Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Spirals

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SPIRALS

by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

There are always people who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone won’t

take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey.

Yes, I knew Jack Halfey. You may not remember my name. But in the main airlock of

industrial Station One there’s an inscribed block of industrial diamond, and my name is sixth

down: Cornelius L. Riggs, Metallurgist. And you might have seen my face at the funeral.

You mast remember the funeral. All across the solar system work stopped while Jack Halfey

took his final trek into the sun. He wanted it that way, and no spacer was going to refuse Jack

Halfey’s last request, no matter how expensive it might be. Even the downers got in the act. They

didn’t help pay the cost, but they spent hundreds of millions on sending reporters and cameras to

the Moon..

That funeral damned near killed me. The kids who took me to the Moon weren’t supposed to

let the ship take more than half a gravity. My bones are over a hundred years old, and they’re

fragile. For that young squirt of a pilot the landing may have been smooth, but she hit a full gee

for a second there, and I thought my time had come.

I had to go, of course. The records say I was Jack’s best friend, the man who’d saved his

life, and being one of the last survivors of the Great Trek makes me somebody special. Noth ing

would do but that I push the button to send Jack on his “final spiral into the sun.” to quote a

downer reporter.

I still see TriVee programs about ships “spiraling” into the sun. You’d think seventy

yeals and more after the Great Trek the schools would teach kids something about space.

When I staggered outside in lunar gravity—lighter than the 20% gravity we keep in the

Skylark. just enough to feel the difference—the reporters were all over me. Why, they demanded,

did Jack want to go into the sun? Cremation and scattering of ashes is good enough for most

spacers. It was good enough for Jack’s wife. Some send their ashes back to Earth; some are

scattered into the solar wind, to be flung throughout the universe; some prefer to go back into

the soil of a colony sphere. But why the sun?

I’ve wondered myself. I never was good at reading Jack’s mind. The question that nearly

drove me crazy, and did drive me to murder, was: why did Jack Halfey make the Great Trek in the

first place?

I finally did learn the answer to that one. Be patient.

Probably there will never be another funeral like Jack’s. The Big Push is only a third

finished, and it’s still two hundred miles of the biggest linear accelerator ever built, an

electronicpowered railway crawling across the Earthside face of the Moon. One day we’ll use it to

launch starships. We’ll fire when the Moon is full, to add the Earth’s and Moon’s orbital

velocities to the speed of the starship, and to give the downers a thrill. But we launched Jack

when the Moon was new, with precisely enough velocity to cancel the Earth’s orbital speed of

eighteen miles per second, It would have cost less to send him into interstellar space.

Jack didn’t drop in any spiral. The Earth went on and the coffin stayed behind, then it

started to fall into the Sun. It fell ninety-three million miles just like a falling safe, except

for that peculiar wiggle when he really got into the sun’s magnetic field. Moonbase is going to do

it again with a probe. They want to know more about that wiggle.

The pilot was a lot more careful getting me home, and now I’m back aboard the Skylailc in

a room near the axis where the heart patients stay; and on my desk is this pile of garbage

from a history professor at Harvard who has absolutely proved that we would have had space

industries and space colonies without Jack Halfey. There are no indispensible men.

In the words of a famous American president: Bullshit! We’ve made all the downers so rich

that they can’t remember what it was like back then.

And it was grim. If we hadn’t got space industries established before 2020 we’d never have

been able to afford them at all. Things were that thin. By 2020 AD. there wouldn’t have been any

resources to invest. They’d have all gone into keeping eleven billion downers alive (barely!) and

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anybody who proposed “throwing money into outer space” would have been lynched.

God knows it was that way when Jack Halfey started.

I first met Jack Halfey at UCLA. He was a grad student in architecture, having got his

engineering physics degree from Cal Tech. He’d also been involved in a number of construction

jobs—among them Hale Observatory’s big orbital telescope while he was still an undergrad at Cal

Tech—and he was already famous. Everyone knows he was brilliant, and they’re right, but he had

another secret weapon: he worked his arse off. He had to. Insomnia. Jack couldn’t sleep more than

a couple of hours a night, and to get even that much sleep he had to get laid first.

I know about this because when I met, Jack he was living with my sister. Ruthie told me

that they’d go to bed, and Jack would sleep a couple of hours, and up he’d be, back at work,

because once he woke up there was no point in lying in bed.

On nights when they couldn’t make Out he fltver went to bed at all, and he was pure hell

to live with the next day.

She also told me he was one mercenary son of a bitch. That doesn’t square with the public

image of Jack Halfey, savior of mankind, but it happens to be true, and he never made much of a

secret of it. He wanted to get rich fast. His ambition was to lie around Rio de Janeiro’s beaches

and sample the local wines and women; and he had his life all mapped out so that he’d be able to

retire before he was forty.

I knew him for a couple of months, then he left UCLA to be a department head in the

construction of the big Tucson arcology. There was a tearful scene with Ruthie: she didn’t fit

into Jack’s image for the future, and he wasn’t very gentle about how he told her he was leaving.

He stormed out of her apartment carrying his suitcase while Ruthie and I~ shouted curses at him,

and that was that.

I never expected to see him again.

When I graduated there was this problem: I was a metallurgist, and there were a lot of us.

Metallurgists had been in big demand when I started UCLA, so naturally everybody studied

metallurgy and matCrials science; by the time I graduated it was damned tough getting a job.

The depression didn’t help much either. I graduated right in the middle of it. Runaway

inflation, research chopped to the bone, environmentalists and Only One Earthers and Friends of

Man and the Earth and other such yo-yo’s on the rise; in those days there was a new energy crisis

every couple of years, and when I got my sheepskin we were in the middle of. I think, number 6.

Industry was laying off, not hiring.

There was one job I knew of. A notice on the UCLA careers board. “Metallurgist wanted.

High pay, long hours, high risk. Guaranteed wealthy in ten years if you live through it.”

That doesn’t sound very attractive just now, but in those days it looked better. Better

than welfare, anyway, especially since the welfare offices were having trouble meeting their staff

payrolls, so there wasn’t a lot left over to hand Out to their clients.

So, I sent in an application and found myself one of about a hundred who’d got past the

paperwork screening. The interview was on campus with a standard personnel officer type who seemed

more interested in my sports record than my abilities as a metallurgist. He also liked my

employment history: I’d done summer jobs in heavy steel construction. He wouldn’t

tell me what the job was for.

“Not secret work,” he said. “But we’d as soon not let it out to anyone we’re not seriously

interested in.” He smiled and stood up, indicating the interview was over. “We’ll let you know”

A couple of days later I got a call at the fraternity house.

They wanted me at the Wilshire headquarters of United Space Industries.

I checked around the house. but didn’t get any new information. USI had contracts for a

good bit of space work, including the lunar mines. Maybe that’s it. I thought. I could hope,

anyway.

When I got to USI the receptionist led me into a comfortable room and asked me to sit down

in a big Eames chair. The chair faced an enormous TV screen (flat: TriVee wasn’t common in those

days. Maybe it was before TriVee at all; it’s been a long time, and I don’t remember). She typed

something on an input console, and we waited a few minutes, and the screen came

to life.

It showed an old man floating in mid-air..

The background looked like a spacecraft, which wasn’t surprising. I recognized Admiral

Robert McLeve. He had to be eighty or more, but he didn’t look it.

“Good morning,” he said.

The receptionist left. “Good morning,” I told the screen. There was a faint red light on a

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