Limits (8 page)

When Ty was alive everyone flirted with Jill. She pretended not to n
o
tice. You’d have to be crude as well as rude before she’d react.

This time it was different. I may not have been very subtle, but I wasn’t crude; and she told me instantly to get the hell out of her cabin and leave her alone.

I went back to my refinery mirror and brooded.

Ninety years later I know better. Ninety years is too damned late. If I’d noticed nothing else, I should have known that nearly eighty unmarried men aboard would all be willing to comfort the grieving widow, and half of them were only too willing to use the subtle approach: “You’re all that keeps us working so hard.”

I wonder who tried before I
did?
It hardly matters; when my turn came, Jill’s reaction was automatic. Slap him down before it’s too late for him to back away. And when she slapped me down, I stayed slapped, more hurt than mad, but less than willing to try again.

I hadn’t stopped being in love with her. So I worked at being her friend again. It wasn’t easy. Jill was cold inside. When she talked to people it was about business, never
herself
. Her dedication to the Shack, and to all it stood for in her mind, was hardening, ossifying. And she spent a lot of time with Dot Hoffman and Admiral McLeve.

But the word came: another shuttle. Again there were no women. The Senator from Wisconsin had found out how expensive it would be to get us home. Add fifty women and it would be half again as expensive.
So no new personnel.

Still they couldn’t stop the company from sending up a new chief eng
i
neer, and we heard the shuttle was on its way, with a load of seeds, liquid hydrogen, vitamin pills, and Jack Halfey.

I couldn’t believe it. Jack wasn’t the type.

To begin with, while the salary you 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 int
e
grated-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 the
m
selves 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 r
e
construction tied into legal knots that would probably take five years to u
n
tangle.

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 substa
n
tial 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 rep
u
tation 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 here; and a way to make my own alcohol seemed a good investment. And it was. By now I had vac
u
um-distilled vodka made from fermented fruit bars and a mash of strawbe
r
ries from the farm—they weren’t missed; the farm covered a quarter of the inner surface now. My concoction tasted better than it sounds, and it wasn’t hard to talk Jack into a drink, then another.

Presently he was trying to sing the verses to “The Green Hills of Earth.” A mellower man you never saw. I seized my chance.

“So you love the green hills of Earth so much, what are you doing here? Change your mind about Rio?”

Jack shook his head; the vibration ran down his arm and sloshed his drink. “Nope…” Outside a hen cackled, and Jack collapsed in laughter. “Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies…”

Grimly I stuck to the subject. “I thought you were all set with that Tucson arcology.”

“Oh, I was. I was indeed. It was a
beautiful
setup. Lots of pay, and—” He stopped abruptly.

“And other opportunities?”
I was beginning to see the light.

“Wellll…yes.
But you have to see it the way I did. First, it was a great opportunity to make a name for myself. A city in a building!
Residential and business and industry all in the same place, one building to house a qua
r
ter…of a million…people.
And it would have been beautiful, Corky. The plans were magnificent! I was in love with it. Then I got into it, and I saw what was really going on.

“Corky, everyone was stealing that place blind! The first week I went to the chief engineer to report shortages in deliveries and he just looked at me. ‘Stick to your own work, Halfey,’ says he. Chief engineer, the architects, construction bosses, even the catering crew—every one of them was knocking down twenty-five, fifty percent! They were selling the cement right off the boxcars and substituting sand. There wasn’t enough cement in that concrete to hold up the walls.”

“So you took your share.”

“Don’t get holy on me! Dammit, look at it my way. I was willing to play square, but they wouldn’t let me. The place was going to fall down. The weight of the first fifty thousand people would have done it. What I could do was make sure nobody got inside before it happened.” Jack Halfey chortled. “I’m a public benefactor, I am. I sold off the reinforcing rods. The inspectors couldn’t possibly ignore that.”

“Nothing else?”
I asked.

“Wellll, those rods were metal-whisker compote.
Almost as strong as diamond, and almost as expensive.
I didn’t need anything else. But I made sure they’d never open that place to the public. Then I stashed my ill-gotten gains and went underground and waited for something to happen.”

“I never heard much about it. Of course, I wouldn’t, up here.”

“Not many down there heard either. Hush hush while the FBI looked into it. The best buy I ever made in my life was a subscription to the
Wall Street Journal
. Just a paragraph about how the Racket Squad was investigating Mafia involvement in the Tucson arcology. That’s when things fell into place.”

I swung around to refill his glass, carefully. We use great big glasses, and never fill them more than half full. Otherwise they slosh all over the place in the low gravity. I had another myself. It was pretty good vodka, and if I felt it, Jack must be pickled blue. “You mean the building fell in?”

“No, no. I realized why there was so
much
graft.” Jack sounded a
g
grieved. “There was supposed to be graft. I wasn’t supposed to get in on it.”

“Aha.”

“Aha you know it. I finished reading that article on a plane to Canaveral. The FBI couldn’t follow me to Rio, but the Mafia sure could. I’d heard there was
a new opening for chief engineer
for the Construction Shack, and all of a sudden the post looked very, very good;”

He chuckled. “Also, I hear that things are tightening up in the USA.
Big crackdown on organized crime.
Computer-assisted.
Income tax boys and Racket Squad working together.
It shouldn’t be long before all the chiefs who want my arse are in jail. Then I can go back, cash my stash, and head for Rio.”

“Switzerland?”

“Oh, no.
Nothing
so
simple as that. I thought of something else. Say, I better get back to my bunk.” He staggered out before I could stop him. Fortunately it was walking distance from my place to his; if he’d had to fly, he’d probably have ended up roosting with the chickens.

“Bloody hell,”
says
I to myself.

Should I add that I had no intention of robbing Jack? I was just curious: what inflation-proof investment had he thought up? But I didn’t find out for a long time…

A month later the dollar collapsed. Inflation had been a fact of life for so long that it was the goal of every union and civil service organizer to get inflation written into their contracts, thereby increasing inflation. The go
v
ernment printed money faster to compensate: more inflation.
One of those vicious spirals.
Almost suddenly, the dollar was down the drain.

There followed a full-scale taxpayer revolt.

The Administration got the message: they were spending too much money. Aha! Clearly that had to stop. The first things to go were all the projects that wouldn’t pay off during the current President’s term of office. Long-term research was chopped out of existence. Welfare, on the other hand, was increased, and a comprehensive National Health Plan was put into effect, even though they had to pay the doctors and hospitals in promissory notes.