Limits by Larry Niven Page A

on got sliced, and our future budgets were completely in doubt.
    Next, the administration tried to bail itself out of the tax revolt by ru n ning 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 we kept track of time by days and weeks; but our work schedules 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 smelter 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 to the other side.
    The pistol ran out of gas. That left Ty floating straight toward the focus of the mirror.
    He shouted into his helmet radio, and Jill frantically hauled in slack, trying to get a purchase on him. I made a quick calculation and knew I would never reach him in time; if I tried I’d likely end up in the focus myself. I n stead 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 book opened the burial service with the