Limits (6 page)

The depression didn’t help much either. I graduated right in the middle of it. Runaway inflation, research chopped to the bone, environmentalists and Only One Earthers and Friends of Man and the Earth and other such yo-yo’s on the rise; in those days there was a new energy crisis every couple of years, and when I got my sheepskin we were in the middle of, I think, number 6. Industry was
laying
off, not hiring.

There was one job I knew of. A notice on the UCLA careers board. “Metallurgist wanted.
High pay, long hours, high risk.
Guaranteed wealthy in
ten years if you live through it.”

That doesn’t sound very attractive just now, but in those days it looked better. Better than welfare, anyway, especially since the welfare offices were having trouble meeting their staff payrolls, so there wasn’t a lot left over to hand out to their clients.

So, I sent in an application and found myself one of about a hundred who’d got past the paperwork screening. The interview was on campus with a standard personnel officer type who seemed more interested in my sports record than my abilities as a metallurgist. He also liked my employment history: I’d done summer jobs in heavy steel construction. He wouldn’t tell me what the job was for.

“Not secret work,” he said. “But we’d as soon not let it out to anyone we’re not seriously interested in.” He smiled and stood up, indicating the interview was over. “We’ll let you know.”

A couple of days later I got a call at the fraternity house. They wanted me at the Wilshire headquarters of United Space Industries.

I checked around the house but didn’t get any new information. USI had contracts for a good bit of space work, including the lunar mines. Maybe that’s it, I thought. I could hope, anyway.

When I got to USI the receptionist led me into a comfortable room and asked me to sit down in a big Eames chair. The chair faced an enormous TV screen (flat: TriVee wasn’t common in those days. Maybe it was before TriVee at all; it’s been a long time, and I don’t remember). She typed something on an input console, and we waited a few minutes, and the screen came to life.

It showed an old man floating in mid-air.

The background looked like a spacecraft, which wasn’t surprising. I recognized Admiral Robert McLeve. He had to be eighty or more, but he didn’t look it.

“Good morning,” he said.

The receptionist left. “Good morning,” I told the screen. There was a faint red light on a lens by the screen, and I assumed he could see me as well as I could see him. “I’d kind of hoped for the Moon. I didn’t expect the O’Neill colony,” I added.

It took a while before he reacted, confirming my guess: a second and a half each way for the message, and the way he was floating meant zero
gravity. I couldn’t think of anything but the Construction Shack (that’s what they called it then) that fit the description.

“This is where we are,” McLeve said. “The duty tour is five years. High
pay,
and you save it all. Not much to spend money on out here.
Unless you drink.
Good liquor costs like transplant rights on your kidneys. So does bad liquor, because you still have to lift it.”

“Savings don’t mean much,” I said.

“True.” McLeve grimaced at the thought. Inflation was running better than 20%. The politicians said they would have it whipped Real Soon Now, but nobody believed them. “We’ve got arrangements to have three quarters of your money banked in Swiss francs. If you go back early, you lose that part of your pay. We need somebody in your field, part time on the Moon, part time up here in the Shack. From your record I think you’d do. Still want the job?”

I wanted it all right. I was never a nut on the space industries bit—I was never a nut on anything—but it sounded like good work. Exciting, a chance to see something of the solar system (well, of near-Earth space and the Moon; nobody had gone further than that) as well as to save a lot of money. And with that job on my record I’d be in demand when I came home.

As to why me, it was obvious when I thought about it. There were lots of good metallurgists, but not many had been finalists in the Olympic gymna
s
tics team trials. I hadn’t won a place on the team, but I’d sure proved I knew how to handle myself. Add to that the heavy construction work experience and I was a natural. I sweated out the job appointment, but it came through, and pretty soon I was at Canaveral, strapping myself into a Shuttle seat, and having second and third thoughts about the whole thing.

There were five of us. We lifted out from the Cape in the Shuttle,
then
transferred in Earth orbit to a tug that wasn’t a lot bigger than the old Apollo capsules had been. The trip was three days, and crowded. The others were going to Moon base. They refueled my tug in lunar orbit and sent me off alone to the Construction Shack. The ship was guided from the Shack, and it was scary as hell because there wasn’t anything to do but wonder if they knew what they were doing. It took as long to get from the Moon to the Shack as it had to get to the Moon from Earth, which isn’t surprising because it’s the same di
s
tance: the Shack was in one of the stable libration points that make an equ
i
lateral triangle with the Earth and the Moon. Anything put there will stay there forever.

The only viewport was a small thing in the forward end of the tug. Na
t
urally we came in ass-backwards so I didn’t see much.

Today we call it the
Skylark,
and what you see as you approach is a sphere half a kilometer across. It rotates every two minutes, and
there’s
all kinds of junk moored to the axis of rotation.
Mirrors, the laser and power targets, the long thin spine of the mass driver, the ring of agricultural pods, the big telescope; a confusion of equipment.

It wasn’t that way when I first saw it. The sphere was nearly all there was, except for a spiderweb framework to hold the solar power panels. The frame was bigger than the sphere, but it didn’t look very substantial. At first sight the Shack was a pebbled sphere, a golf ball stuck in a spider’s web.

McLeve met me at the airlock. He was long of limb, and startlingly thin, and his face and neck were a maze of wrinkles. But his back was straight, and when he smiled the wrinkles all aligned
themselves
.
Laugh-lines.

Before I left Earth I read up on his history: Annapolis, engineer with the space program (didn’t make astronaut because of his eyes); retired with a bad heart; wrote a lot of science fiction. I’d read most of his novels in high school, and I suppose half the people in the space program were pulled in by his stories.

When his wife died he had another heart attack. The Old Boys network came to the rescue. His classmates wangled an assignment in space for him. He hadn’t been to Earth for seven years, and low gravity was all that kept him alive. He didn’t even dare go to the Moon. A reporter with a flair for myt
h
ological phraseology called him “The Old Man of Space.” It was certain that he’d never go home again, but if he missed Earth he didn’t show it.

“Welcome aboard.” He sounded glad to see me. “What do they call you?” he asked.

A good question.
Cornelius might sound a dignified name to a Roman, but it makes for ribald comments in the USA. “Corky,” I told him. I shrugged, which was a mistake: we were at the center of the sphere, and there wasn’t any gravity at all. I drifted free from the grabhandle I’d been clinging to and drifted around the airlock.

After a moment of panic it turned out to be fun. There hadn’t been room for any violent maneuvers in the tug, but the airlock was built to get tugs and
rocket motors inside for repairs; it was big, nine meters across, and I could twirl around in the zero gravity. I flapped my arms and found I could swim.

McLeve was watching with a critical air. He must have liked what he saw because he grinned slightly. “Come on,” he said. He turned in the air and drifted without apparent motion—it looked like levitation. “I’ll show you around.” He led the way out of the airlock into the sphere itself.

We were at the center of rotation. All around, above and below, were fields of dirt, some plowed, some planted with grass and grains.

There were wings attached to hooks at the entrance. McLeve took down a set and began strapping them on. Black bat wings. They made him look like a fallen angel, Milton’s style. He handed me another pair. “Like to fly?” he asked.

I returned the grin.
“Why not?”
I hadn’t the remotest idea of what I was doing, but if I could swim in the air with my hands, I ought to be able to handle wings in no gravity. He helped me strap in, and when I had them he gave some quick instructions.

“Main thing is to stay high,” he said. “The further down the higher the
gravity,
and the tougher it is to control these things.” He launched himself into space, gliding across the center of the sphere. After a moment I followed him.

I was a tiny chick in a vast eggshell. The landscape was wrapped around me: fields and houses, and layout yards of construction gear, and machinery, and vats of algae, and three huge windows opening on blackness. Every direction was down, millions of light years down when a window caught my attention. For a moment that was terrifying. But McLeve held himself in place with tiny motions of his wings, and his eyes were on me. I swallowed my fear and looked.

There were few roads. Mostly the colonists flew with their wings, flew like birds, and if they didn’t need roads, they didn’t need squared-off patterns for the buildings either. The “houses” looked like they’d been dropped at random among the green fields. They were fragile partitions of sheet metal (wood was far more costly than sheet steel here), and they could not have borne their own weight on Earth, let alone stand up to a stiff breeze. They didn’t have to. They existed for privacy alone.

I wondered about the weather. Along the axis of the sphere I could see scores of white puffballs.
Clouds?
I gathered my courage and flapped my
way over to the white patch. It was a flock of hens. Their feet were drawn up, their heads were tucked under their wings, and they roosted on nothing.

“They like it in zero gravity,” McLeve said. “Only thing is, when you’re below them you have to watch out.”

He pointed. A blob of chicken splat had left the flock and moved away from us. It fell in a spiral pattern. Of course the splat was actually going in a straight line—we were the ones who were rotating, and that made the falling stuff look as if it were spiraling to the ground below.

“Automatic fertilizer machine,” I said.

McLeve nodded.

“I wonder you don’t keep them caged,” I said.

“Some people like their sky dotted with fleecy white hens.”

“Oh. Where is everybody?” I asked.

“Most are outside working,” McLeve said. “You’ll meet them at dinner.”

We stayed at the axis, drifting with the air currents, literally floating on air. I knew already why people who came here wanted to stay. I’d never experienced anything like it, soaring like a bird. It wasn’t even like a sail plane: you wore the wings and you flew with them, you didn’t sit in a cockpit and move controls around.

There were lights along part of the axis. The mirrors would take over their job when they were installed; for the moment the lights ran off solar power cells plastered over the outside of the sphere. At the far end of the sphere was an enormous cloud of dust. We didn’t get close to it. I pointed and looked a question.

“Rock grinder,” McLeve said.
“Making soil.
We spread it over the northern end.” He laughed at my frown. “North is the end toward the sun. We get our rocks from the Moon. It’s our radiation shielding. Works just as well if we break it up and spread it around, and that way we can grow crops in it. Later on we’ll get the agricultural compartments built, but there’s always five times as much work as we have people to do it with.”

They’d done pretty well already. There was grass, and millet and wheat for the chickens, and salad greens and other vegetable crops. Streams ran through the fields down to a ring-shaped pond at the equator. There was also a lot of bare soil that had just been put in place and hadn’t been planted. The Shack wasn’t anywhere near finished.

“How thick is that soil?” I asked.

“Not thick enough. I was coming to that. If you hear the flare warnings, get to my house.
North pole.”

I thought that one over. The only way to ward yourself from a solar flare is to put a lot of mass between you and the sun. On Earth that mass is a hundred miles of air. On the Moon they burrow ten meters into the regolith. The Shack had only the rock we could get from the Moon, and Moonbase had problems of its own. When they had the manpower and spare energy they’d throw more rock our way, and we’d plaster it across the outer shell of the Shack, or grind it up and put it inside; but for now there wasn’t enough, and come flare time McLeve was host to an involuntary lawn party.

But what the hell, I thought. It’s beautiful.
Streams rushing in spirals from pole to equator.
Green fields and houses, skies dotted with fleecy white hens; and I was flying as man flies in dreams.