Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

to revive an ancient practice, amputating the felon’s hand as a therapeutic measure, before it kills him.

Foreign aid could be delivered by ICBM.

Is this just another crazy utopian scheme? Or could the American people be brought to accept the radioactive standard as money? Perhaps we could. It’s got to be better than watching green paper approach its intrinsic value. The cost of making and printing a dollar bill, which used to be one and a half cents, is rising inexorably toward one dollar. (If only we could count on its stopping there! But it costs the same to print a twenty…)

At least the radioactive money would have intrinsic value. What we have been calling “nuclear waste,” our descendants may well refer to as “fuel.” It is dangerous precisely because it undergoes fission…because it delivers power. Unfortunately, the stuff doesn’t last “thousands of years.” In six hundred years, the expended fuel is no more radioactive than the ore it was mined from.

Dropping radioactives into the sea is wasteful. We can ensure that they will still be around when the Earth’s oil and coal and plutonium have been used up, by turning them into money, now.

MORE TALES FROM

THE DRACO TAVERN…

TABLE MANNERS

A lot of what comes out of Xenobiology these days is classified, and it doesn’t come out. The Graduate Studies Complex is in the Mojave Desert. It makes security easier.

Sireen Burke’s smile and honest blue retina prints and the microcircuitry in her badge got her past the gate. I was ordered out of the car. A soldier offered me coffee and a bench in the shade of the guard post. Another searched my luggage.

He found a canteen, a sizable hunting knife in a locking sheath, and a microwave beamer. He became coldly polite. He didn’t thaw much when I said that he could hold them for awhile.

I waited.

Presently Sireen came back for me. “I got you an interview with Dr. McPhee,” she told me on the way up the drive. “Now it’s your baby. He’ll listen as long as you can keep his interest.”

Graduate Studies looked like soap bubbles: foamcrete sprayed over inflation frames. There was little of military flavor inside. More like a museum. The reception room was gigantic, with a variety of chairs and couches and swings and resting pits for aliens and humans: designs borrowed from the Draco Tavern without my permission.

The corridors were roomy too. Three chirpsithra passed us, eleven feet tall and walking comfortably upright. One may have known me, because she nodded. A dark glass sphere rolled through, nearly filling the corridor, and we had to step into what looked like a classroom to let it pass.

McPhee’s office was closet-sized. He certainly didn’t interview aliens here, at least not large aliens. Yet he was a mountainous man, six feet four and barrel-shaped and covered with black hair: shaggy brows, full beard, a black mat showing through the V of his blouse. He extended a huge hand across the small desk and said, “Rick Schumann? You’re a long way from Siberia.”

“I came for advice,” I said, and then I recognized him. “B-beam McPhee?”

“Walter, but yes.”

The Beta Beam satellite had never been used in war; but when I was seven years old, the Pentagon had arranged a demonstration. They’d turned it loose on a Perseid meteor shower. Lines of light had filled the sky one summer night, a glorious display, the first time I’d ever been allowed up past midnight. The Beta Beam had shot down over a thousand rocks.

Newscasters had named Walter McPhee for the Beta Beam when he played offensive guard for Washburn University.

B-beam was twenty-two years older, and bigger than life, since I’d last seen him on a television set. There were scars around his right eye, and scarring distorted the lay of his beard. “I was at Washburn on an athletic scholarship,” he told me. “I switched to Xeno when the first chirpsithra ships landed. Got my doctorate six years ago. And I’ve never been in the Draco Tavern because it would have felt too much like goofing off, but I’ve started to wonder if that isn’t a mistake. You get everything in there, don’t you?”

I said it proudly. “Everything that lands on Earth visits the Draco Tavern.”

“Folk too?”

“Yes. Not often. Four times in fifteen years. The first time, I thought they’d want to talk. After all, they came a long way—”

He shook his head vigorously, “They’d rather associate with other carnivores. I’ve talked with them, but it’s damn clear they’re not here to have fun. Talking to local study groups is a guest-host obligation. What do you know about them?”

“Just what I see. They come in groups, four to six. They’ll talk to glig, and of course they get along with chirpsithra. Everything does. This latest group was thin as opposed to skeletal, though I’ve seen both—”

“They’re skeletal just before they eat. They don’t associate with aliens then, because it turns them mean. They only eat every six days or so, and of course they’re hungry when they hunt.”

“You’ve seen hunts?”

“I’ll show you films. Go on.”

Better than I’d hoped. “I need to see those films. I’ve been invited on a hunt.”

“Sireen told me.”

I said, “This is my slack season. Two of the big interstellar ships took off Wednesday, and we don’t expect another for a couple of weeks. Last night there were no aliens at all until—”

“This all happened last night?”

“Yeah. Maybe twenty hours ago. I told Sireen and Gail to go home, but they stayed anyway. The girls are grad students in Xeno, of course. Working in a bar that caters to alien species isn’t a job for your average waitress. They stayed and talked with some other Xenos.”

“We didn’t hear what happened, but we saw it,” Sireen said. “Five Folk came in.”

“Anything special about them?”

She said, “They came in on all fours, with their heads tilted up to see. One alpha-male, three females and a beta-male, I think. The beta had a wound along its left