Cities in Flight

“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 foundation in. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered where we put it. We could have floated the caissons on the sea itself, if we hadn’t wanted a fixed point from which to measure storm velocities 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 building it. Actually, it’s much more like a traveling crane—an extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn’t going anywhere because it hasn’t any place interesting to go to, that’s all. We’re extending it to cover as much territory as possible, and to increase its stability, not to span the distance between places. There’s no point to reproaching it because it doesn’t span a real gap—between, 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,” Helmuth said, trying to control his impatience. “I have at present as much common sense as the average child. What I am trying to point out is that meeting colossalness with colossalness—out here—is 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 all—it’s just a cumbersome evasion.”

Dillon smiled. “You’re depressed, and no wonder. Sleep it off, Bob, if you can—you might even come up with that answer. In the meantime—well, when you stop to think about it, the surface of Jupiter isn’t any more hostile, inherently, than the surface of Jupiter V, except in degree. If you stepped out of this building naked, you’d die just as fast as you would on Jupiter. Try to look at it that way.”

Helmuth, looking forward into another night of dreams, said: “That’s the way I look at it now.”

BOOK TWO

Finally, in semantic aphasia, the full significance of words and phrases is lost. Separately, each word or each detail of a drawing can be understood, but the general significance escapes; an act is executed on command, though the purpose of it is not understood. … A general conception cannot be formulated, but details can be enumerated.

—HENRI PIÉRON

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because ‘two’ is ‘one and one.’ We forget that we have still to make a study of ‘and.’

—A. S. EDDINGTON

INTERMEZZO: WASHINGTON

THE REPORT of the investigating sub-committee of the Senate Finance Committee on the Jupiter Project was a massive document, especially so in the mimeographed, uncorrected form in which it had been rushed to Wagoner’s desk. In its printed form—not due for another two weeks—the report would be considerably less bulky, but it would probably be more unreadable. In addition, it would be tempered in spots by the cautious second thoughts of its seven authors; Wagoner needed to see their opinions in the raw “for colleagues only” version.