Limits (11 page)

“True enough—”

“And he was driving all of you nuts, wasn’t he? Until I—helped him sleep.”

“I thought you were in love with him.”

She looked sad. “I like him, but no, I’m not in love with him.” She was standing in the doorway of her quarters. “This isn’t going to work, is it?
The Plan.
Not enough of you will come. We can’t do it, can
we.
”

“No.”
Might as well tell her the truth.
“It never would have worked, and it won’t work now even if all of us aboard come along. Margin’s too thin, Jill. I wish it would, but no.”

“I suppose you’re right. But I’m going to try anyway.”

“You’ll kill yourself.”

She shrugged.
“Why not?
What’s left anyway?” She went back into her room.

I followed. “You’ve got a lot to live for. Think of the baby fur seals you could save. And there’s always me.”

“You?”

“I’ve been in love with you since the first time I saw you.”

She shook her head sadly.
“Poor Corky.
And I treated you just like all the others, back then when—. I wish you’d stay with us.”

“I wish you’d come back to Earth with me. Or even Moonbase. We might make a go of Moonbase. Hang on until things change down there.
New administration.
Maybe they’ll want a space program, and Moonbase would be a good start. I’ll stay at Moonbase if you’ll come.”

“Will you?” She looked puzzled, and scared, and I wanted to take and hold her. “Let’s talk about it. Want a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“I do.” She poured herself something. “Sure you won’t join me?”

“All right.”

She handed me something cold, full of shaved ice. It tasted like Tang.
We began to talk, about life on Earth—or even on Moonbase. She mixed us more drinks, Tang powder and water from a pitcher and vodka and shaved ice. Presently I felt good.
Damned good.

One thing led to another, and I was holding her, kissing her, whispering to her—

She broke free and went over to close and lock her door. As she came back toward me she was unbuttoning the top of her blouse.

And I passed out.

When I woke I didn’t know. Now, ninety years later, I still don’t. For ninety years it has driven me nuts, and now I’ll never know.

All that’s certain is that I woke half dressed, alone in her bed, and her clothes were scattered on the deck. I had a thundering hangover and an u
r
gent thirst. I drank from the water pitcher on her table—

It wasn’t water. It must have been
my own 100 proof vodka
. Next to it
was
a jar of Tang and a bowl that had held shaved ice—and a bottle holding more vodka. She’d been feeding me vodka and Tang and shaved ice.

No wonder I had a hangover worthy of being bronzed as a record.

I went outside. There was something wrong.

The streams weren’t running correctly. They stood at an angle. At first I thought it was me. Then they sloshed.

The Shack was under acceleration.

There were a dozen others screaming for blood outside the operations building. One was a stranger—the shuttle pilot. The door was locked, and Halfey was talking through a loudspeaker.

“Too late,” he was saying. “We don’t have enough thrust to get back to the L-4 point. We’re headed for the Belt, and you might as well get used to the idea. We’re going.”

There was a cheer. Not everyone hated the idea. Eventually those who did understood: Halfey had drained the shuttle fuel and stored it somewhere. No escape that way.

No other shuttles in lunar orbit. Nothing closer than Canaveral, which was days away even if there were anything ready to launch. Nothing was going to match orbits with us.

We were headed for the Moon, and we’d whip around it and go for the
Belt, and that was as inevitable as the tides.

When we understood all that they unlocked the doors.

An hour later the alarms sounded.
“Outside.
Suit up.
Emergency ou
t
side!”
McLeve’s voice announced.

Those already in their suits went for the airlocks. I began half-heartedly putting on mine, in no hurry. I was sure I’d never get my swollen, pulsing head inside the helmet.

Jack Halfey dashed past, suited and ready. He dove for the airlock.

Halfey.
The indispensable man.
With a defective connector for an air intake.

I fumbled with the fasteners. One of the construction people was nearby and I got his help. He couldn’t understand my frantic haste.

“Bastards kidnapped us,” he muttered. “Let them do the frigging work. Not me.”

I didn’t want to argue with him, I just wanted him to hurry.

A strut had given way, and a section of the solar panel was off center. It had to be straightened, and we couldn’t turn off the thrust while we did it. True, our total thrust was tiny, a quarter of a percent of a gravity, hardly enough to notice, but we needed it all.

Because otherwise we’d go out toward the Belt but we wouldn’t get there, and by the time the Shack—Skylark, now—returned inevitably to Earth orbit there’d be no one alive aboard her.

I noticed all the work, but I didn’t help. Someone cursed me, but I went on, looking for Halfey.

I saw him. I dove for him, neglecting safety lines, forgetting everything. I had to get to him before that connector went.

His suit blew open across the middle. As if the fabric had been weakened with, say, acid. Jack screamed and tried to hold himself together.

He had no safety line either. When he let go he came loose from the spiderweb. Skylark pulled away from him, slowly, two and a half centim
e
ters per second; slow but inexorable.

I lit where he’d been, turned, and dove for him. I got him and used my reaction pistol to drive us toward the airlock.

I left it on too long. We were headed fast for the airlock entrance, too fast, we’d hit too hard. I tumbled about to get Jack across my back so that I’d
be between him and the impact. I’d probably break a leg, but without Halfey I might as well have a broken neck and get it over with.

Leon Briscoe, our chemist, had the same idea. He got under us and braced, reaction pistol flaring behind us. We hit in a
menage à trois
,
with me as Lucky Pierre.

Leon cracked an ankle. I ignored him as I threw Halfey into the airlock and slammed it shut, hit the recycle switch. Air hissed in.

Jack had a nosebleed, and his cough sounded bad; but he was breathing. He’d been in vacuum about forty seconds. Fortunately the decompression hadn’t been totally explosive. The intake line to his suit had fractured a half second before the fabric blew…

The Moon grew in the scopes. Grew and kept growing, until it wasn’t a sphere but a circle, and still it grew. There were mountains dead ahead.

“How close?” I demanded.

Dot had her eyes glued to a radar scope. “Not too close.
About a kil
o
meter.”

“A
kilometer
!”
One thousand meters.
“You said two, before.”

“So I forgot the shuttle pilot.” She continued to stare at the scope, then her fingers bashed at the console keyboard. “Make
that
800 meters,” she said absently.

I was past saying anything. I watched the Moon grow and grow. Terror banished the last of my hangover; amazing what adrenalin in massive doses can do.

Jill looked worse than I did. And I didn’t know. Were we lovers?

“Thirty seconds to periastron,” Dot said.

“How close?” McLeve asked.

“Five hundred meters.
Make that four-fifty.”

“Good,” McLeve muttered.
“Closer the better.”

He was right; the nearer we came to the Moon, the more slingshot v
e
locity we’d pick up, and the faster we’d get to the Belt.

“Periastron,” Dot announced.
“Closest approach, four twenty-three and a fraction.”
She looked up in satisfaction. Potato eyes smiled. “We’re on our way.”

On Earth we were heroes. We’d captured the downers’ imaginations.
Intrepid explorers.
Before we were out of range we got a number of offers for book rights, should we happen to survive.

There were even noises about hydrogen shipments to the Moon. Of course there was nothing they could do for us. There weren’t any ships d
e
signed for a three-year trek.

Certainly Skylark wasn’t. But we were trying it.

There were solar flares. We all huddled around McLeve’s house, with as much of our livestock as we could catch stuffed into his bedroom. It took weeks to clean it out properly afterward. We had to re-seed blighted areas and weed out mutated plants after each flare. More of our recycled air was coming from the algae tanks now.

In a time of the quiet sun we swarmed outside and moved all of the mirrors. The sun was too far away now, and the grass was turning brown, until we doubled the sunlight flooding through the windows.

But it seemed we’d reach Ceres. Already our telescopes showed five boulders in orbit around that largest of the asteroids. We’d look at them all, but we wanted the smallest one we could find: the least daunting challenge. If it didn’t have ice somewhere in its makeup, the next one would, or the next.

And then we’d all be working like sled dogs, for our lives.

I was circling round the outside of Skylark, not working, just observing: looking for points with some structural strength, places where I could put stress when the real work began. Win or lose, with or without a cargo, we would have to get home a lot faster than we came. The life support system wouldn’t hold up forever. Something would give out.
Vitamins, water, something in the soil or the algae tanks.
Something.

Our idea was to build a mass driver, a miniature of the machine that had been throwing rocks at us from the Moon. If we found copper in that rock ahead—a pinpoint to the naked eye now, near the tiny battered disk of Ceres—we could make the kilometers of copper wire we’d need. If not, iron would do. We had power from the sun, and dust from the rocks around Ceres, and we’d send that dust down the mass driver at rocket-exhaust speeds. Home in ten months if we found copper.

I went back inside.

The air had an odd smell when I took off my helmet. We were used to it; we never noticed now unless we’d been breathing tanked air. I made a mental
note: mention it to Jill. It was getting stronger.

I had only the helmet off when Jean and Kathy Gaynor came to drag me out. I was clumsy in my pressure suit, and they thought that was hilarious. They danced me around and around, pulled me out into the grass, and began undressing me with the help of a dozen others.

It looked like I’d missed half of a great party. What the hell, Ceres was still a week away. They took my pressure suit off and scattered the comp
o
nents, and I didn’t fight. I was dizzy and had the giggles. They kept going. Presently I was stark naked and grabbing for Kathy, who took to the air b
e
fore I realized she had wings. I came down in a stream and surfaced still giggling.

Jack and Jill were on their backs in the grass, watching the fleecy white hens and turning occasionally to avoid chicken splat. I liked seeing Jill so relaxed for once. She waved, and I bounced over and somersaulted onto my back next to them.

A pair of winged people were
way up near the axis, flapping among the chickens, scaring them into panic. It was like looking into Heaven, as you find it painted on the ceilings of some of the European churches. I couldn’t tell who they were.

“Wealth comes in spirals too,” Jill was saying in a dreamy voice. I don’t think she’d noticed I wasn’t wearing clothes. “We’ll build bigger ships with the metal we bring home. Next trip we’ll bring back the whole asteroid. One day the downers will be getting all their metal from us. And their whisker compotes, and drugs, and magnets, and, and free-fall alloys. Dare I say it? We’ll own the world!”

I said, “Yeah.” There were puffball chickens drifting down the sky, as if they’d forgotten how to fly.

“There won’t be anything we can’t do. Corky, can you see a mass driver wrapped all around the Moon?
For launching starships.
The ships will go round and round. We’ll put the mag—mag, net,
ic
levitation plates overhead, to hold the ships down after they’re going too fast to stay down.”

Halfey said, “What about a hotel on Titan?
Excursions into Saturn’s rings.
No downers allowed.”