Limits by Larry Niven

it painted on the ceilings of some of the European churches. I couldn’t tell who they were.
    “Wealth comes in spirals too,” Jill was saying in a dreamy voice. I don’t think she’d noticed I wasn’t wearing clothes. “We’ll build bigger ships with the metal we bring home. Next trip we’ll bring back the whole asteroid. One day the downers will be getting all their metal from us. And their whisker compotes, and drugs, and magnets, and, and free-fall alloys. Dare I say it? We’ll own the world!”
    I said, “Yeah.” There were puffball chickens drifting down the sky, as if they’d forgotten how to fly.
    “There won’t be anything we can’t do. Corky, can you see a mass driver wrapped all around the Moon? For launching starships. The ships will go round and round. We’ll put the mag—mag, net, ic levitation plates overhead, to hold the ships down after they’re going too fast to stay down.”
    Halfey said, “What about a hotel on Titan? Excursions into Saturn’s rings. No downers allowed.”
    “We’ll spend our second honeymoon there,” said Jill.
    “Yeah,” I said, before I caught myself.
    Halfey laughed like hell. “No, no, I want to build it!”
    I was feeling drunk and I hadn’t had a drink. Contact high, they call it. I watched those two at the axis as they came together in a tangle of wings, clung together. Objects floated around them, and presently began to spiral outward, fluttering and tumbling. I recognized a pair of man’s pants.
    It made me feel as horny as hell. Two hundred million miles away there was a planet with three billion adult women. Out of that number there must be millions who’d take an astronaut hero to their beds. Especially after I published my best-selling memoirs. I’d never be able to have them all, but it was certainly worth a try. All I had to do was go home.
    Hah. And Thomas Wolfe thought he couldn’t go home again!
    A shoe smacked into a nearby roof, and the whole house bonged . We laughed hysterically. Something else hit almost beside my head: a hen lay on her back in the wheat, stunned and puzzled. The spiral of clothing was dropping away from what now seemed a single creature with four wings. A skinny blue snake wriggled out of the sky and touched down. I held it up, a tangle of blue wool. “My God!” I cried. “It’s Dot!”
    Jill rolled over and stared. Jack was kicking his heels in the grass, hel p less with laughter. I shook my head; I was still dizzy. “What have you all been drinking? Not that Tang mixture again!”
    Jill said, “Drinking?”
    “Sure, the whole colony’s drunk as lords,” I said. “Hey …black wings…is that McLeve up there?”
    Jill leapt to her feet. “Oh my God,” she screamed. “The air!”
    Jack bounded up and grabbed her arm. “What’s happened?”
    She tried to pull away. “Let me go! It’s the air system. It’s putting out alcohols. Not just ethanol, either. We’re all drunk and hypoxic. Let me go!”
    “One moment.” Jack was fighting it and losing. In a moment he’d co l lapse in silliness again. “You knew it was going to happen,” he said. His voice was full of accusation.
    “Yes,” Jill shouted. “Now will you let me go?”
    “How did you know?”
    “I knew before we started,” Jill said. “Recycling isn’t efficient enough. We need fresh water. Tons of fresh water.”
    “If there’s no ice on that rock ahead—”
    “Then we probably won’t get to another rock,” Jill said. “ Now will you let me go work on the system?”
    “Get out of here, you bitch,” Jack yelled. He pushed her away and fell on his face.
    It was scary. But there was also the alcohol. Fear and anger and ethanol and higher ketones and God knows what else fought it out in my brain. Fear lost.
    “She’s kept it going with Kleenex and bubble gum,” I shouted. “And you believed her. When she told you it’d last three years. You believed.” I whooped at the joke.
    “Oh, shut up,” Jack shouted.
    “We’ve