Of major graft, however, there had been no trace. No steel company had sold the Bridge any substandard castings, because there was no steel in the Bridge. A Jovian might have made a good thing of selling the Bridge substandard Ice IV but as far as anyone could know there were no Jovians, so the Bridge got its Ice IV for nothing but the cost of cutting it. Wagoner's office had been very strict about the handling of the lesser contracts for prefabricated moon huts, for supply ferry fuel, for equipment and had policed not only its own deals, but all the Army Space Service subcontracts connected with the Bridge.

As for Charity Dillon and his foreman, they were rigidly efficient partly because it was in their natures to work that way, and partly because of the intensive conditioning they had all been given before being shipped to the Jovian system. There was no waste to be found in anything that they supervised, and if they had occasionally been guilty of bad engineering judgment, no outside engineer would be likely to detect it. The engineering principles by which the Bridge operated did not hold true anywhere but on Jupiter.

The hugest loss of money the whole Jupiter Project had yet sustained had been accompanied by such carnage that it fell in the senators' minds in the category of warfare. When a soldier is killed by enemy action, nobody asks how much money his death cost the government through the loss of his gear. The part of the report which described the placing of the Bridge's foundation mentioned reverently the heroism of the lost two hundred and thirty-one crewmen; it said nothing about the cost of the nine specially designed space tugs which now floated in silhouette, as fiat as so many tin cutouts under six million pounds per square inch of pressure, somewhere at the bottom of Jupiter's atmosphere floated with eight thousand vertical miles of eternally roaring poisons between them and the eyes of the living.

Had those crewmen been heroes? They had been enlisted men and officers of the Army Space Service, acting under orders. While doing what they had been ordered to do, they bad been killed. Wagoner could not remember whether or not the survivors of that operation had also been called heroes. Oh, they had certainly been decorated the Army liked its men to wear as much fruit salad on their chests as it could possibly spoon out to them, because it was good public relations but they were not mentioned in the report.

This much was certain: the dead men had died because of Wagoner. He had known, generally at least, that many of them would die, but he had gone ahead anyhow. He knew that there might be worse to come. Nevertheless, he would proceed, because he thought that in the long run it would be worth it. He knew well enough that the end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary....