He was astounded by he white fury that masked Eva's big boned, mildly pretty face.

"You'll blow the Bridge up yet, won't you?" she said, evenly, without preamble. "Any pretext will do!"

Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that was no better. The suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly through the pictureport, just as it did on the foreman's deck.

He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of satellite V were falling forward toward Jupiter; their uneventful, cooped up lives on Jupiter V were utterly unreal compared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on Jupiter's ever-changing surface. Every new day brought their minds, like ships out of control, closer and closer to that gaudy inferno.

There was no other way for a manor a woman on Jupiter V to look at the giant planet. It was simple experience, shared by all of them, that planets do not occupy four fifths of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there in that planet's sky, falling toward it, falling faster and faster "I have no intention," he said tiredly, "of blowing up the Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I want the Bridge to stay up even though I'm not starry-eyed to the point of incompetence about the project. Did you think that that rotten spot was going to go away by itself after you'd painted it over? Didn't you know that"

Several helmeted, masked heads nearby turned blindly toward the sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up. Any distracting conversation or other activity was taboo down here on the gang deck. He motioned Eva back to duty.

The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was plain from the way that her normally full lips were thinned that she thought Helmuth had ended the argument only in order t4ave the last word.

Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the central axis of the operations shack, and mounted the spiraling cleats toward his own foremati's cubicle. Already he felt in anticipation the weight of the helmet upon his own head.

Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet. He was sitting in Helmuth's chair.

Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth's entrance. The Bridge operator must learn to ignore, to be utterly unconscious of, anything happening about his' body except the inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to heed only those senses which report something going on thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he watched Dillon's white, bladelike fingers roving with blind sureness over the controls.

Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the Bridge not only from end to end, but up and down, too. The tally board showed that he had already activated nearly two thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had been up all night at the job; had begun it immediately after he had last relieved Helmuth.