Free Limits by Larry Niven

tell you he looked frightening, as evil as Dracula himself. Leon Briscoe, the chemist, had painted mathematical formulae all over his, in exquisite medieval ca l ligraphy. Jill and Ty had worn the plumage of male and female Least Terns, and she still wore hers. There were no two sets of wings alike in that flock. We were ninety birds of ninety species, all gathered as if the ancient roles of predator and prey had been set aside for a larger cause. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
    A glum Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
    “It’s over,” McLeve said. “We’ve been given three months to phase out and go home. Us, Moonbase, the whole space operation. They’ll try to keep some of the near-Earth operations going a while longer, but we’re to shut down.”
    Nobody said anything at first. We’d been expecting it, those of us who’d had time to follow news from Earth. Now it was here, and nobody was ready. I thought about it: back to high gravity again. Painful.
    And Jill. Her dream was being shot down. Ty died for nothing. Then I remembered McLeve. He wasn’t going anywhere. Any gravity at all was a death sentence.
    And I hated Jack Halfey for the grin he was hiding. There had been a long piece in the latest newscast about the roundup of the Mafia lords; grand juries working overtime, and the District of Columbia jail filled, no bail to be granted. It was safe for Jack down there, and now he could go home early.
    “They can’t do this to us!” Jill wailed. A leftover Fromate reflex, I guess. “We’ll—” Go on strike? Bomb something? She looked around at our faces, and when I followed the look I stopped with Dot Hoffman. The potato face was withered in anguish, the potato eyes were crying. What was there for Dot on Earth?
    “What a downer,” she said.
    I almost laughed out loud, the old word was so inadequate. Then McLeve spoke in rage. “Downers. Yes. Nine billion downers sitting on their fat arses while their children’s future slides into the muck. Downers is what they are.”
    Now you know. McLeve the wordsmith invented that word, on that day.
    My own feelings were mixed. Would the money stashed in Swiss francs be paid if we left early, even though we had to leave? Probably, and it was not a small amount; but how long would it last? There was no job waiting for me…but certainly I had the reputation I’d set out for. I shouldn’t have much trouble getting a job.
    But I like to finish what I start. The Shack was that close to being self-sufficient. We had the solar power grids working. We even had the ion engines mounted all over the grid to keep it stable. We didn’t have the m i crowave system to beam the power back to Earth, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to put in…except that Earth had no antennae to receive the power. They hadn’t even started reconstruction. The permit hearings were tied up in lawsuits.
    No. The Shack was dead. And if our dollars were worthless, there were things that weren’t. Skilled labor couldn’t be worthless. I would get my francs, and some of my dollar salary had been put into gold. I wouldn’t be broke. And—the clincher—there were women on Earth.
    McLeve let us talk a while. When the babble died down and he found a quiet lull, he said, very carefully, “Of course, we have a chance to keep the station going.”
    Everyone talked at once. Jill’s voice came through loudest. “How?”
    “The Shack was designed to be a self-sufficient environment,” McLeve said. “It’s not quite that yet, but what do we need?”
    “Air,” someone shouted.
    “Water,” cried another.
    I said, “Shielding. It would help to have enough mass to get us through a big solar flare. If they’re shutting down Moonbase we’ll never have it.”
    Jill’s voice carried like a microphone. “Rocks? Is that all we need? Ice and rocks? We’d have both in the asteroid belt.” It was a put-up job. She and McLeve must have rehearsed it.
    I laughed. “The Belt is two hundred million miles away. We don’t have