Limits (9 page)

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 ca
l
ligraphy. 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 m
i
crowave 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 wha
t
ever 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 ha
p
pen.

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 Instr
u
ments 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 b
e
lieve 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 ge
t
ting out there. We’ve got that figured out.”

I said, “The hell you do. This isn’t a spaceship, it’s just a habitat. Even if you had a big rocket motor to mount on the axis, you wouldn’t have fuel for it, and if you did, the Shack would break up under the thrust.” I hated him for what he was doing to Jill, and I wondered why McLeve wasn’t aware of it. Maybe he was. The Admiral never let anyone know what he thought.

“So we don’t mount a big rocket motor,” Jack said. “What we’ve got is just what we need: a lot of little motors on the solar panels. We use those and everything else we have. Scooters and tugs, the spare panel engines, and, last but not least, the Moon. We’re going to use the Moon for a gravity sling.”

He had it all diagrammed out in four colors. “We shove the Shack toward the Moon. If we aim just right, we’ll skim close to the lunar surface with everything firing. We’ll leave the Moon with that velocity plus the Moon’s orbital velocity, and out we go.”

“How close?”

He looked to Dot. She pursed her lips. “We’ll clear the peaks by two kilometers.”

“That’s close.”

“More than a mile,” Jack said. “The closer we come the faster we leave.”

“But you just don’t have the thrust!”

“Almost enough,” Jack said. “Now look. We keep the panel thrusters on full blast. That gives us about a quarter percent of
a gravity
, not
nearly
enough to break up the Shack, Corky. And we use the mirrors.” He poked buttons and another diagram swam onto McLeve’s drafting table. “See.”

It showed the Shack with the window mirrors opened all the way for maximum surface area. My smelter mirror was hung out forward. Other mirrors had been added.
“Sails!
Light pressure adds more thrust. Not a lot, but enough to justify carrying their mass. We can get to the Belt.”

“You’re crazy,” I informed them.

“Probably,” McLeve muttered. “But from my viewpoint it looks good.”

“Sure. You’re dead anyway, no offense intended. We’re playing a game here, and it’s getting us nowhere.”

“I’m going.” Jill’s voice was very low and very convincing. It stirred the hair on my neck.