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

ster. It's a way we've developed for studying the behaviour
of materials under specific conditions of temperament, pres-
sure, and gravity. Jupiter isn't Hell, either; it's a set of condi-
tions. The Bridge is the laboratory we set up to work with
those conditions."
"It isn't going anywhere. It's a bridge to no place."
"There aren't many places on Jupiter," Dillon said, missing
Helmuth's meaning entirely. "We put the Bridge on an island
in the local sea because we needed solid ice we could sink
the caissons in. Otherwise, it wouldn't have mattered where
we put it. We could have floated it on the sea itself, if
we hadn't wanted to fix it in order to measure storm veloci-
ties and such things."
"I know that," Helmuth said.
"But, Bob, you don't show any signs of understanding it.
Why, for instance, should the Bridge go any place? It isn't
even, properly speaking, a bridge at all. We only call it that
because we used some bridge engineering principles in build-
ing it. Actually, it's much more like a travelling cranean
extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn't going any-
where because it hasn't any place interesting to go, that's all.
We're extending it to cover as much territory as possible, and
to increase its stablility, not to span the distance between
places. There's no point to reproaching it because it doesn't
span a real gapbetween, say, Dover and Calais. It's a
bridge to knowledge, and that's far more important. Why
can't you see that?"
"I can see that; that's what I was talking about," Hel-
muth said, trying to control his impatience. "I have as
much common sense as the average child. What I was try-
ing to point out is that meeting colossalness with colossal-
nessout hereis a mug's game. It's a game Jupiter will
always win, without the slightest effort. What if the engineers
who built the Dover-Calais bridge had been limited to broom-
straws for their structural members? They could have got the
bridge up somehow, sure, and made it strong enough to carry
light traffic on a fair day. But what would you have had left
of it after the first winter storm came down the Channel
from the North Sea? The whole approach is idiotic!"
"All right," Dillon said reasonably. "You have a point.
Now you're being reasonable. What better approach have you
to suggest? Should we abandon Jupiter entirely because it's
too big for us?"
"No," Helmuth said. "Or maybe, yes. I don't know. I
don't have any easy answer. I just know that this one is no
answer at allit's just a cumbersome evasion."
Dillon smiled. "You're depressed, and no wonder. Sleep
it off, Bob, if you canyou might even come up with that an-
swer. In the meantimewell, when you stop to think about
it, the surface of Jupiter isn't any more hostile, inherently,