Limits, page 5
I thought that one over. The only way to ward yourself from a solar flare is to put a lot of mass between you and the sun. On Earth that mass is a hundred miles of air. On the Moon they burrow ten meters into the regolith. The Shack had only the rock we could get from the Moon, and Moonbase had problems of its own. When they had the manpower and spare energy they’d throw more rock our way, and we’d plaster it across the outer shell of the Shack, or grind it up and put it inside; but for now there wasn’t enough, and come flare time McLeve was host to an involuntary lawn party.
But what the hell, I thought. It’s beautiful. Streams rushing in spirals from pole to equator. Green fields and houses, skies dotted with fleecy white hens; and I was flying as man flies in dreams.
I decided it was going to be fun, but there was one possible hitch.
“There are only ten women aboard,” I said.
McLeve nodded gravely.
“And nine of them are married.”
He nodded again. “Up to now we’ve mostly needed muscle. Heavy construction experience and muscle. The next big crew shipment’s in six months, and the company’s trying like hell to recruit women to balance things off. Think you can hold out that long?”
“Guess I have to.”
“Sure. I’m old navy. We didn’t have women aboard ships and we lived through it.”
I was thinking that I’d like to meet the one unmarried woman aboard. Also that she must be awfully popular. McLeve must have read my thoughts, because he waved me toward a big structure perched on a ledge partway down from the north pole. “You’re doing all right on the flying. Take it easy and let’s go over there.”
We soared down, and I began to feel a definite “up” and “down”; before that any direction I wanted it to be was “up.” We landed in front of the building.
“Combination mess hall and administration offices,” McLeve said. “Ten percent level.”
It took a moment before I realized what he meant. Ten percent level—ten percent of Earth’s gravity.
“It’s as heavy as I care to go,” McLeve said. “And any lighter makes it hard to eat. The labs are scattered around the ring at the same level.”
He helped me off with my wings and we went inside. There were several people, all men, scurrying about purposefully. They didn’t stop to meet me.
They weren’t wearing much, and I soon found that was the custom in the Shack; why wear clothes inside? There wasn’t any weather. It was always warm and dry and comfortable. You mostly needed clothes for pockets.
At the end of the corridor was a room that hummed; inside there was a bank of computer screens, all active. In front of them sat a homely girl.
“Miss Hoffman,” McLeve said. “Our new metallurgist, Corky Riggs.”
“Hi.” She looked at me for a moment, then back at the computer console. She was mumbling something to herself as her fingers flew over the keys.
“Dot Hoffman is our resident genius,” McLeve said. “Anything from stores and inventories to orbit control, if a computer can figure it out she can make the brains work the problem.”
She looked up with a smile. “We give necessity the praise of virtue,” she said.
McLeve looked thoughtful. “Cicero?”
“Quintilian.” She turned back to her console again.
“See you at dinner,” McLeve said. He led me out.
“Miss Hoffman,” I said.
He nodded.
“I suppose she wears baggy britches and blue wool stockings and that shirt because it’s cool in the computer room,” I said.
“No, she always dresses that way.”
“Oh.”
“Only six months, Riggs,” the Admiral said. “Well, maybe a year. You’ll survive.”
I was thinking I’d damned well have to.
I fell in love during dinner.
The chief engineer was named Ty Plauger, a long, lean chap with startling blue eyes. The chief ecologist was his wife, Jill. They had been married about a year before they came up, and they’d been aboard the Shack for three, ever since it started up. Neither was a lot older than me, maybe thirty then.
At my present age the concept of love at first sight seems both trite and incredible, but it was true enough. I suppose I could have named you reasons then, but I don’t feel them now. Take this instead:
There were ten women aboard out of ninety total. Nine were married, and the tenth was Dot Hoffman. My first impression of her was more than correct. Dot never would be married. Not only was she homely, but she thought she was homelier still. She was terrified of physical contact with men, and the blue wool stockings and blouse buttoned to the neck were the least of her defenses.
If I had to be in love—and at that age, maybe I did—I could choose among nine married women. Jill was certainly the prettiest of the lot. Pug nose, brown hair chopped off short, green eyes, and a compact muscular shape, very much the shape of a woman. She liked to talk, and I liked to listen.
She and Ty had stars in their eyes. Their talk was full of what space would do for mankind.
Jill was an ex-Fromate; she’d been an officer in the Friends of Man and the Earth. But while the Fromates down below were running around sabotaging industries and arcologies and nuclear plants and anything else they didn’t like, Jill went to space. Her heart bled no less than any for the baby fur seals and the three-spined stickleback and all the fish killed by mine tailings, but she’d thought of something to do about it all.
“We’ll put all the dirty industries into space,” she told me. “Throw the pollution into the solar wind and let it go out to the cometary halo. The Fromates think they can talk everyone into letting Kansas go back to buffalo grass—”
“You can’t make people want to be poor,” Ty put in.
“Right! If we want to clean up the Earth and save the wild things, we’ll have to give people a way to get rich without harming the environment. This is it! Someday we’ll send down enough power from space that we can tear down the dams and put the snail darter back where he came from.”
And more. Jill tended to do most of the talking. I wondered about Ty. He always seemed to have the words that would set her off again.
And one day, when we were clustered around McLeve’s house with, for a few restful hours, nothing to do, and Jill was well out of earshot flying around and among the chickens in her wonderfully graceful wingstyle, Ty said to me, “I don’t care if we turn the Earth into a park. I like space. I like flying, and I like free fall, and the look of stars with no air to cloud them. But don’t tell Jill.”
I learned fast. With Ty in charge of engineering, McLeve as chief administrator, and Dot Hoffman’s computers to simulate the construction and point up problems before they arose, the project went well. We didn’t get enough mass from the Moon, so that my smelter was always short of raw materials, and Congress didn’t give us enough money. There weren’t enough flights from down below and we were short of personnel and goods from Earth. But we got along.
Two hundred and forty thousand miles below us, everything was going to hell.
First, the senior senator from Wisconsin lived long enough to inherit a powerful committee chairmanship, and he’d been against the space industries from the start. Instead of money we got “Golden Fleece” awards. Funds already appropriated for flights we’d counted on got sliced, and our future budgets were completely in doubt.
Next, the administration tried to bail itself out of the tax revolt by running the printing presses. What money we could get appropriated wasn’t worth half as much by the time we got it.
Moonbase felt the pinch and cut down even more on the rock they flung out our way.
Ty’s answer was to work harder: get as much of the Shack finished as we could, so that we could start sending down power.
“Get it done,” he told us nightly. “Get a lot of it finished. Get so much done that even those idiots will see that we’re worth it. So much that it’ll cost them less to supply us than to bring us home.”
He worked himself harder than anyone else, and Jill was right out there with him. The first task was to get the mirrors operating.
We blew them all at once over a couple of months. They came in the shuttle that should have brought our additional crew; it wasn’t much of a choice, and we’d have to put off balancing out the sex ratio for another six months.
The mirrors were packages of fabric as thin as the cellophane on a package of cigarettes. We inflated them into great spheres, sprayed foam plastic on the outside for struts, and sprayed silver vapor inside where it would precipitate in a thin layer all over. Then we cut them apart to get spherical mirrors, and sliced a couple of those into wedges to mount behind the windows in the floor of the Shack.
They reflected sunlight in for additional crops. Jill had her crew out planting more wheat to cut down on the supplies we’d need from Earth.
Another of the mirrors was my concern. A hemisphere a quarter of a kilometer across can focus a lot of sunlight onto a small point. Put a rock at that point and it melts, fast. When we got that set up we were all frantically busy smelting iron for construction out of the rocks. Moonbase shipped up when they could. When Moonbase couldn’t fling us anything we dismounted rock we’d placed for shielding, smelted it, and plastered the slag back onto the sphere.
Days got longer and longer. There’s no day or night aboard the Shack anyway, of course: open the mirrors and you have sunlight, close them and you don’t. Still, habit dies hard, and we kept track of time by days and weeks; but our work schedules bore no relation to them. Sometimes we worked the clock around, quitting only when forced to by sheer exhaustion.
We got a shipment from Moonbase, and in the middle of the refining process the mounting struts in the big smelter mirror got out of alignment. Naturally Ty was out to work on it.
He was inspecting the system by flying around with a reaction pistol. The rule was that no one worked without a safety line; a man who drifted away from the Shack might or might not be rescued, and the rescue itself would cost time and manpower we didn’t have.
Ty’s line kept pulling him up short of where he wanted to go. He gave the free end to Jill and told her to pay out a lot of slack. Then he made a jump from the mirror frame. He must have thought he’d use the reaction pistol to shove him off at an angle so that he’d cross over the bowl of the mirror to the other side.
The pistol ran out of gas. That left Ty floating straight toward the focus of the mirror.
He shouted into his helmet radio, and Jill frantically hauled in slack, trying to get a purchase on him. I made a quick calculation and knew I would never reach him in time; if I tried I’d likely end up in the focus myself. Instead I took a dive across his back path. If I could grab his safety line, the jerk as I pulled up short ought to keep him out of the hottest area, and my reaction pistol would take us back to the edge.
I got the line all right, but it was slack. It had burned through. Ty went right through the hot point. When we recovered his body, metal parts on his suit had melted.
We scattered his ashes inside the sphere. McLeve’s navy prayer book opened the burial service with the words “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we shall take nothing out.” Afterwards I wondered how subtle McLeve had been in his choice of that passage.
We had built this world ourselves, with Ty leading us. We had brought everything into this world, even down to Ty’s final gift to us; the ashes which would grow grass in a place no human had ever thought to reach until now.
For the next month we did without him; and it was as if we had lost half our men. McLeve was a good engineer if a better administrator, but he couldn’t go into the high gravity areas, and he couldn’t do active construction work. Still, it wasn’t engineering talent we lacked. It was Ty’s drive.
Jill and Dot and McLeve tried to make up for that. They were more committed to the project than ever.
Two hundred and forty thousand miles down, they were looking for a construction boss. They’d find one, we were sure. We were the best, and we were paid like the best. There was never a problem with salaries. Salaries were negligible next to the other costs of building the Shack. But the personnel shuttles were delayed, and delayed again, and we were running out of necessities, and the US economy was slipping again.
We got the mirrors arrayed. Jill went heavily into agriculture, and the lunar soil bloomed, seeded with earthworms and bacteria from earthly soil. We smelted more of the rocky crust around the Shack and put it back as slag. We had plans for the metal we extracted, starting with a lab for growing metal whiskers. There was already a whisker lab in near-Earth orbit, but its output was tiny. The Shack might survive if we could show even the beginnings of a profit-making enterprise.
Jill had another plan: mass production of expensive biologicals, enzymes and various starting organics for ethical drugs.
We had lots of plans. What we didn’t have was enough people to do it all. You can only work so many twenty-hour days. We began to make mistakes. Some were costly.
My error didn’t cost the Shack. Only myself. I like to think it was due to fatigue and nothing more.
I made a try at comforting the grieving widow, after a decent wait of three weeks.
When Ty was alive everyone flirted with Jill. She pretended not to notice. You’d have to be crude as well as rude before she’d react.
This time it was different. I may not have been very subtle, but I wasn’t crude; and she told me instantly to get the hell out of her cabin and leave her alone.
I went back to my refinery mirror and brooded.
Ninety years later I know better. Ninety years is too damned late. If I’d noticed nothing else, I should have known that nearly eighty unmarried men aboard would all be willing to comfort the grieving widow, and half of them were only too willing to use the subtle approach: “You’re all that keeps us working so hard.”
I wonder who tried before I did? It hardly matters; when my turn came, Jill’s reaction was automatic. Slap him down before it’s too late for him to back away. And when she slapped me down, I stayed slapped, more hurt than mad, but less than willing to try again.
I hadn’t stopped being in love with her. So I worked at being her friend again. It wasn’t easy. Jill was cold inside. When she talked to people it was about business, never herself. Her dedication to the Shack, and to all it stood for in her mind, was hardening, ossifying. And she spent a lot of time with Dot Hoffman and Admiral McLeve.
But the word came: another shuttle. Again there were no women. The Senator from Wisconsin had found out how expensive it would be to get us home. Add fifty women and it would be half again as expensive. So no new personnel.
Still they couldn’t stop the company from sending up a new chief engineer, and we heard the shuttle was on its way, with a load of seeds, liquid hydrogen, vitamin pills, and Jack Halfey.
I couldn’t believe it. Jack wasn’t the type.
To begin with, while the salary you could save in five years amounted to a good sum, enough to let you start a business and still have some income left, it wasn’t wealth. You couldn’t live the rest of your life in Rio on it; and I was pretty sure Jack’s goals hadn’t changed.
But there he was, the new boss. From the first day he arrived things started humming. It was the old Jack, brilliant, always at work, and always insisting everyone try to keep up with him although no one ever could. He worked our arses off. In two months he had us caught up on the time we lost after Ty was killed.
Things looked good. They looked damned good. With the mirrors mounted we could operate on sunlight, with spare power for other uses. Life from soil imported from Earth spread throughout the soil imported from the Moon; and earthly plants were in love with the chemicals in lunar soil. We planted strawberries, corn and beans together; we planted squashes and melons in low-gravity areas and watched them grow into jungles of thin vines covered with fruit.
The smelter worked overtime, and we had more than enough metals for the whisker lab and biological vats, if only a shuttle would bring us the pumps and electronics we needed, and if necessary we’d make pumps in the machine shops, and Jack had Dot working out the details of setting up integrated-circuit manufacture.
But the better things looked in space, the worse they looked on Earth.
One of the ways we were going to make space colonies pay for themselves was through electricity. We put out big arrays of solar cells, monstrous spiderwebs a kilometer long by half that wide, so large that they needed small engines dotted all over them just to keep them oriented properly toward the sun.
We made the solar cells ourselves; one of the reasons they needed me was to get out the rare metals from the lunar regolith and save them for the solar-cell factory. And it was working; we had the structure and we were making the cells. Soon enough we’d have enormous power, megaWatts of power, enough to beam it down to Earth where it could pay back some of the costs of building the system. The orbiting power stations cost a fortune to put up, but not much to maintain; they would be like dams, big front end costs but then nearly free power forever.
We were sure that would save us. How could the United States turn down free electricity?
It looked good until the Fromates blew up the desert antenna that we would have been beaming the power down to, and the lawyers got their reconstruction tied into legal knots that would probably take five years to untangle.
The Senator from Wisconsin continued his crusade. This time we got three Golden Fleece awards. Down on Earth the company nominated him for membership in the Flat Earth Society. He gleefully accepted and cut our budget again.
We also had problems on board. Jack had started mean; it was obvious he had never wanted to come here in the first place. Now he turned mean as a rattlesnake. He worked us. If we could get the whisker lab finished ahead of time, at lower cost than planned, then maybe we could save the station yet; so he pushed and pushed again; and one day he pushed too hard.
