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bottom. Helmuth ordered down a new truss and a squad of scaffolder~. Damage of
this order of magnitude took time to repair. He watched the tornado tearing
ragged chunks from the edges of the pit until he was sure that the
catalysis-cancer had been stopped. Then- suddenly, prematurely, dismally
tired-he took off the
helmet. -
He was astounded by ~he white fury that masked Eva's big-boned, mildly pretty
face.
"You'll blow the Bridge up yet, won't you?" she said, evenly, without
preamble. "Any pretext will do!"
Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that was no better. The
suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly through the picture-port, just as it
did on the foreman's deck.
He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of satellite V were falling
forward toward Jupiter; their uneventful, cooped-up lives on Jupiter V were
utterly unreal compared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on
Jupiter's ever-changing surface. Every new day brought their minds, like ships
out of control, closer and closer to that gaudy inferno.
There was no other way for a man-or a woman-on Jupiter V to look at the giant
planet. It was simple experience, shared by all of them, that planets do not
occupy four-fifths of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there
in that planet's sky, falling toward it, falling faster and faster- "I have no
intention," he said tiredly, "of blowing up
the Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I want the Bridge
to stay up-even though I'm not starry-eyed to the point of incompetence about
the project. Did you think that that rotten spot was going to go away by
itself after you'd painted it over? Didn't you know that-"
Several helmeted, masked heads nearby turned blindly toward the sound of his
voice. Helmuth shut up. Any distractiiig conversation or other activity was
taboo down here on the gang deck. He motioned Eva back to duty.
The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was plain from the way
that her normally full lips were thinned that she thought Helmuth had ended
the argument only in order t~4~ave the last word.
Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the central axis of the
operations shack, and mounted the
spiraling cleats toward his own foremati's cubicle. Already he felt in
anticipation the weight of the helmet upon his own head.
Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet. He was sitting in
Helmuth's chair.
Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth's entrance. The Bridge
operator must learn to ignore, to be utterly unconscious of, anything
happening about his' body except the inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to
heed only those senses which report something going on thousands and hundreds
of thousands of miles away.
Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he watched Dillon's white,
blade-like fingers roving with blind sureness over the controls.
Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the Bridge-not only from end
to end, but up and down, too. The tally board showed that he had already
activated nearly two-thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had
been up all night at the job; had begun it imniediately after he had last
relieved Helmuth.
Why?
With a thrill of unfocused apprehension, Helmuth looked at the foreman's jack,
which allowed the operator here in the cubicle to communicate with the gang
when necessary, and which kept him aware of anything said or done on the gang
boards.
It was plugged in.
Dillon sighed suddenly, took the helmet off,' and turned.
"Hello, Bob," he said. "It's funny about this job. You can't see, you can't
hear, but when somebody's watching you, you feel a sort of pressure on the
back of your neck. Extra-sensory perception, maybe. Ever felt it?"
"Pretty often, lately. Why the grand tour, Charity?"
"There's to be an inspection," Dillon said. His eyes met Helmuth's. They were
frank and transparent. "A couple of Senate sub-committee chairmen, coming to
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