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

intelligence had just quitted. The fact that the gravity on the
foreman's deck was as weak as that of most of the habitable
asteroids only made the contrast greater, and his need for
caution in walking more extreme.
He went to the big porthole and looked out. The unworn,
tumbled, monotonous surface of airless Jupiter V looked al-
most homey after the perpetual holocaust of Jupiter itself.
But there was an overpowering reminder of that holocaust
for through the thick quartz the face of the giant planet
stared at him, across only one hundred and twelve thousand
and six hundred miles: a sphere-section occupying almost
all of the sky except the near horizon. It was crawling with
colour, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poi-
sonous storming of its atmosphere, spotted with the deep
planet-sized shadows of farther moons.
Somewhere down there, six thousand miles below the clouds
that boiled in his face, was the Bridge. The Bridge was
thirty miles high and eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles
longbut it was only a sliver, an intricate and fragile ar-
rangement of ice-crystals beneath the bulging, racing torna-
does.
On Earth, even in the West, the Bridge would have been
the mightiest engineering achievement of all history, could the
Earth have borne its weight at all. But on Jupiter, the Bridge
was as precarious and perishable as a snowflake.
"Bob?" Dillon's voice asked. "You seem more upset than
usual. Is it serious?" Helmuth turned. His superior's worn
young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already
beginning to grey at the temples, was alight both with love
for the Bridge and the consuming ardour of the responsibility
he had to bear. As always, it touched Helmuth, and re-
minded him that the implacable universe bed, after all,
provided one warm corner in which human beings might hud-
dle together.
"Serious enough," he said, forming the words with dif-
ficulty against the frozen inarticulateness Jupiter forced upon
him. "But not fatal, as far as I could see. There's a lot of
hydrogen vulcanism on the surface, especially at the north-
west end, and it looks like there must have been a big blast
under the cliffs. I saw what looked like the last of a series
of fireballs."
Dillon's face relaxed while Helmuth was talking, slowly,
line by engraved line. "Oh. Just a flying chunk, then."
"I'm almost sure that's what it was. The cross-draughts
are heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each
other some time next week, aren't they? I haven't checked,
but I can feel the difference in the storms."
"So the chunk got picked up and thrown through the end
of the Bridge. A big piece?"
Helmuth shrugged. "That end is all twisted away to the left,