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

made of ice: a marvellous structural material under a pres-
sure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94C.
Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a fria-
ble, talc-like powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar,
transparent substance that splits at a tap.
Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of
starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps still later,
on Uranus, too. But that had been politicians' talk. The
Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface
of Jupiter's atmosphere, and its mechanisms were just barely
manageable. The bottom of Saturn's atmosphere had been
sounded at sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight
miles, and the temperature there was below 150C. There
even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be
worked with anything except itself. And as for 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 high-
est penetration, and examined the nearby 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 whole web-
work was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale,
but it had been designed to do that. Helmuth could never
help being alarmed by the movement, but habit assured him
that he had nothing to fear from it.
He took the automatics out of the circuit and inched the
beetle forward manually. This was only Sector 113, and the
Bridge's own Wheatstone-bridge scanning systemthere was
no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was
impossible to maintain a vacuum on Jupitersaid that the
trouble was in Sector 114. The boundary of Sector 114 was
still fully fifty feet away.
It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red
beard. Evidently there was really cause for alarmreal
alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he al-
ways 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 fore-
man of the Bridgethat disaster which the. Bridge itself could
not repair, sending man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.
The secondaries cut in and the beetle stopped again. Grim-
ly, Helmuth opened the switch and sent the beetle creeping
across the invisible 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