Limits (34 page)

IF YOU CROSS THIS FENCE YOU WILL DIE

Granted, there will be people willing to cross the fence. Think of it as evolution in action. Average human intelligence goes up by a fraction of a percent.

4) Drop the radioactive wastes, in canisters, into the seabed folds where the continental plates are sliding under each other. The radioactives would
disappear back into the magma from which they came.

Each of these solutions gets rid of the stuff; but at some expense, and no profit. What the world needs now is another genius. We need a way to turn radioactive wastes into wealth.

And I believe I know the way.

Directly.
Make coins out of it.

Radioactive money has certain obvious advantages.

A healthy economy depends on money circulating
fast
. Make it radi
o
active and it will certainly circulate.

Verifying the authenticity of money would become easy. Geiger cou
n
ters, like pocket calculators before them, would become both tiny and cheap due to mass production. You would hear their rapid clicking at every ticket window. A particle accelerator is too expensive for a counterfeiter; cou
n
terfeiting would become a lost art.

The economy would be boosted in a number of ways. Lead would b
e
come extremely valuable. Even the collection plates in a church would have to be made of lead (or gold). Bank vaults would have to be lead lined, and the coins separated by dampers. Styles of clothing would be affected. Every purse, and one pocket in every pair of pants, would need to be shielded in lead. Even so, the concept of “money burning a hole in your pocket” would take on new meaning.

Gold would still be the mark of wealth. Gold blocks radiation as easily as lead. It would be used to shield the wealthy from their money.

The profession of tax collector would carry its own, well deserved pe
n
alty. So would certain other professions. An Arab oil sheik might still grow obscenely rich, but at least we could count on his spending it as fast as it comes in, lest it go up in a fireball. A crooked politician would have to take bribes by credit card, making it easier to convict him. A bank robber would be conspicuous, staggering up to the teller’s window in his heavy lead-shielding clothing. The successful pickpocket would also stand out in a crowd. A thick lead-lined glove would be a dead giveaway; but without it, he could be identified by his sickly, faintly glowing hands. Society might even have to revive an ancient practice, amputating the felon’s hand as a ther
a
peutic measure, before it kills him.

Foreign aid could be delivered by ICBM.

Is this just another crazy utopian scheme? Or could the American people
be brought to accept the radioactive standard as money? Perhaps we could. It’s got to be better than watching green paper approach its intrinsic value. The cost of making and printing a dollar bill, which used to be one and a half cents, is rising inexorably toward one dollar.
(If only we could count on its stopping there!
But it costs the same to print a twenty…)

At least the radioactive money would have intrinsic value. What we have been calling “nuclear waste,” our descendants may well refer to as “fuel.” It is dangerous precisely because it undergoes fission…because it delivers power. Unfortunately, the stuff
doesn’t
last “thousands of years.” In six hundred years, the expended fuel is no more radioactive than the ore it was mined from.

Dropping radioactives into the sea is wasteful. We can ensure that they will still be around when the Earth’s oil and coal and plutonium have been used up, by turning them into money, now.

A lot of what comes out of Xenobiology these days is classified, and it
doesn’t
come out. The Graduate Studies Complex is in the Mojave Desert. It makes security easier.

Sireen Burke’s smile and honest blue retina prints and the microcircuitry in her badge got her past the gate. I was ordered out of the car. A soldier offered me coffee and a bench in the shade of the guard post. Another searched my luggage.

He found a canteen, a sizable hunting knife in a locking sheath, and a microwave beamer. He became coldly polite. He didn’t thaw much when I said that he could hold them for awhile.

I waited.

Presently Sireen came back for me. “I got you an interview with Dr. McPhee,” she told me on the way up the drive. “Now it’s your baby. He’ll listen as long as you can keep his interest.”

Graduate Studies looked like soap bubbles: foamcrete sprayed over i
n
flation frames. There was little of military flavor inside. More like a museum. The reception room was gigantic, with a variety of chairs and couches and swings and resting pits for aliens and humans: designs borrowed from the Draco Tavern without my permission.

The corridors were roomy too. Three chirpsithra passed us, eleven feet tall and walking comfortably upright. One may have known me, because she nodded. A dark glass sphere rolled through, nearly filling the corridor, and we had to step into what looked like a classroom to let it pass.

McPhee’s office was closet-sized. He certainly didn’t interview aliens here, at least not large aliens. Yet he was a mountainous man, six feet four and barrel-shaped and covered with black hair: shaggy brows, full beard,
a
black mat showing through the V of his blouse. He extended a huge hand across the small desk and said, “Rick Schumann? You’re a long way from Siberia.”

“I came for advice,” I said, and then I recognized him.
“B-beam McPhee?”

“Walter, but yes.”

The Beta Beam satellite had never been used in war; but when I was seven years old, the Pentagon had arranged a demonstration. They’d turned it loose on a Perseid meteor shower. Lines of light had filled the sky one summer night, a glorious display, the first time I’d ever been allowed up past midnight. The Beta Beam had shot down over a thousand rocks.

Newscasters had named Walter McPhee for the Beta Beam when he played offensive guard for Washburn University.

B-beam was twenty-two years older, and bigger than life, since I’d last seen him on a television set. There were scars around his right eye, and scarring distorted the lay of his beard. “I was at Washburn on an athletic scholarship,” he told me. “I switched to Xeno when the first chirpsithra ships landed.
Got my doctorate six years ago.
And I’ve never been in the Draco Tavern because it would have felt too much like goofing off, but I’ve started to wonder if that isn’t a mistake. You get everything in there, don’t you?”

I said it proudly. “Everything that lands on Earth visits the Draco Ta
v
ern.”

“Folk too?”

“Yes. Not often. Four times in fifteen years. The first time, I thought they’d want to talk. After all, they came a long way—”

He shook his head vigorously, “They’d rather associate with other ca
r
nivores. I’ve talked with them, but it’s damn clear they’re not here to have fun. Talking to local study groups is a guest-host obligation. What do you know about them?”

“Just what I see.
They come in groups, four to six. They’ll talk to glig, and of course they get along with chirpsithra. Everything does. This latest group was thin as opposed to skeletal, though I’ve seen both—”

“They’re skeletal just before they eat. They don’t associate with aliens then, because it turns them mean. They only eat every six days or so, and of course they’re hungry when they hunt.”

“You’ve seen hunts?”

“I’ll show you films. Go on.”

Better than I’d hoped.
“I need to see those films. I’ve been invited on a hunt.”

“Sireen told me.”

I said, “This is my slack season. Two of the big interstellar ships took off Wednesday, and we don’t expect another for a couple of weeks. Last night there were no aliens at all until—”

“This all happened last night?”

“Yeah.
Maybe twenty hours ago. I told Sireen and Gail to go home, but they stayed anyway. The girls are grad students in Xeno, of course. Working in a bar that caters to alien species isn’t a job for your average waitress. They stayed and talked with some other Xenos.”

“We didn’t hear what happened, but we saw it,” Sireen said. “Five Folk came in.”

“Anything special about them?”

She said, “They came in on all fours, with their heads tilted up to see. One alpha-male, three females and a beta-male, I think. The beta had a wound along its left side, growing back. They were wearing the usual: translators built into earmuffs, and socks, with slits for the fingers on the forefeet. Their ears were closed tight against the background noise. They didn’t try to talk till they’d reached a table and turned on the sound baffle.”

I can’t tell the Folk apart. They look a little like Siberian elkhounds, if you don’t mind the head. The head is big. The eyes are below the jawline, and face forward. There’s a nostril on top that closes tight or opens like a trumpet. They weigh about a hundred pounds. Their fingers are above the callus, and they curl up out of the way. Their fur is black, sleek, with white markings in curly lines. We can’t say their word for themselves; their voices are too high and too soft. We call them the Folk because their translators do.

I said, “They stood up and pulled themselves onto ottomans. I went to take their orders. They were talking in nearly supersonic squeaks, with their translators turned off. You had to strain to hear anything. One turned on his translator and ordered five glasses of milk, and a drink for myself if I would join them.”

“Any idea why?”

“I was the closest thing to a meat eater?”

“Maybe.
And maybe the local alpha-male thought they should get to know something about humans as opposed to grad students. Or—” McPhee grinned. “Had you eaten recently?”

“Yeah.
Someone finally built a sushi place near the spaceport. I can’t do
my own
cooking,
I’d go
nuts
if I had to run an alien restaurant too—”

“Raw flesh.
They smelled it on your breath.”

Oh. “I poured their milk and a double Scotch and soda. I don’t usually drink on the premises, but I figured Sireen or Gail could handle anything that came up.

“It was the usual,” I said. “What’s it like to be human. What’s it like to be Folk. Trade items, what are they missing that could improve their life-styles.
Eating habits.
The big one did most of the talking. I remember saying that we have an ancestor who’s supposed to have fed itself by running alongside an antelope while beating it on the head with a club till it fell over. And he told me that his ancestors traveled in clusters—he didn’t say
packs
—and fo
l
lowed herds of plant-eaters to pull down the slow and the sick. Early bi
o
logical engineering, he said.”

McPhee looked worried. “Do the Folk expect you to outrun an ant
e
lope?”

“Oboy!” That was a terrible thought. “No, we talked about that too, how brains and civilization cost you other abilities.
Smell, for humans.
I got a feeling…he wanted to think we’re carnivores unless we run out of live meat. I tried not to disillusion him, but I had to tell him about cooking, that we like the taste, that it kills parasites and softens vegetables and meat—”

“Why?”

“He asked. Jesus, B-beam, you don’t lie to aliens, do you?”

He grinned. “I never have. I’m never sure what they want to hear.”

“Well, I never lie to customers. —And he talked about the hunts, how little they test the Folk’s animal
abilities,
how the whole species is getting soft…I guess he saw how curious I was. He invited me on a hunt. Five days from now.”

“You’ve got a problem anyone in this building would kill for.”

“Ri-ight.
But what the hell do they
expect
of me?”

“Where does it take place? The Folk have an embassy not fifty miles from here.”

“Yeah, and it’s a hunting ground too, and I’ll be out there next Wednesday, getting my own meal. I may have been a little drunk. I did have the wit to ask if I could bring a companion.”

“And?”
B-beam looked like he was about to spring across the desk into my lap.

“He said yes.”

“That’s my Nobel Prize calling,” said B-beam. “Rick Schumann, will you accept me as your, ah, second?”

“Sure.” I didn’t have to think hard. Not only did he have the knowledge; he looked like he could strangle a grizzly bear; which might be what they expected of us.

The Folk had arrived aboard a chirpsithra liner, five years after the first chirp landing.