Eva remained silent in her chair for a long time.

"One thing I don't understand," she said at last. "Why did you come to me? I'd have thought that you'd find the whole thing terrifying."

"Oh, it's terrifying, all right," Helmuth said, with quiet exultation. "But terror and fright are two different things as I've just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself."

"I don't understand you."

"I didn't understand myself. My fears of working in person on the Bridge were irrational; they came from dreams. That should have tipped me off right away. There was really never' any chance of anyone's working in person on Jupiter; but I wanted to. It was a death wish, and it came directly out of the goddamned conditioning. I knew, we all knew, that the Bridge couldn't stand forever, but we were conditioned to believe that it had to. Nothing else could justify the awful ordeal of keeping it going even one day. The result: the classical dilemma that leads to madness. It affected you,' too, and your response was just as insane as mine: you wanted to have a child here.

"Now all that's changed. The work the Bridge was doing was worth while after all. I was wrong in calling it a bridge to nowhere. And Eva, you no more saw where it was going than I did, or you'd never have made it the be all and end all of your existence.

"Now, there's a place to go to. In fact, there are places hundreds of places. They'll be Earthlike places. Since the Soviets are about to win the Earth, those places will be more Earthlike than Earth itself, at least for the next century or so!"

She said: "Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace between us?"

"I'm going to take on this job, Evita ... if you'll go along."

She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvelous fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with a jangle of pure horror.

"Posts!" the loudspeaker above Eva's bed roared, in a distorted, gigantic caricature of Charity Dillon's voice. "Peak storm overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has already topped all previous records, and part 0/the land mass has begun to settle. This is an At overload emergency."

Behind Charity's bellow, they could hear what he was hearing, the winds of Jupiter, a spectrum of continuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge was responding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp, percussive tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way through a forest of huge steel tuning forks. Helmuth had never heard the sound. before, but he knew what it was.