Limits by Larry Niven (tohfa e dulha read online TXT) 📗

become damn sick of Roy and Cynnie poking their cameras into their every activity. That sign above the auditorium toilet: Smile! Roy Is Watching!

He’d tried to tell them. “Don’t you know who it is that builds starships? It’s taxpayers, that’s who! And they’ve got to get something for their money. Sure we’re putting on a show for them. If we don’t, when election time comes around they may ask for a refund.”

Oh, they probably believed him. But the sign was still up.

Roy watched Cynnie interview Jase and Brew in the fields; watched Angie and Chris constructing the animal pens. Jill thawed some of the fertilized goat eggs and a tape was shown of the wriggling embryos.

“At first,” Cynnie reminisced, “Ridgeback was daunting. There was no sound: no crickets, no birdsongs, but no roar of traffic either. By day, the sky is Earthlike enough, but by night the constellations are brighter. It’s impossible to forget how far from home we are—we can’t even see Sol, invisible somewhere in the northern hemisphere. It’s hard to forget that no help of any kind could come in much less than twenty-five years. It would take five years just to refuel the ship. It takes fourteen years to make the trip, although thanks to relativity it was only three years ‘ship time.’

“Yes, we are alone.” The image of Cynnie’s sober face segued to the town hall, a geodesic dome of metal tubing sprayed with plastic. “But it is heartening that we have found, in each other, the makings of a community. We come together for midday meal, discussions, songfests and group worship services.”

Cynnie’s face was calm now, comforting. “We have no crime, and no unemployment. We’re much too busy for marital squabbles or political infighting.” She grinned, and the sparkle of her personality brought pleasure to Roy’s analytical mind. “In fact, I have work to do myself. So, until next year, this is Cynnie Mitchell on Ridgeback, signing off.”

A year and a half after landing, a number of animals were out of incubation with a loss of less than two percent. The mammals drank synthetic milk now, but soon they would be milling in their pens, eating Ridgeback grass and adding their own rich wastes to the cooking compost heaps.

Friday night was community night at the town hall.

From the inside the ribs of the dome were still visible through the sprayed plastic walls, and some of the decorations were less than stylish, but it was a warm place, a friendly, relaxing place where the common bond between the Ridgebackers was strengthened.

Jill, especially, seemed to love the stage, and took every opportunity to mount it, almost vibrating with her infectious energy.

“Everything’s right on schedule,” she said happily. “The fruit flies are breeding like mad.” (Booo!) “And if I hear that again I’m gonna break out the mosquitoes. Gang, there are things we can live without, but we don’t know what they are yet. Chances are we’ll be raising the sharks sooner or later. We’ve been lucky so far. Really lucky.” She cleared her throat dramatically. “And speaking of luck, we have Chris with some good news for the farmers, and bad news for the sunbathers. Chris?”

There was scattered applause, most vigorously from Chris’s tiny wife Angie. He walked to the lectern and adjusted the microphone before speaking.

“We, uh,” he took off his glasses, polishing them on his shirt, then replaced them, smiling nervously. “We’ve been having good weather, people, but there’s a storm front moving over the mountains. I think Greg can postpone the irrigation canals for a week, we’re going to get plenty wet.”

He coughed, and moved the microphone close to his mouth. “June and I are working to program the atmospheric model into the computer. Until we do, weather changes will keep catching us unaware. We have to break down a fairly complex set of thermo and barometric dynamics into something that can be dealt with systematically—wind speed, humidity, vertical motion, friction, pressure gradients, and a lot of other factors still have to be fed in, but we’re making progress. Maybe next year we’ll be able to tell you how to dress for the tenth anniversary of Landing Day.”

There were derisive snorts and laughter, and Chris was applauded back into his seat.

Jase bounded onto the stage and grabbed the mike. “Any more announcements? No? All right, then, we all voted on tonight’s movie, so no groans, please. Lights?”

The auditorium dimmed. He slipped from the stage and the twin beams of the holo projector flickered onto the screen.

It was a war movie, shot in flatfilm but optically reconstructed to simulate depth. Doc found it boring. He slipped out during a barrage of cannon fire. He headed to the lab and found Jill there already, using one of the small microscopes.

“Hi hon,” he called out, flipping on his desk light. “Working late?”

“Well, I’m maybe just a wee bit more bugged than I let on. Just a little.”

“About what?”

“I keep thinking that one day we’ll find out that we left something out of our tame ecology. It’s just a feeling, but it won’t go away.”

“Like going on vacation,” Doc said, deliberately flippant. “You know you forgot something. You’d just rather it was your toothbrush and not your passport.”

She smeared a cover glass over a drop of fluid on a slide and set it to dry. “Yes, it feels like that.”

“Do you really have mosquitoes in storage?”

She twinkled and nodded. “Yep. Hornets too.”

“Just how good is it going? You know how impatient everyone is.”

“No real problems. There sure as hell might have been, but thanks to my superior planning—” she stuck out her tongue at Doc’s grimace. “We’ll have food for ourselves and all the children we can raise. I’ve been getting a little impatient myself, you know? As if there’s a part of me that isn’t functioning at full efficiency.”

Doc laughed. “Then I think you’d better tell Greg.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll announce it tonight and let all the fathers-to-be catch the tidings in one shot.”

“Oh boy.”

“What?”

“No, it