Limits, page 6
It wasn’t a mutiny. It wasn’t even a strike. We all did a day’s work; but suddenly, without as far as I know any discussion among us, nobody would put in overtime. Ten hours a day, yes; ten hours and one minute, no.
Jill pleaded. The Admiral got coldly formal. Dot cried. Jack screamed.
We cut work to nine and a half hours.
And then it all changed. One day Jack Halfey was smiling a lot. He turned polite. He was getting his two or three hours sleep a night.
Dot described him. “Like Mrs. Fezziwig,” she said. “‘One vast substantial smile.’ I hope she’s happy. I wonder why she did it? To save the Shack…” She was trying to keep her voice cheerful, but her look was bitter. Dot wasn’t naive; just terrified. I suppose that to her the only reason a woman would move in with a man would be to save some noble cause like the Shack.
As to Jill, she didn’t change much. The Shack was the first step in the conquest of the universe, and it was by God going to be finished and self-sufficient. Partly it was a memorial to Ty, I think; but she really believed in what she was doing, and it was infectious.
I could see how Jack could convince her that he shared her goal. To a great extent he did, although it was pure selfishness; his considerable reputation was riding on this project. But Jack never did anything half-heartedly. He drove himself at whatever he was doing.
What I couldn’t understand was why he was here at all. He must have known how thin were the chances of completing the Shack before he left Earth.
I had to know before it drove me nuts.
Jack didn’t drink much. When he did it was often a disaster, because he was the world’s cheapest drunk. So one night I plied him.
Night is generally relative, of course, but this one was real: the Earth got between us and the sun. Since we were on the same orbit as the Moon, but sixty degrees ahead, that happened to us exactly as often as there are eclipses of the Moon on Earth; a rare occasion, one worth celebrating.
Of course we’d put in a day’s work first, so the party didn’t last long, we were all too beat. Still it was a start, and when the formalities broke up and Jill went off to look at the air system, I grabbed Jack and got him over to my quarters. We both collapsed in exhaustion.
I had brought a yeast culture with me from Canaveral. McLeve had warned me that liquor cost like diamonds up here; and a way to make my own alcohol seemed a good investment. And it was. By now I had vacuum-distilled vodka made from fermented fruit bars and a mash of strawberries from the farm—they weren’t missed; the farm covered a quarter of the inner surface now. My concoction tasted better than it sounds, and it wasn’t hard to talk Jack into a drink, then another.
Presently he was trying to sing the verses to “The Green Hills of Earth.” A mellower man you never saw. I seized my chance.
“So you love the green hills of Earth so much, what are you doing here? Change your mind about Rio?”
Jack shook his head; the vibration ran down his arm and sloshed his drink. “Nope…” Outside a hen cackled, and Jack collapsed in laughter. “Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies…”
Grimly I stuck to the subject. “I thought you were all set with that Tucson arcology.”
“Oh, I was. I was indeed. It was a beautiful setup. Lots of pay, and—” He stopped abruptly.
“And other opportunities?” I was beginning to see the light.
“Wellll…yes. But you have to see it the way I did. First, it was a great opportunity to make a name for myself. A city in a building! Residential and business and industry all in the same place, one building to house a quarter…of a million…people. And it would have been beautiful, Corky. The plans were magnificent! I was in love with it. Then I got into it, and I saw what was really going on.
“Corky, everyone was stealing that place blind! The first week I went to the chief engineer to report shortages in deliveries and he just looked at me. ‘Stick to your own work, Halfey,’ says he. Chief engineer, the architects, construction bosses, even the catering crew—every one of them was knocking down twenty-five, fifty percent! They were selling the cement right off the boxcars and substituting sand. There wasn’t enough cement in that concrete to hold up the walls.”
“So you took your share.”
“Don’t get holy on me! Dammit, look at it my way. I was willing to play square, but they wouldn’t let me. The place was going to fall down. The weight of the first fifty thousand people would have done it. What I could do was make sure nobody got inside before it happened.” Jack Halfey chortled. “I’m a public benefactor, I am. I sold off the reinforcing rods. The inspectors couldn’t possibly ignore that.”
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“Wellll, those rods were metal-whisker compote. Almost as strong as diamond, and almost as expensive. I didn’t need anything else. But I made sure they’d never open that place to the public. Then I stashed my ill-gotten gains and went underground and waited for something to happen.”
“I never heard much about it. Of course, I wouldn’t, up here.”
“Not many down there heard either. Hush hush while the FBI looked into it. The best buy I ever made in my life was a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Just a paragraph about how the Racket Squad was investigating Mafia involvement in the Tucson arcology. That’s when things fell into place.”
I swung around to refill his glass, carefully. We use great big glasses, and never fill them more than half full. Otherwise they slosh all over the place in the low gravity. I had another myself. It was pretty good vodka, and if I felt it, Jack must be pickled blue. “You mean the building fell in?”
“No, no. I realized why there was so much graft.” Jack sounded aggrieved. “There was supposed to be graft. I wasn’t supposed to get in on it.”
“Aha.”
“Aha you know it. I finished reading that article on a plane to Canaveral. The FBI couldn’t follow me to Rio, but the Mafia sure could. I’d heard there was a new opening for chief engineer for the Construction Shack, and all of a sudden the post looked very, very good;”
He chuckled. “Also, I hear that things are tightening up in the USA. Big crackdown on organized crime. Computer-assisted. Income tax boys and Racket Squad working together. It shouldn’t be long before all the chiefs who want my arse are in jail. Then I can go back, cash my stash, and head for Rio.”
“Switzerland?”
“Oh, no. Nothing so simple as that. I thought of something else. Say, I better get back to my bunk.” He staggered out before I could stop him. Fortunately it was walking distance from my place to his; if he’d had to fly, he’d probably have ended up roosting with the chickens.
“Bloody hell,” says I to myself.
Should I add that I had no intention of robbing Jack? I was just curious: what inflation-proof investment had he thought up? But I didn’t find out for a long time…
A month later the dollar collapsed. Inflation had been a fact of life for so long that it was the goal of every union and civil service organizer to get inflation written into their contracts, thereby increasing inflation. The government printed money faster to compensate: more inflation. One of those vicious spirals. Almost suddenly, the dollar was down the drain.
There followed a full-scale taxpayer revolt.
The Administration got the message: they were spending too much money. Aha! Clearly that had to stop. The first things to go were all the projects that wouldn’t pay off during the current President’s term of office. Long-term research was chopped out of existence. Welfare, on the other hand, was increased, and a comprehensive National Health Plan was put into effect, even though they had to pay the doctors and hospitals in promissory notes.
The Senator from Wisconsin didn’t even bother giving us his customary Golden Fleece award. Why insult the walking dead?
We met in our usual place, a cage-work not far from the north pole. Admiral McLeve was in the center, in zero gravity. The rest of us perched about the cage-work, looking like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Dot had a different picture, from Aristophanes. “Somewhere, what with all these clouds and all this air, there must be a rare name, somewhere…How do you like Cloud-Cuckoo-Land?”
Putting on wings does things to people. Halfey had dyed his wings scarlet, marked with yellow triangles enclosing an H. Dot wore the plumage of an eagle, and I hadn’t believed it the first time I saw it; it was an incredibly detailed, beautiful job. McLeve’s were the wings of a bat, and I tell you he looked frightening, as evil as Dracula himself. Leon Briscoe, the chemist, had painted mathematical formulae all over his, in exquisite medieval calligraphy. Jill and Ty had worn the plumage of male and female Least Terns, and she still wore hers. There were no two sets of wings alike in that flock. We were ninety birds of ninety species, all gathered as if the ancient roles of predator and prey had been set aside for a larger cause. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
A glum Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
“It’s over,” McLeve said. “We’ve been given three months to phase out and go home. Us, Moonbase, the whole space operation. They’ll try to keep some of the near-Earth operations going a while longer, but we’re to shut down.”
Nobody said anything at first. We’d been expecting it, those of us who’d had time to follow news from Earth. Now it was here, and nobody was ready. I thought about it: back to high gravity again. Painful.
And Jill. Her dream was being shot down. Ty died for nothing. Then I remembered McLeve. He wasn’t going anywhere. Any gravity at all was a death sentence.
And I hated Jack Halfey for the grin he was hiding. There had been a long piece in the latest newscast about the roundup of the Mafia lords; grand juries working overtime, and the District of Columbia jail filled, no bail to be granted. It was safe for Jack down there, and now he could go home early.
“They can’t do this to us!” Jill wailed. A leftover Fromate reflex, I guess. “We’ll—” Go on strike? Bomb something? She looked around at our faces, and when I followed the look I stopped with Dot Hoffman. The potato face was withered in anguish, the potato eyes were crying. What was there for Dot on Earth?
“What a downer,” she said.
I almost laughed out loud, the old word was so inadequate. Then McLeve spoke in rage. “Downers. Yes. Nine billion downers sitting on their fat arses while their children’s future slides into the muck. Downers is what they are.”
Now you know. McLeve the wordsmith invented that word, on that day.
My own feelings were mixed. Would the money stashed in Swiss francs be paid if we left early, even though we had to leave? Probably, and it was not a small amount; but how long would it last? There was no job waiting for me…but certainly I had the reputation I’d set out for. I shouldn’t have much trouble getting a job.
But I like to finish what I start. The Shack was that close to being self-sufficient. We had the solar power grids working. We even had the ion engines mounted all over the grid to keep it stable. We didn’t have the microwave system to beam the power back to Earth, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to put in…except that Earth had no antennae to receive the power. They hadn’t even started reconstruction. The permit hearings were tied up in lawsuits.
No. The Shack was dead. And if our dollars were worthless, there were things that weren’t. Skilled labor couldn’t be worthless. I would get my francs, and some of my dollar salary had been put into gold. I wouldn’t be broke. And—the clincher—there were women on Earth.
McLeve let us talk a while. When the babble died down and he found a quiet lull, he said, very carefully, “Of course, we have a chance to keep the station going.”
Everyone talked at once. Jill’s voice came through loudest. “How?”
“The Shack was designed to be a self-sufficient environment,” McLeve said. “It’s not quite that yet, but what do we need?”
“Air,” someone shouted.
“Water,” cried another.
I said, “Shielding. It would help to have enough mass to get us through a big solar flare. If they’re shutting down Moonbase we’ll never have it.”
Jill’s voice carried like a microphone. “Rocks? Is that all we need? Ice and rocks? We’d have both in the asteroid belt.” It was a put-up job. She and McLeve must have rehearsed it.
I laughed. “The Belt is two hundred million miles away. We don’t have ships that will go that far, let alone cargo…ships…” And then I saw what they had in mind.
“Only one ship,” McLeve said. “The Shack itself. We can move it out into the Belt.”
“How long?” Dot demanded. Hope momentarily made her beautiful.
“Three years,” McLeve said. He looked thoughtful. “Well, not quite that long.”
“We can’t live three years,” I shouted. I turned to Jill, trusting idiot that I was then. “The air system can’t keep us alive that long, can it? Not enough chemicals—”
“But we can do it!” she shouted. “It won’t be easy, but the farm is growing now. We have enough plants to make up for the lack of chemical air purification. We can recycle everything. We’ve got the raw sunlight of space. Even out in the asteroids that will be enough. We can do it.”
“Can’t hurt to make a few plans,” McLeve said.
It couldn’t help either, thought I; but I couldn’t say it, not to Dot and Jill.
These four were the final architects of The Plan: Admiral McLeve, Jill Plauger, Dot Hoffman, and Jack Halfey.
At first the most important was Dot. Moving something as large as the Shack, with inadequate engines, a house in space never designed as a ship; that was bad enough. Moving it farther than any manned ship, no matter the design, should have been impossible.
But behind that potato face was a brain tuned to mathematics. She could solve any abstract problem. She knew how to ask questions; and her rapport with computers was a thing to envy.
Personal problems stopped her cold. Because McLeve was one of the few men she could see as harmless, she could open up to him. He had told me sometime before we lost Ty, “Dot tried sex once and didn’t like it.” I think he regretted saying even that much. Secrets were sacred to him. But for whatever reason, Dot couldn’t relate to people; and that left all her energy for work.
Dot didn’t talk to women either, through fear or envy or some other reason I never knew. But she did talk to Jill. They were fanatical in the same way. It wasn’t hard to understand Dot’s enthusiasm for The Plan.
McLeve had no choices at all. Without the Shack he was a dead man.
Jack was in the Big Four because he was needed. Without his skills there would be no chance at all. So he was dragged into it, and we watched it happen.
The day McLeve suggested going to the asteroids, Jack Halfey was thoroughly amused, and showed his mirth to all. For the next week he was not amused by anything whatever. He was a walking temper tantrum. So was Jill. I expect he tried to convince her that with sufficient wealth, exile on Earth could be tolerable. Now he wasn’t sleeping, and we all suffered.
Of course our miseries, including Jack’s, were only temporary. We were all going home. All of us.
Thus we followed the downer news closely, and thus was there a long line at the communications room. Everyone was trying to find an Earthside job. It hardly mattered. There was plenty of power for communications. It doesn’t take much juice to close down a colony.
We had no paper, so the news was flashed onto a TV for the edification of those waiting to use the transmitter. I was waiting for word from Inco: they had jobs at their new smelter in Guatemala. Not the world’s best location, but I was told it was a tropical paradise, and the quetzal was worth at least as much as the dollar.
I don’t know who Jack was expecting to hear from. He looked like a man with a permanent hangover, except that he wasn’t so cheerful.
The news, for a change, wasn’t all bad. Something for everyone. The United States had issued a new currency, called “marks” (it turns out there were marks in the US during revolutionary times); they were backed by miniscule amounts of gold.
Not everyone was poor. Technology proceeded apace. Texas Instruments announced a new pocket computer, a million bits of memory and fully programmable, for twice what a calculator cost. Firestone Diamonds—which had been manufacturing flawless blue-white diamonds in a laboratory for the past year, and which actually was owned by a man named Firestone—had apparently swamped the engagement ring market, and was now making chandeliers. A diamond chandelier would cost half a year’s salary, of course, but that was expected to go down.
The “alleged Mafia chieftains” now held without bail awaiting trial numbered in the thousands. I was surprised: I hadn’t thought it would go that far. When the dollar went worthless, apparently Mafia bribe money went worthless too. Maybe I’m too cynical. Maybe there was an epidemic of righteous wrath in government.
Evidently someone thought so, because a bond issue was approved in California, and people were beginning to pay their taxes again.
Something for everyone. I thought the Mafia item would cheer Jack up, but he was sitting there staring at the screen as if he hadn’t seen a thing and didn’t give a damn anyway. My call was announced and I went in to talk to Inco. When I came out Jack had left, not even waiting for his own call. Lack of sleep can do terrible things to a man.
I wasn’t surprised when Jack had a long talk with McLeve, nor when Jill moved back in with him. Jack would promise anything, and Jill would believe anything favorable to her mad scheme.
The next day Jack’s smile was back, and if I thought it was a bit cynical, what could I do? Tell Jill? She wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
They unveiled The Plan a week later. I was invited to McLeve’s house to hear all about it.
Jack was there spouting enthusiasm. “Two problems,” he told us. “First, keeping us alive during the trip. That’s more Jill’s department, but what’s the problem? The Shack was designed to last centuries. Second problem is getting out there. We’ve got that figured out.”
