Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

When men came the land was as barren as a tabletop.

Doc and Elise were among the last to leave the ship. He took his wife’s hand and walked down the ramp, eager to feel alien loam between his toes. He kept his shoes on. They’d have to make the loam first.

The other colonists were exceptionally silent, as if each were afraid to speak. Not surprising, Doc thought. The first words spoken on Ridgeback would become history.

The robot probes had found five habitable worlds besides Ridgeback in Earth’s neighborhood. Two held life in more or less primitive stages, but Ridgeback was perfect. There was one-celled life in Ridgeback’s seas, enough to give the planet an oxygenating atmosphere; and no life at all on land. They would start with a clean slate.

So the biologists had chosen what they believed was a representative and balanced ecology. A world’s life was stored in the cargo hold now, in frozen fertilized eggs and stored seeds and bacterial cultures, ready to go to work.

Doc looked out over his new home, the faint seabreeze stinging his eyes. He had known Ridgeback would be barren, but he had not expected the feel of a barren world to move him.

The sky was bright blue, clouds shrouding Tau Ceti, a sun wider and softer than the sun of Earth. The ocean was a deeper blue, flat and calm. There was no dirt. There was dust and sand and rock, but nothing a farming man would call dirt. There were no birds, no insects. The only sound was that of sand and small dust-devils dancing in the wind, a low moan almost below the threshold of human hearing.

Doc remembered his college geology class’s fieldtrip to the Moon. Ridgeback wasn’t dead as Luna was dead. It was more like his uncle’s face, after the embalmers got through with him. It looked alive, but it wasn’t.

Jase, the eldest of them and the colony leader, raised his hand and waited. When all eyes were on him he crinkled his eyes happily, saving his biggest smile for his sister Cynnie, who was training a holotape camera on him. “We’re here, people,” his voice boomed in the dead world’s silence. “It’s good, and it’s ours. Let’s make the most of it.”

There was a ragged cheer and the colonists surged toward the cargo door of the landing craft. The lander was a flattish dome now, its heat shield burned almost through, its Dumbo-style atomic motor buried in dust. It had served its purpose and would never move again. The great door dropped and became a ramp. Crates and machinery began to emerge on little flatbed robot trucks.

Elise put her arm around her husband’s waist and hugged him. She murmured, “It’s so empty.”

“So far.” Doc unrolled a package of birth control pills, and felt her flinch.

“Two years before we can have children.”

Did she mean it as a question? “Right,” he said. They had talked it through too often, in couples and in groups, in training and aboard ship. “At least until Jill gets the ecology going.”

“Uh huh.” An impatient noise.

Doc wondered if she believed it. At twenty-four, tall and wiry and with seven years of intensive training behind him, he felt competent to handle most emergencies. But children, and babies in particular, were a problem he could postpone.

He had interned for a year at Detroit Memorial, but most of his schooling related directly to General Colonization. His medical experience was no better than Elise’s, his knowledge not far superior to that of a 20th century GP. Like his shipmates, Doc was primarily a trained crewman and colonist. His courses in world settling—“funny chemistry,” water purification, basic mine engineering, exotic factor recognition, etc.—were largely guesswork. There were no interstellar colonies, not yet.

And bearing children would be an act of faith, a taking possession of the land. Some had fought the delay bitterly. The starship would have been smelling of babies shortly after takeoff if they’d had their way.

He offered Elise a pill. “Bacteria and earthworms come first. Men last,” he said. “We’re too high on the chain. We can’t overload the ecology—”

“Uh huh.”

“—before we’ve even got one. And look—”

She took a six-month birth control pill and swallowed it.

So Doc didn’t say: suppose it doesn’t work out? Suppose we have to go home? He passed out the pills and watched the women take them, crossing names off a list in his head.

The little robot trucks were all over the place now. Their flat beds were endless belts, and they followed a limited repertoire of voiced orders. They had the lander half unloaded already. When Doc had finished his pill pushing he went to work beside Elise, unloading crates. His thirty patients, including himself, were sickeningly healthy. As an unemployed doctor he’d have to do honest work until someone got ill.

He was wrong, of course. Doc had plenty of employment. His patients were doing manual labor in 1.07 gravities. They’d gained an average of ten pounds the moment the landing craft touched down. It threw their coordination and balance off, causing them to strain muscles and gash themselves.

One of the robot trucks ran over Chris’ foot. Chris didn’t wince or curse as Doc manipulated the bones, but his teeth ground silently together.

“All done here, Chris.” Doc smiled. The meteorologist looked at him bleakly from behind wire-rimmed glasses, eyes blinking without emotion. “Hey, you’re a better man than I am. If I had a wound like that, I’d scream my head off—”

Something only vaguely like a smile crossed Chris’ lips. “Thanks, Doc,” he said, and limped out.

Remarkable control, Doc mused. But then again, that’s Chris.

A week after landing, Ridgeback’s nineteen-hour day caught up with them. Disrupted body rhythms are no joke; adding poor sleep to the weight adjustment led to chronic fatigue. Doc recognized the signs quickly.

“I’m surprised that it took this long,” he said to Elise as she tossed, sleepless.

“Why couldn’t we have done our adjusting on ship?” she mumbled, opening a bleary eye.

“There’s more to it than just periods