Cities in Flight

And, when he got back to Chicago and went looking for a job—for his resignation from the Bridge gang would automatically take him out of government service—he would be asked why he had left the Bridge at the moment when work on the Bridge was just reaching its culmination.

He began to understand why the man in the dream had volunteered.

When the trick-change bell rang, he was still determined to resign, but he had already concluded bitterly that there were, after all, other kinds of hells besides the one on Jupiter.

He was returning the board to neutral as Charity came up the cleats. Charity’s eyes were snapping like a skyful of comets. Helmuth had known that they would be.

“Senator Wagoner wants to speak to you if you’re not too tired, Bob,” he said. “Go ahead: I’ll finish up there.”

“He does?” Helmuth frowned. The dream surged back upon him. No. They would not rush him any faster than he wanted to go. “What about, Charity? Am I suspected of unwestern activities? I suppose you’ve told them how I feel.”

“I have,” Dillon said, unruffled. “But we’ve agreed that you may not feel the same way after you’ve talked to Wagoner. He’s in the ship, of course. I’ve put out a suit for you at the lock.”

Charity put the helmet over his head, effectively cutting himself off from further conversation or from any further consciousness of Helmuth at all.

Helmuth stood looking at the blind, featureless bubble on Charity’s shoulders for a moment. Then, with a convulsive shrug, he went down the cleats.

Three minutes later, he was plodding in a spacesuit across the surface of Jupiter V with the vivid bulk of the mother planet splashing his shoulders with color.

A courteous marine let him through the ship’s airlock and deftly peeled him out of the suit. Despite a grim determination to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possible consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was conducted up toward the bow.

But the ship on the inside was like the ones that had brought him from Chicago to Jupiter V—it was like any spaceship: there was nothing in it to see but corridor walls and cleatwalls, until you arrived at the cabin where you were needed.

Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no more than sixty at most, not at all portly, and he had the keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen. The cabin in which he received Helmuth was obviously his own, a comfortable cabin as spaceship accommodations go, but neither roomy nor luxurious. The senator was hard to match up with the stories Helmuth had been hearing about the current Senate, which had been involved in scandal after scandal of more than Roman proportions.

There were only two people with him: a rather plain girl who was possibly his secretary, and a tall man wearing the uniform of the Army Space Corps and the eagles of a colonel. Helmuth realized, with a second shock of surprise, that he knew the officer: he was Paige Russell, a ballistics expert who had been stationed in the Jovian system not too long ago. The dirt-collector. He smiled rather wryly as Helmuth’s eyebrows went up.

Helmuth looked back at the senator. “I thought there was a whole sub-committee here,” he said.

“There is, but we left them where we found them, on Ganymede. I didn’t want to give you the idea that you were facing a grand jury,” Wagoner said, smiling. “I’ve been forced to sit in on most of these endless loyalty investigations back home, but I can’t see any point in exporting such religious ceremonies to deep space. Do sit down, Mr. Helmuth. There are drinks coming. We have a lot to talk about.”

Stiffly, Helmuth sat down.

“You know Colonel Russell, of course,” Wagoner said, leaning back comfortably in his own chair. “This young lady is Anne Abbott, about whom you’ll hear more shortly. Now then: Dillon tells me that your usefulness to the Bridge is about at an end. In a way, I’m sorry to hear that, for you’ve been one of the best men we’ve had on any of our planetary projects. But, in another way, I’m glad. It makes you available for something much bigger, where we need you much more.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You’ll have to let me explain it in my own way. First, I’d like to talk a little about the Bridge. Please don’t feel that I’m quizzing you, by the way. You’re at perfect liberty to say that any given question is none of my business, and I’ll take no offense and hold no grudge. Also, ‘I hereby disavow the authenticity of any tape or other tapping of which this statement may be a part.’ In short, our conversation is unofficial, highly so.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s to my interest; I’m hoping that you’ll talk freely to me. Of course, my disavowal means nothing, since such formal statements can always be excised from a tape; but later on I’m going to tell you some things you’re not supposed to know, and you’ll be able to judge by what I say that anything you say to me is privileged. Paige and Anne are your witnesses. Okay?”