest of them all.”

  “Not by me,” Helmuth said. “The building of gigantic projects for ritual purposes—doing a thing for the sake of doing it—is the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or an even more idiotic and more enormous example, bigger than anything human beings have accomplished yet, the laying out of the ‘Diagram of Power’ over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had put all that energy into survival instead, they’d probably be alive yet.”

  “Agreed,” Wagoner said.

  “All right. Then maybe you’ll also agree that the essence of a vital culture is its ability to defend itself. The West has beaten off the Soviets for a century now—but as far as I can see, the Bridge is the West’s ‘Diagram of Power’, its pyramids, or what have you. All the money and the resources that went into the Bridge are going to be badly needed, and won’t be there, when the next Soviet attack comes.”

  “Which will be very shortly, I’m told,” Wagoner said, with complete calm. “Furthermore, it will be successful, and in part it will be successful for the very reasons you’ve outlined. For a man who’s been cut off from the Earth for years, Helmuth, you seem to know more about what’s going on down there than most of the general populace does.”

  “Nothing promotes an interest in Earth like being off it,” Helmuth said. “And there’s plenty of time to read out here.” Either the drink was stronger than he had expected, or the senator’s calm concurrence in the collapse of Helmuth’s entire world had given him another shove towards nothingness; his head was spinning.

  Wagoner saw it. He leaned forward suddenly, catch-fag Helmuth flat-footed. “However,” he said, “it’s difficult for me to agree that the Bridge serves, or ever did serve, a ritual purpose. The Bridge served a huge practical purpose which is now fulfilled—the Bridge, as such, is now a defunct project.”

  “Defunct?” Helmuth repeated faintly.

  “Quite. Of course we’ll continue to operate it for a while, simply because you can’t stop a process of that size on a dime, and that’s just as well for people like Dillon who are emotionally tied up in it. You’re the one person with any authority in the whole station who has already lost enough interest in the Bridge to make it safe for me to tell you that it’s being abandoned.”

  “But why?”

  “Because,” Wagoner went on quietly, “the Bridge has now given us confirmation of a theory of stupendous importance—so important, in my opinion, that the imminent fall of the West seems like a puny event fa comparison. A confirmation, incidentally, which contains in it the seeds of ultimate destruction for the Soviets, whatever they may win for themselves in the next fifty years or so.”

  “I suppose,” Helmuth said, puzzled, “that you mean antigravity?”

  For the first time, it was Wagoner’s turn to be taken aback. “Man,” he said at last, “do you know everything I want to tell you? I hope not, or my conclusions will be mighty suspicious. Surely Charity didn’t tell you we had antigravity; I strictly enjoined him not to mention it.”

  “No, the subject’s been on my mind,” Helmuth said. “But I certainly don’t see why it should be so world-shaking, any more than I see how the Bridge helped to bring it about. I thought it had been developed independently, for the further exploitation of the Bridge, and would step up Bridge operation, not discontinue it.”

  “Not at all. Of course, the Bridge has given us information in thousands of different categories, much of it very valuable indeed. But the one job that only the Bridge could do was that of confirming, or throwing out, the Blackett-Dirac equations.”

  “Which are—?”

  “A relationship between magnetism and the spinning of a massive body—that much is the Dirac part of it. The Blackett Equation seemed to show that the same formula also applied to gravity. If the figures we collected on the magnetic field strength of Jupiter forced us to retire the Dirac equations, then none of the rest of the information we’ve gotten from the Bridge would have been worth the money we spent to get it. On the other hand, Jupiter was the only body in the solar system available to us which was big enough in all relevant respects to make it possible for us to test those equations at all. They involve quantities of enormous orders of magnitudes.

  “And the figures show that Dirac was right. They also show that Blackett was right. Both magnetism and gravity are phenomena of rotation.

  “I won’t bother to trace the succeeding steps, because I think you can work them out for yourself. It’s enough to say that there’s a drive-generator on board this ship which is the complete and final justification of all the hell you people on the Bridge gang have been put through. The gadget has a long technical name, but the technies who tend it have already nicknamed it the spindizzy, because of what it does to the magnetic moment of any atom—any atom—within its field.

  “While it’s in operation, it absolutely refuses to notice any atom outside its own influence. Furthermore, it will notice no other strain or influence which holds good beyond the borders of that field. It’s so snooty that it has to be stopped down to almost nothing when it’s brought close to a planet, or it won’t let you land. But in deep space…well, it’s impervious to meteors and such trash, of course; it’s impervious to gravity; and—it hasn’t the faintest interest in any legislation about top speed limits.”

  “You’re kidding,” Helmuth said.

  “Am I, now? The ship came to Ganymede directly from Earth. It did it in a little under two hours, counting maneuvering time.”

  Helmuth took a defiant pull at his drink. “This thing really has no top speed at all?” be said. “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Well, we can’t,” Wagoner admitted. “After all, one of the unfortunate things about general mathematical formulas is that they don’t contain cut-off points to warn you of areas where they don’t apply. Even quantum mechanics is somewhat subject to that criticism. However, we expect to know pretty soon just how fast the spindizzy can drive an object, if there is any limit. We expect you to tell us.”

  “I?”

  “Yes, Helmuth, you. The coming debacle on Earth makes it absolutely imperative for us—the West—to get interstellar expeditions started at once. Richardson Observatory, on the Moon, has two likely-looking systems picked out already—one at Wolf 3S9, another at 61 Cygni—and there are sure to be hundreds of others where Earth-like planets are highly probable. We want to scatter adventurous people, people with a thoroughly indoctrinated love of being free, all over this part of the galaxy, if it can be done.

  “Once they’re out there, they’ll be free to flourish, with no interference from Earth. The Soviets haven’t the spindizzy yet, and even after they steal it from us, they won’t dare allow it to be used. It’s too good and too final an escape route.

  “What we want you to do…now “I’m getting to the point, you see…is to direct this exodus. You’ve the intelligence and the cast of mind for it. Your analysis of the situation on Earth confirms that, if any more confirmation were needed. And—there’s no future for you on Earth now.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me” Helmuth said, firmly. “I’m in no condition to be reasonable now; it’s been more than I could digest in a few moments. And the decision doesn’t entirely rest with me, either. If I could give you an answer in…let me see…about three hours. Will that be soon enough?”

  “That’ll be fine,” the senator said.

  “And so, that’s the story,” Helmuth said.

  Eva remained silent in her chair for a long time.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” she said at last, “Why did you come to me? I’d have thought that you’d find the whole thing terrifying.”

  “Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Helmuth said, with quiet exul
tation. “But terror and fright are two different things, as I’ve just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “All right, let’s put it this way: The work the Bridge was doing was worthwhile, as I know now—so I was wrong in being frightened of it, in calling it a bridge to nowhere.

  “But you no more saw where it was going than I, and you made the Bridge the be-all and end-all of your existence.

  “Now, there’s a place to go to; in fact there are places—hundreds of places. They’ll be Earth-like places. Since the Soviets are about to win Earth, those places will be more Earth-like than Earth itself, for the next century or so at least!”

  She said, “Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace between us?”

  “I’m going to take on this job, Evita, if you’ll go along?”

  She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvellous fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with a jangle of pure horror.

  “Posts!” the speaker above Eva’s bed roared, in a distorted, gigantic version of Charity Dillon’s voice. “Peak storm overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has already topped all previous records, and part of the land mass has begun to settle. This is an A-l overload emergency”

  Behind Charity’s bellow, the winds of Jupiter made a spectrum of continuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge was responding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp, percussive tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way through a forest of huge steel tuning-forks. Helmuth had never heard that sound before, but he knew what it was.

  The deck of the Bridge was splitting up the middle.

  After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker said, in Charity’s normal voice, “Eva, you too, please. Acknowledge, please. This is it—unless everybody comes on duty at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour.”

  “Let it,” Eva responded quietly.

  There was a brief, startled silence, and then a ghost of a human sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner’s, and the sound just might have been a chuckle.

  Charity’s circuit clicked out.

  The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in the little room.

  After a while, the man and the woman went to the window, and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the near horizon, where there had always been visible a few stars.

  1952

  VICTORY UNINTENTIONAL

  Isaac Asimov

  As in “Bridge” and several of the other stories in this volume, in “Victory Unintentional” Isaac Asimov decided to use a proxy to explore Jupiter, on the grounds that it is not an environment congenial to frail, air-breathing human beings. Unlike the other authors, Isaac had a proxy ready at hand, in the form of his “positronic robots.” What is a positronlc robot? Why, Just your average run-of-the-mill robot, actually; the “positronic” part came about because the positron had just been discovered about the time Asimov began writing the series, and it seemed like a good buzzword kind of name that would seem to answer the hard questions of “how” and “what” without overly committing anyone. But the positronic element of the robots in Asimov’s stories is not important; what Is important is that here, for perhaps the first time anywhere, someone seriously considered what the inventors of the robots that would ultimately exist would want to do to keep them from taking over. (And when such intelligent machines came to be built, in the labs of MIT and elsewhere, graduate students were assigned the reading of the Asimov robot stories to help them in their programing.)

  The spaceship leaked, as the saying goes, like a sieve.

  It was supposed to. In fact, that was the whole idea. The result, of course, was that during the journey from Ganymede to Jupiter, the ship was crammed just as full as it could be with the very hardest space vacuum. And since the ship also lacked heating devices, this space vacuum was at normal temperature, which is a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

  This, also, was according to plan. Little things like the absence of heat and air didn’t annoy anyone at all on that particular spaceship.

  The first near vacuum wisps of Jovian atmosphere began percolating into the ship several thousand miles above the Jovian surface. It was practically all hydrogen, though perhaps a careful gas analysis might have located a trace of helium as well. The pressure gauges began creeping skyward.

  That creep continued at an accelerating pace as the ship dropped downward in a Jupiter-circling spiral. The pointers of successive gauges, each designed for progressively higher pressures, began to move until they reached the neighborhood of a million or so atmospheres, where figures lost most of their meaning. The temperature, as recorded by thermocouples, rose slowly and erratically, and finally steadied at about seventy below zero, Centigrade.

  The ship moved slowly toward the end, plowing its way heavily through a maze of gas molecules that crowded together so closely that hydrogen itself was squeezed to the density of a liquid. Ammonia vapor, drawn from the incredibly vast oceans of that liquid, saturated the horrible atmosphere. The wind, which had begun a thousand miles higher, had risen to a pitch inadequately described as a hurricane.

  It was quite plain long before the ship landed on a fairly large Jovian island, perhaps seven times the size of Asia, that Jupiter was not a very pleasant world.

  And yet the three members of the crew thought it was. They were quite convinced it was. But then, the three members of the crew were not exactly human. And neither were they exactly Jovian.

  They were simply robots, designed on Earth for Jupiter.

  ZZ Three said, “It appears to be a rather desolate place.”

  ZZ Two joined him and regarded the wind-blasted landscape somberly. “There are structures of some sort in the distance,” he said, “which are obviously artificial. I suggest we wait for the inhabitants to come to us.”

  Across the room ZZ One listened, but made no reply. He was the first constructed of the three, and half experimental. Consquently he spoke a little less frequently than his two companions.

  The wait was not long. An air vessel of queer design swooped overhead. More followed. And then a line of ground vehicles approached, took position, and disgorged organisms. Along with these organisms came various inanimate accessories that might have been weapons. Some of these were borne by a single Jovian, some by several, and some advanced under their own power, with Jovians perhaps inside.

  The robots couldn’t tell.

  ZZ Three said, “They’re all around us now. The logical peaceful gesture would be to come out in the open. Agreed?”

  It was, and ZZ One shoved open the heavy door, which was not double or, for that matter, particularly airtight.

  Their appearance through the door was the signal for an excited stir among the surrounding Jovians. Things were done to several of the very largest of the inanimate accessories, and ZZ Three became aware of a temperature rise on the outer rind of his beryllium-iridium-bronze body.

  He glanced at ZZ Two. “Do you feel it? They’re aiming heat energy at us, I believe.”.

  ZZ Two indicated his surprise. “I wonder why?”

  “Definitely a heat ray of some sort. Look at that!” One of the rays had been jarred out of alignment for some undiscernible cause, and its line of radiation intersected a brook of sparkling pure ammonia—which promptly boiled furiously.

  Three turned to ZZ One, “Make a note of this, One, will you?”

  “Sure.” It was to ZZ One that the routine secretarial work fell, and his method of taking a note was to make a mental addition to the accurate memory scroll within him. He had already gathered the hour-by-hour record of every important instrument on board ship during the trip to Jupiter. He added agreeably, “What reason shall I put for the
reaction? The human masters would probably enjoy knowing.”

  “No reason. Or better,” Three corrected himself, “no apparent reason. You might say the maximum temperature of the ray was about plus thirty, Centigrade.”

  Two interrupted, “Shall we try communicating?”

  “It would be a waste of time,” said Three. “There can’t be more than a very few Jovians who know the radio-click code that’s been developed between Jupiter and Ganymede. They’ll have to send for one, and when he comes, he’ll establish contact soon enough. Meanwhile let’s watch them. 1 don’t understand their actions, I tell you frankly.”

  Nor did understanding come immediately. Heat radiation ceased, and other instruments were brought to the forefront and put into play. Several capsules fell at the feet of the watching robots, dropping rapidly and forcefully under Jupiter’s gravity. They popped open and a blue liquid exuded, forming pools which proceeded to shrink rapidly by evaporation.

  The nightmare wind whipped the vapors away and where those vapors went, Jovians scrambled out of the way. One was too slow, threshed about wildly, and became very limp and still.

  ZZ Two bent, dabbed a finger in one of the pools and stared at the dripping liquid. “I think this is oxygen,” he said.

  “Oxygen, all right,” agreed Three. “This becomes stranger and stranger. It must certainly be a dangerous practice, for I would say that oxygen is poisonous to the creatures. One of them died!”

  There was a pause, and then ZZ One, whose greater simplicity led at times to an increased directness of thought, said heavily, “It might be that these strange creatures in a rather childish way are attempting to destroy us.”