"Blish, James - Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

BRIDGE
by James Blish

A SCREECHING tomado 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 possiblebecause 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 bed-bug, got slow-
ly under way on its ball-bearing races, guided and held firm-
ly 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 it-
self 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; it's height, thirty miles;
its length, deliberately unspecifled in the plans, fifty-four miles
at the momenta squat, colossal structure, built with engi-
neering principles, methods, materials and tools never touched
before
For the very good reason that they would have been im-
possible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was