Cities in Flight

“That’s me,” the voice said. It was impossible to avoid thinking of it as coming from the robot itself. “This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?”

“Very cosy,” Helmuth said. “I didn’t even know it existed. What do you do in it?”

“We just got it installed this year. It’s to study the Jovian life-forms. You’ve seen them?”

“You mean the jellyfish? Are they really alive?”

“Yes,” the robot said. “We are keeping it under our hats until we have more data, but we knew that sooner or later one of you beetle-goosers would see them. They’re alive, all right. They’ve got a colloidal continuum-discontinuum exactly like protoplasm—except that it uses liquid ammonia as a sol substrate, instead of water.”

“But what do they live on?” Helmuth said.

“Ah, that’s the question. Some form of aerial plankton, that’s certain; we’ve found the digested remnants inside them, but haven’t captured any live specimens of it yet. The digested fragments don’t offer us much to go on. And what does the plankton live on? I only wish I knew.”

Helmuth thought about it. Life on Jupiter. It did not matter that it was simple in structure, and virtually helpless in the winds. It was life all the same, even down here in the frozen pits of a hell no living man would ever visit. And who could know, if jellyfish rode the Jovian air, what Leviathans might not swim the Jovian seas?

“You don’t seem to be much impressed,” the robot said. “Jellyfish and plankton probably aren’t very exciting to a layman. But the implications are tremendous. It’s going to cause quite a stir among biologists, let me tell you.”

“I can believe that,” Helmuth said. “I was just taken aback, that’s all. We’ve always thought of Jupiter as lifeless—”

“That’s right. But now we know better. Well, back to work; I’ll be talking to you.” The robot flourished its tentacles and bent over a workbench.

Abstractedly, Helmuth backed the beetle off and turned it upward again. Barth, he remembered, was the man who had found a fossil on Europa. Earlier, there had been an officer doing a tour of duty in the Jovian system who had spent some of his spare time cutting soil samples, in search of bacteria. Probably he had found some; scientists of the age before space-flight had even found them in meteors. The Earth and Mars were not the only places in the universe that would harbor life, after all; perhaps it was—everywhere. If it could exist in a place like Jupiter, there was no logical reason to rule it out even on the Sun—some animated flame no one would recognize as life ….

He regained the deck and sent the beetle rumbling for the switchyard; he would need to transfer to another track before he could return the car to its garage. It had occurred to him during the ghostly proxy-conversation that he had never met Doc Barth, or many of the other men with whom he had talked so often by ham radio. Except for the Bridge operators themselves, the Jovian system was a community of disembodied voices to him. And now, he would never meet them ….

“Wake up, Helmuth,” a voice from the gang deck snapped abruptly. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have run yourself off the end of the Bridge. You had all the automatic stops on that beetle cut out.”

Helmuth reached guiltily and more than a little too late for the controls. Eva had already run his beetle back beyond the danger line.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, taking the helmet off. “Thanks, Eva.”

“Don’t thank me. If you’d actually been in it, I’d have let it go. Less reading and more sleep is what I recommend for you, Helmuth.”

“Keep your recommendations to yourself,” he growled.

The incident started a new and even more disturbing chain of thought. If he were to resign now, it would be nearly a year before he could get back to Chicago. Antigravity or no antigravity, the senators’ ship would have no room for unexpected extra passengers. Shipping a man back home had to be arranged far in advance. Living space had to be provided, and a cargo equivalent of the weight and space requirements he would take up on the return trip had to be dead-headed out to Jupiter V.

A year of living in the station on Jupiter V without any function—as a man whose drain on the station’s supplies no longer could be justified in terms of what he did. A year of living under the eyes of Eva Chavez and Charity Dillon and the other men and women who still remained Bridge operators, men and women who would not hesitate to let him know what they thought of his quitting.

A year of living as a bystander in the feverish excitement of direct, personal exploration of Jupiter. A year of watching and hearing the inevitable deaths—while he alone stood aloof, privileged and useless. A year during which Robert Helmuth would become the most hated living entity in the Jovian system.