Limits by Larry Niven

wool stockings and that shirt because it’s cool in the computer room,” I said.
    “No, she always dresses that way.”
    “Oh.”
    “Only six months, Riggs,” the Admiral said. “Well, maybe a year. You’ll survive.”
    I was thinking I’d damned well have to.
     
    I fell in love during dinner.
    The chief engineer was named Ty Plauger, a long, lean chap with sta r tling blue eyes. The chief ecologist was his wife, Jill. They had been married about a year before they came up, and they’d been aboard the Shack for three, ever since it started up. Neither was a lot older than me, maybe thirty then.
    At my present age the concept of love at first sight seems both trite and incredible, but it was true enough. I suppose I could have named you reasons then, but I don’t feel them now. Take this instead:
    There were ten women aboard out of ninety total . Nine were married, and the tenth was Dot Hoffman. My first impression of her was more than correct. Dot never would be married. Not only was she homely, but she thought she was homelier still. She was terrified of physical contact with men, and the blue wool stockings and blouse buttoned to the neck were the least of her defenses.
    If I had to be in love—and at that age, maybe I did—I could choose among nine married women. Jill was certainly the prettiest of the lot. Pug nose, brown hair chopped off short, green eyes, and a compact muscular shape, very much the shape of a woman. She liked to talk, and I liked to listen.
    She and Ty had stars in their eyes. Their talk was full of what space would do for mankind.
    Jill was an ex-Fromate; she’d been an officer in the Friends of Man and the Earth. But while the Fromates down below were running around sab o taging industries and arcologies and nuclear plants and anything else they didn’t like, Jill went to space. Her heart bled no less than any for the baby fur seals and the three-spined stickleback and all the fish killed by mine tailings, but she’d thought of something to do about it all.
    “We’ll put all the dirty industries into space,” she told me. “Throw the pollution into the solar wind and let it go out to the cometary halo. The Fromates think they can talk everyone into letting Kansas go back to buffalo grass—”
    “You can’t make people want to be poor,” Ty put in.
    “Right! If we want to clean up the Earth and save the wild things, we’ll have to give people a way to get rich without harming the environment. This is it! Someday we’ll send down enough power from space that we can tear down the dams and put the snail darter back where he came from.”
    And more. Jill tended to do most of the talking. I wondered about Ty. He always seemed to have the words that would set her off again.
    And one day, when we were clustered around McLeve’s house with, for a few restful hours, nothing to do, and Jill was well out of earshot flying around and among the chickens in her wonderfully graceful wingstyle, Ty said to me, “I don’t care if we turn the Earth into a park. I like space. I like flying, and I like free fall, and the look of stars with no air to cloud them. But don’t tell Jill.”
     
    I learned fast. With Ty in charge of engineering, McLeve as chief a d ministrator, and Dot Hoffman’s computers to simulate the construction and point up problems before they arose, the project went well. We didn’t get enough mass from the Moon, so that my smelter was always short of raw materials, and Congress didn’t give us enough money. There weren’t enough flights from down below and we were short of personnel and goods from Earth. But we got along.
    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 indu s tries from the start. Instead of money we got “Golden Fleece” awards. Funds already appropriated for flights we’d counted