"Do we?" the girl said, standing abruptly in a white fury. "Not quite! Also, I'm not pretty, and a receptionist for a firm as big as Pfitzner is usually pretty striking. Striking enough to resist being pumped by the first man to notice her, at least. Go ahead, complete the list! Tell the whole truth!"

"How can I?" Paige said, rising also and looking squarely at her, his fingers closing slowly, "If I told you honestly just what I think of your looks and by God I will, I think the most beautiful woman in the world would bathe every day in fuming nitric acid just to duplicate your smile you'd hate me more than ever. You'd think I was mocking you. Now you tell me the rest of the truth. You are related to Dr. Abbott."

"Partly enough," the girl said, each word cut out of smoking dry ice, "Dr. Abbott is my father. And I insist upon being allowed to go home now, Colonel Russell. Not ten seconds from now, but now."

CHAPTER FOUR: Jupiter V

The firm determination to submit to experiment is not enough; there are still dangerous hypotheses; first, and above all, those which are tacit and unconscious. Since we make them without knowing it, we are powerless to abandon them.

HEN1U PoiNcAlui

THE BRIDGE vanished as the connection was broken. The continuous ultromc pulses from the Jovian satellites to the selsyns and servos of the Bridge never stopped, of course; and the Bridge sent back information ceaselessly on the same subetheric channels to the ever vigilant eyes and ears and hands of the Bridge gang on Jupiter V. But for the moment, the vast structure's guiding intelligence, the Bridge gang foreman, had quitted it.

Helmuth set the heavy helmet carefully in its niche and felt of his temples, feeling the blood passing under his fingertips. Then he turned.

Dillon was looking at him,

"Well?" the civil engineer said. "What's the matter, Bob? Is it bad?"

Helmuth did not reply for a moment. The abrupt transition from the storm ravaged deck of the Bridge to the quiet, placid air of the operations shack on Jupiter's fifth moon was always a shock. He had never been able to anticipate it, let alone become accustomed to it; it was worse each time, not better.

He pulled the jacks from the foreman's board and let them flick back into the desk on their alive, elastic cables, and then got up from the bucket seat, moving carefully upon shaky legs, feeling implicit in his own body the enormous weights. and pressures his guiding intelligence had just quitted. The fact that the gravity on the foreman's deck was as weak as that of most of the habitable asteroids only made the contrast greater, and his need for caution in walking more extreme.

He went to the big porthole and looked out. The unworn, tumbled, monotonous surface of airless Jupiter V looked almost homey after the perpetual holocaust of Jupiter itself. But there was an overpowering reminder of that holocaust for through the thick quartz of the porthole, the face of the giant planet stared at. Helmuth across only 112,600 miles, less than half the distance between Earth's moon and Earth; a sphere section occupying almost all of the sky, except the near horizon, where one could see a few first magnitude stars. The rest of the sky was crawling with color, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poisonous storming of Jupiter's atmosphere, spotted with the deep black, planet sized shadows of moons closer to the sun than Jupiter V.