more damage to the West than they will to the USSR. After all, in the Soviet Union one isn’t permitted to inherit money, or to exercise any real control over economic forces just because one’s lived a long time. If both major powers are given control over death at the same time, the West will be at a natural disadvantage. If we give control over death to the West alone, we’ll be sabotaging our own civilization without putting the USSR under any comparable handicap. Is that sensible?”
The picture was staggering, to say the least. It gave Paige an impression of Gunn decidedly at variance with the mask of salesman-turned-executive which the man himself wore. But it was otherwise self-consistent; that, he knew, was supposed to be enough for him.
“How could I tell?” he said coldly. “All I can see is that every day I stick with you, I get in deeper. First I pose for the FBI as something that I’m not. Next I’m given possession of information that it’s unlawful for me to have. And now I’m helping you conceal the evidence of a high crime. It looks more and more to me as though I was supposed to be involved in this thing from the beginning. I don’t see how you could have done so thorough a job on me without planning it.”
“You needn’t deny that you asked for it, Paige.”
“I don’t deny that,” he said. “You don’t deny deliberately involving me, either, I notice.”
“No. It was deliberate, all right. I thought you’d have suspected it before. And if you’re planning to ask me why, save your breath. I’m not permitted to tell you. You’ll find out in due course.”
“You two—”
“No. Hal had nothing to do with involving you. That was my idea. He only agreed to it—and he had to be convinced from considerably higher up.”
“You two,” Paige said through almost motionless lips, “don’t hesitate to trample on the bystanders, do you? If I didn’t know before that Pfitzner was run by a pack of idealists, I’d know it now. You’ve got the characteristic ruthlessness.”
“That,” Anne said in a level voice, “is what it takes.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: Jupiter V
INSTEAD OF sleeping after his trick—for now Helmuth knew that he was really afraid—he sat up in the reading chair in his cabin. The illuminated microfilmed pages of a book flicked by across the surface of the wall opposite him, timed precisely to the reading rate most comfortable for him, and he had several weeks’ worry-conserved alcohol and smoke rations for ready consumption.
But Helmuth let his mix go flat and did not notice the book, which had turned itself on, at the page where he had abandoned it last, when he had fitted himself into the chair. Instead, he listened to the radio.
There was always a great deal of ham radio activity in the Jovian system. The conditions were good for it, since there was plenty of power available, few impeding atmosphere layers and those thin, no Heaviside layers, and few official and no commercial channels with which the hams could interfere.
And there were plenty of people scattered about the satellites who needed the sound of a voice.
“… anybody know whether or not the senators are coming here? Doc Barth put in a report a while back on a fossil plant he found here, at least he thinks it was a plant. Maybe they’d like a look at it.”
“It’s the Bridge team they’re coming to see.” A strong voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in and out to the currents of an atmosphere; that would be Sweeney, on Ganymede. “Sorry to throw the wet blanket, boys, but I don’t think the senators’ll be interested in our rock-balls for their own lumpy selves. They’re only scheduled to stay here three days.”
Helmuth thought grayly:
“Is that you, Sweeney? Where’s the Bridge tonight?”
“Dillon’s on duty,” a very distant transmitter said. “Try to raise Helmuth, Sweeney.”
“Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy beetle-gooser! Come in, Helmuth!”
“Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us a little. We’re feeling cheerful.”
Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike, from where it lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But before he had completed the gesture, the door to his room swung open.
Eva came in.
She said: “Bob, I want to tell you something.”
“His voice is changing!” the voice of the Callisto operator said. “Sweeney, ask him what he’s drinking!”
Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed—in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter V —and Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this hour, half-way between her sleep period and her trick. Her hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of the way she had looked when they had been lovers, before the Bridge had come to bestride his bed instead. He put the memory aside.
“All right,” he said. “I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, sugar and the other stuff are in the locker … you know where it is. Shot-cans are there, too.”
The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which, Helmuth knew, meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.
“I don’t need a drink,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been turning my lux-R’s back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for me—by showing me what a mind looks like that’s hiding from itself.”
“Evita, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously you’re advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won’t you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?”
“Now you’re being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn’t a vitamin. And I didn’t come to talk about that. I came to tell you something I think you ought to know.”
“Which is—?”
She said: “Bob, I mean to have a child here.”
A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exasperation, jack-knifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading. Eva twisted to look at it, but the page was already dimming and vanishing.
“Why should it?” she said suspiciously, looking back at him. “I don’t see the joke. Shouldn’t a woman want to have a child?”
“Of course she should,” he said, settling back. The pages began to flip across the wall again. “It’s quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock garden like Jupiter V, to pluck fossils and make dust-castles and get quaintly starburned. How cosy to tuck the blue little body back into its corner that night, and give it its oxygen bottle, promptly as the sound of the trick-change bell! Why it’s as natural as Jupiter-light—as Western as freeze-dried apple pie.”
He turned his head casually away. “Congratulations. As for me, though, Eva, I’d much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here.”
Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.
“You reedy male platitude!” she said, in a low grinding voice. “How you could see almost the whole point, and make so little of it—
He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away. “What else?” he demanded, trying to imagine how it would feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these Bridge-robots. “None of us need bother with
