Cities in Flight (3 page)

"Yes, I'd like that. Do you have ascomycin in production now?"

This time, Gunn looked at him sharply and without any attempt to disguise his interest. "No," he- said, "that's still out on clinical trial. May I ask you, Colonel Russell, just how you happened to—"

The question, which Paige realized belatedly would have been rather sticky to answer, never did get all the way asked. Over Harold Gunn's head, a squawk-box said, "Mr. Gunn, Dr. Abbott has just arrived."

Gunn turned away from the door that, he had said, led out to the main plant, with just the proper modicum of polite regret. "There's my man," he said. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut this tour short, Colonel Russell. You may have seen what a collection of important people we have in the plant today; we've been waiting only for Dr. Abbott to begin a very important meeting. If you'll oblige me—"

Paige could say nothing but "Certainly." After what seemed only a few seconds, Gunn deposited him smoothly in the reception room from which he had started.

"Did you see what you wanted to see?" the receptionist said.

"I think so," Paige said thoughtfully "Except that what I wanted to see sort of changed in mid-flight. Miss Anne, I have a petition to put before you. Would you be kind enough to have dinner with me this evening?"

"No," the girl said. "I've seen quite a few spacemen, Colonel Russell. and I'm no longer impressed. Furthermore, I shan't tell you anything you haven't heard from Mr. Gunn, so there's no need for you to- spend your money or your leave-time on me. Good-by."

"Not so fast," Paige said. "I mean business-or, if you like, I mean to make trouble. If you've met spacemen before, you know that they- like to be independent-not much like the conformists who never leave the ground. I'm not after your maidenly laughter, either. I'm after information."

"Not interested," the girl said. "Save your breath.

"MacHinery is here," Paige said quietly. "So is Senator Wagoner, and some other people who have influence. Suppose I should collar any one of those people and accuse Pfitzner of conducting human vivisection?"

That told: Paige could see the girl's knuckles whitening. "You don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"That's my complaint. And I take it seriously. There were some things Mr. Gunn wasn't able to conceal from me, though he tried very hard. Now, I am going to put my suspicions through channels-and get Pfitzner investigated-or would you rather be sociable over a fine flounder broiled in paprika butter?"

The look she gave him back was one of almost pure hatred. She seemed able to muster no other answer. The expression did not at all suit her; as a matter of fact, she looked less like someone he would want to date than any other girl he could remember. Why should he spend his money or his leave-time on her? There were, after all, about five million surplus women in the United States by the Census of 2010, and at least 4,999,950 of them must be prettier and less recalcitrant than this one.

"All right," she said abruptly. "Your natural charm has swept me off my feet, Colonel. For the record, there's no other reason for my acceptance. It would be even funnier to call your bluff and see how far you'd get with that vivisection tale, but I don't care to tie my company up in a personal joke."

"Good enough," Paige said, uncomfortably aware that his bluff in fact had been called. "Suppose I pick you up—"

He broke off, suddenly noticing that voices were rising behind the double doors. An instant later, General Horsefield bulled into the reception room, closely followed by Gunn.

"I want it clearly understood, once and for all," Horsefield was rumbling, "that this entire project is going to wind up under military control unless we can show results before it's time to ask for a new appropriation. There's still a lot going on here that the Pentagon will regard as piddling inefficiency and highbrow theorizing. And if that's what the Pentagon reports, you know what the Treasury will do-or Congress will do it for them. We're going to have to cut back, Gunn. Understand? Cut right back to basics!"

"General, we're as far back to basics as we possibly can get," Harold Gunn said, placatingly enough, but with considerable firmness as well. "We're not going to put a gram of that drug into production until we're satisfied with it on all counts. Any other course would be suicide."

"You know I'm on your side," Horsefield said, his voice becoming somewhat less threatening. "So is General Alsos, for that matter. But this is a war we're fighting, whether the public understands it or not. And on as sensitive a matter as these death-dopes, we can't afford—"

Gunn, who had spotted Paige belatedly at the conclusion of his own speech, had been signaling Horsefield ever since with his eyebrows, and suddenly it took. The general swung around and glared at Paige, who, since he was uncovered now, was relieved of the necessity for saluting. Despite the sudden, freezing silence, it was evident that Gunn was trying to retain in his manner toward Paige some shreds of professional cordiality-a courtesy which Paige was not too sure he merited, considering the course his conversation with the girl had taken.

As for Horsefield, he relegated Paige to the ghetto of "unauthorized persons" with a single look. Paige had no intention of remaining in that classification for a second longer than it would take him to get out of it, preferably without having been asked his name; it was deadly dangerous. With a mumbled "at eight, then," to the girl, Paige sidled ingloriously out of the Pfitzner reception room and beat it.

He was, he reflected later in the afternoon before his shaving mirror, subjecting himself to an. extraordinary series of small humiliations, to get close to a matter which was none of his business. Worse: it was obviously Top Secret, which made it potentially lethal even for everyone authorized to know about it, let alone for rank snoopers. In the Age of Defense, to know was to be suspect, in the West as in the USSR; the two great nation-complexes had been becoming more and more alike in their treatment of "security" for the past fifty years. It had even been a mistake to mention the Bridge on Jupiter to the girl-for despite the fact that everyone knew that the Bridge existed, anyone who spoke of it with familiarity could quickly earn the label of being dangerously flap-jawed. Especially If the speaker, like Paige, had actually been stationed in the Jovian system for a while, whether he had had access to information about the Bridge or not.

And especially if the talker, like Paige, had actually spoken to the Bridge gang, worked with them on marginal projects, was known to have talked to Charity Dillon, the Bridge foreman. More especially if he held military rank, making it possible for him to sell security files to Congressmen, the traditional way of advancing a military career ahead of normal promotion schedules.

And most especially if the man was discovered nosing about a new and different classified project, one to which he hadn't even been assigned.

Why, after all, was he taking the risk? He didn't even know the substance of the matter; he was no biologist. To all outside eyes the Pfitzner project was simply another piece of research in antibiotics, and a rather routine research project at that. Why should a spaceman like Paige find himself flying so close to the candle already?

He wiped the depilatory cream off his face into a paper towel and saw his own eyes looking back at him from the concave mirror, as magnified as an owl's. The image, however, was only his own, despite the distortion. It gave him back no answer.

It is the plunge through the forbidden zones that catches the heart with its sheer audacity. In the history of life there have been few such episodes. it is that which makes us lonely. We have entered a new corridor, the cultural corridor. There has been nothing here before us. In it we are utterly alone. In it we are appallingly unique. We look at each other and say, "It can never be done again."

-LOREN C. EISELEY

A SCREECHING tornado was rocking the Bridge when the alarm sounded; the whole structure shuddered and swayed. This was normal, and Robert Helmuth on Jupiter V 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 was given 1-14 as the sector where the trouble was. 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 down to the invisible surface. There were no ultra-phone "eyes" at that end to show 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 its 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. In fact, the drops weighed almost as much as cannon. balls there under Jupiter's two-and-a-half-fold gravity, although 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; even a small shock wave traveled through the incredibly dense atmosphere of the planet like the armor-plate of a bursting battleship.

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 they could not, in the very nature of things, do Helmuth any harm.

Helmuth, after all, was not on Jupiter-though that was becoming harder and harder for him to bear in mind. Nobody was on Jupiter; had any real damage ever been done to the Bridge, it probably would never have been repaired. There was nobody on Jupiter to repair it; only the machines which were themselves part of the Bridge.

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

It had been well planned. From Helmuth's point of view-that of the scanners on the beetle-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, which no one would ever see, was eleven miles; its height, as incomprehensible to the Bridge gang as a skyscraper to an ant, thirty miles; its length, deliberately unspecified in the plans, fifty-four miles at the moment and still increasing-a squat, colossal structure, built with engineering principles, methods, materials and tools never touched before now.

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° below zero Fahrenheit. 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; water, on the other hand, becomes Ice IV, a dense, opaque white medium which will deform to a heavy stress, but will break only under impacts huge enough to lay whole Earthly cities waste. Never mind that it took millions of megawatts of power to keep the Bridge up and growing every hour of the day; the winds on Jupiter blow at velocities up to twenty-five thousand miles per hour, and will never stop blowing, as they may have been blowing for more than four billion years; there is power enough.

Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps later still on Uranus too. But that had been politicians' talk. The Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface of Jupiter's atmosphere-luckily in a way, for at the top of that atmosphere the temperature was 76° Fahrenheit colder than it was down by the Bridge, but even with that differential the Bridge's mechanisms were just barely manageable. The bottom of Saturn's atmosphere, if the radiosonde readings could be trusted, was just 16,878 miles below the top of the Saturnian clouds one could see through the telescope, and the temperature down there was below -238° F. Under those conditions, even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be worked with anything softer than itself.

And as for a Bridge on 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 I-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 gravity down here was two and a half times as great as Earth's.

Even under that load, the whole webwork of girders was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale. It had been designed to do that, but Helmuth could never help being alarmed by the movement. Habit alone assured him that he had nothing to fear from it.

He took the automatic cut-out of the circuit and inched the beetle forward on manual control. This was only Sector 113, and the Bridge's own Wheatstone 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 that sector was still fully fifty feet away.

It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red beard. Evidently there was 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 a man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.

The secondaries cut in, and the beetle hunkered down once more against the deck, the ball-bearings on which it rode frozen magnetically to the rails. Grimly, Helmuth cut the power to the magnet windings and urged the flat craft inch by inch across the 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 which set Helmuth's teeth on edge. The beetle itself fluttered and chattered like an alarm-clock hammer between 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 darkness again toward the horizon which, like the Bridge itself, no eye would ever see.

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

There was a fiat, especially heavy crash, and a long line of fuming orange fire came pouring down the seething air into the depths, feathering horizontally like the mane of a Lipizzan stallion, 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 storming, streaming gases, and 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 lurid light of the hydrogen cataract.

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 of liquid hydrogen thirty miles below. The scanner clucked with satisfaction as the beetle recrossed the danger line into Sector 113.

Helmuth turned the body of the vehicle 180 degrees on its chassis, presenting its back to the dying orange torrent. There was nothing further that he could do at the moment for the Bridge. He searched his control board-a ghost image of which was cast on the screen across the scene on the Bridge-for the blue button marked Garage, punched it savagely, and tore off his fireman's helmet.

Obediently, the Bridge vanished.