"Larry Niven - Limits UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Two hundred and forty thousand miles below us,everything was going to hell.
First, the senior senator from Wisconsin lived long enough to inherit a powerful committee chairmanship, and he'd been against the space industries from the start. Instead of money we got "Golden Fleece" awards. Funds already appropriated for flights we'd counted on got sliced, and our future budgets were completely in doubt.
Next, the administration tried to bail itself out of the tax revolt by running the printing presses. What money we could get appropriated wasn't worth half as much by the time we got it.
Moonbase felt the pinch and cut down even more on the rock they flung out our way.
Ty's answer was to work harder: get as much of the Shack finished as we could, so that we could start sending down power.
"Get it done," he told us nightly. "Get a lot of it finished. Get so much done that even those idiots will see that we're worth it. So much that it'll cost them less to supply us than to bring us home."
He worked himself harder than anyone else, and Jill was right out there with him. The first task was to get the mirrors operating.
We blew them all at once over a couple of months. They came in the shuttle that should have brought our additional crew; it wasn't much of a choice, and we'd have to put off balancing out the sex ratio for another six months.
The mirrors were packages of fabric as thin as the cellophane on a package of cigarettes. We inflated them into great spheres, sprayed foam plastic on the outside for struts, and sprayed silver vapor inside where it would precipitate in a thin layer all over. Then we cut them apart to get spherical mirrors. and sliced a couple of those into wedges to mount behind the windows in the floor of the Shack.
They reflected sunlight in for additional crops. Jill had her crew out planting more wheat to cut down on the supplies we'd need from Earth.
Another of the mirrors was my concern. A hemisphere a quarter of a kilometer across can focus a lot of sunlight onto a small point. Put a rock at that point and it melts, fast. When we got that set up we were all frantically busy smelting iron for construction out of the rocks. Moonbase shIpped up when they could. When Moonbase couldn't fling us anything we dismounted rock we'd placed for shielding, smelted it, and plastered the slag back onto the sphere.
Days got longer and longer. There's no day or night aboard the Shack anyway, of course: open the mirrors and you have sunlight, close them and you don't. Still, habit dies hard, and wekept track of time by days and weeks; but our work schedulcs bore no relation to them. Sometimes we worked the clock around, quitting only when forced to by sheer exhaustion.
We got a shipment from Moonbase, and in the middle of the refining process the mounting struts in the big me1ter mirror got out of alignment. Naturally Ty was out to work on it.
He was inspecting the system by flying around with a reaction pistol. The rule was that no one worked without a safety line; a man who drifted away from the Shack might or might not be rescued, and the rescue itself would Cost time and manpower we didn't have.
Ty's line kept pulling him up short of where he wanted to go, He gave the free end to Jill and told her to pay out a lot of slack. Then he made a jump from the mirror frame. He must have thought he'd use the reaction pistol to shove him off at an angle so that he'd cross over the bowl of the mirror, the other side.
The pistol ran out of gas. That left Ty floating straight toward the focus of the miner.
He shouted into his helmet radio, and Jill franticallyhauled in slack, trying to get a purchase on him. I made a quick calculation and knew I would ever reach him in time; if I tried I'd likely end up in the focus myself. Instead I took a dive across his back path. If I could grab his safety line, the jerk as I pulled up short ought to keep him out of the hottest area, and my reaction pistol would take us back to the edge.
I got the line all right, but it was slack. It had burned through. Ty went right through the hot point. When we recovered his body, metal parts on his suit had melted.

We scattered his ashes inside the sphere. McLeve's navy prayer buok opened the burial service with the words "We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we shall take nothing out." Afterwards I wondered how subtle McLeve had been in his choice of that passage.
We had built this world ourselves, with Ty leading us. We had brought everything into this world, even down to Ty's final gift to us; the ashes which would grow grass in a place no human had ever thought to reach Until now.
For time next month we did without him; and it was as if we had lost half our men. McLeve was a good engineer if a better administrator, but he couldn't go into the high gravity areas, and he couldn't do active construction work. Still, it wasn't engineering talent we lacked. It was Ty's drive.
Jill and Dot and McLeve tried to make up for that. They were more committed to the project than ever.
Two hundred and forty thousand miles down, they were looking for a construction boss. They'd find one, we were sure. We were thebest, and we were paid like the best. There was never a problem with salaries. Salaries were negligible next to the other costs of building the Shack. But the personnel shuttles were delayed, and delayed again, and we were running out of necessities, and the US economy was slipping again.
We got the mirrors arrayed. Jill went heavily into agriculture, and the lunar soil bloomed, seeded with earthworms and bacteria from earthly soil. We smelted more of the rocky crust around the Shack and put it back as slag. We had plans for the metal we extracted, starting with a lab for growingmetal whiskers. There was already a whisker lab in near-Earth orbit, but its output was tiny. The Shack might survive if we could show even the beginnings of a profit-making enterprise.
Jill had another plan: mass production of expensive blologicals, enzymes and various starting organics for ethical drugs.
We had lots of plans. What we didn't have was enough people to do it alL You can only work so many twenty-hour days. We began to make mistakes. Some were costly.
My error didn't cost the Shack. Only myself. I like to think it was due to-Mtigue and nothing more.
I made a try at comforting the grieving widow, after a decent wait of three weeks.
When Ty was alive everyone flirtedwith Jill, She pretended not to notice. 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 tiy 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 Wisconson 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 engineer, and we heard the-shuffle was on its way, with a load of seeds, liquid hydrogen, Vitamin pills, and Jack Halley.
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 moie 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 time details of setting up integrated-cireult manufacture.
But the betterthings looked in space, the worse they looked on Earth.
One of the ways we were going to make space colonies pay for themselves 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 regotith and save them for the solar-cell factory. And it was working.
We had the structure and we were making the cells. Soon уnough 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 reconstruction tied into legal knots that would probably take five years to untangle.
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.