Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

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.

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