Limits by Larry Niven Page A

high -protein foods. We could grow crops; but that took water, and our r e cycling systems were nowhere near 100% efficient.
    Now the hydrogen shipments had stopped. At a cost of fifty million dollars a flight before the dollar collapsed, the USA would soon stop sending us ships!
    Another thing about those ships. They had stopped bringing us r e placement crew long ago. Jack was the last. Now they were taking people home. If they stopped coming, we’d be marooned.
    A few more years and we could be self-sufficient. A few more years and we could have colonists, people who never intended to go home. They were aboard now, some of them. Jill and Ty, before Ty was killed. Dot Hoffman was permanent. So was McLeve, of course. Of the seventy-five still aboard—we’d lost a few to the shuttles—twenty-five or so, including all the married couples, thought of themselves as colonists.
    The rest of us wanted to go home.
    Canaveral gave us fifty days to wind up our affairs. The shuttles would come up empty but for the pilots, with a kind of sardine-can-with-seats fitted in the hold.
    I could understand why McLeve kept working on The Plan. Earth would kill him. And Jill: Ty’s death had no meaning if the Shack wasn’t finished. Dot? Sure. She was valuable, here.
    But would you believe that I worked myself stupid mounting mirrors and solar panel motors? It wasn’t just for something to do before the shuttle a r rived, either: I had a nightmare living in my mind.
    McLeve was counting on about twenty crew: the Big Four, and six of the eight married couples, and up to half a dozen additional men, all held by their faith in The Plan.
    The history books have one thing right. The Plan was Jack Halfey’s. Sure, Jill and McLeve and Dot worked on it, but without him it couldn’t be brought off. Half of The Plan was no more than a series of contingency o p erations, half-finished schemes that relied on Halfey’s ingenuity to work. McLeve and Halfey were the only people aboard who really knew the Shack—knew all its parts and vulnerabilities, what might go wrong and how to fix it; and McLeve couldn’t do much physical work. He wouldn’t be ou t side working when something buckled under the stress.
    And there would be stress. A hundredth of a gravity doesn’t sound heavy, but much of our solar panel area and all our mirrors were flimsy as tissue p a per.
    Without Halfey it wouldn’t, couldn’t work. When Halfey announced that he was going home on that final shuttle, the rest would quit too. They’d beg the downers for one more shuttle, and they’d get it, of course, and they’d hold the Shack until it came.
    But McLeve couldn’t quit, and Dot wouldn’t, and I just couldn’t be sure about Jill. If Halfey told her he wasn’t really going, would she see reason? The son of a bitch was trading her life for a couple of hours sleep. When Skylark broke from orbit, would she be aboard? She and Dot and the A d miral, all alone in that vast landscaped bubble with a growing horde of chickens, going out to the asteroids to die. The life support system might last a long time with only three humans to support: they might live for years.
    So I worked. When they finally died, it wouldn’t be because Cornelius Riggs bobbled a weld.
    The first shuttle came and picked up all nonessential personnel. They’d land at Moonbase, which was the final staging area for taking everyone home. If The Plan went off as McLeve expected, many of them would be staying on the Moon, but they didn’t have to decide that yet.
    I was classed as essential, though I’d made my intentions clear. The Plan needed me: not so much on the trip out, but when they reached the Belt. They’d have to do a lot of mining and refining, assuming they could find the right rock to mine and refine.
    I let them talk me into waiting for the last shuttle. I wouldn’t have stayed if I hadn’t known Halfey’s intentions, and I confess to a squirmy feeling in my guts when I watched that