The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (4 page)

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Oh, I know what you said. Now listen here, Dick
Swenson—"

"I only said," cried Swenson, "that now I
know why Scavengers usually don't marry."

"You shouldn't have either. I'm tired of having every
person in the neighborhood pity me and smirk and ask when you're coming home.
Other people can be mining engineers and administrators and even tunnel borers.
At least tunnel borers' wives have a decent home life and their children don't
grow up like vagabonds. Peter might as well not have a father—"

A thin boy-soprano voice made its way through the door. It
was somewhat more distant, as though it were in another room. "Hey, Mom,
what's a vagabond?"

Dora's voice rose a notch. "Peter! You keep your mind
on your homework."

Swenson said in a low voice, "It's not right to talk
this way in front of the kid. What kind of notions will he get about me?"

"Stay home then and teach him better notions."

Peter's voice called out again. "Hey, Mom, I'm going to
be a Scavenger when I grow up."

Footsteps sounded rapidly. There was a momentary hiatus in
the sounds, then a piercing, "Mom! Hey, Mom! Leggo my ear! What did I
do?" and a snuffling silence.

Long seized the chance. He worked the signal vigorously.

Swenson opened the door, brushing down his hair with both
hands.

"Hello, Ted," he said in a subdued voice. Then
loudly, "Ted's here, Dora. Where's Mario, Ted?"

Long said, "He'll be here in a while."

Dora came bustling out of the next room, a small, dark woman
with a pinched nose, and hair, just beginning to show touches of gray, combed
off the forehead.

"Hello, Ted. Have you eaten?"

"Quite well, thanks. I haven't interrupted you, have
I?"

"Not at all. We finished ages ago. Would you like some
coffee?"

"1 think so." Ted unslung his canteen and offered
it.

"Oh, goodness, that's all right. We've plenty of
water."

"I insist."

"Well, then—"

Back into the kitchen she went. Through the swinging door,
Long caught a glimpse of dishes sitting in Secoterg, the "waterless
cleaner that soaks up and absorbs grease and dirt in a twinkling. One ounce of
water will rinse eight square feet of dish surface clean as clean. Buy
Secoterg. Secoterg just cleans it right, makes your dishes shiny bright, does
away with water waste—"

The tune started whining through his mind and Long crushed
it with speech. He said, "How's Pete?"

"Fine, fine. The kid's in the fourth grade now. You
know I don't get to see him much. Well, sir, when I came back last time, he
looked at me and said . . ."

It went on for a while and wasn't too bad as bright sayings
of bright children as told by dull parents go.

The door signal burped and Mario Rioz came in, frowning and
red.

Swenson stepped to him quickly. "Listen, don't say
anything about shell-snaring. Dora still remembers the time you fingered a
Class A shell out of my territory and she's in one of her moods now."

"Who the hell wants to talk about shells?" Rioz
slung off a fur-lined jacket, threw it over the back of the chair, and sat
down.

Dora came through the swinging door, viewed the newcomer
with a synthetic smile, and said, "Hello, Mario. Coffee for you,
too?"

"Yeah," he said, reaching automatically for his
canteen.

"Just use some more of my water, Dora," said Long
quickly. "He'll owe it to me."

"Yeah," said Rioz.

"What's wrong, Mario?" asked Long.

Rioz said heavily, "Go on. Say you told me so. A year
ago when Hilder made that speech, you told me so. Say it."

Long shrugged.

Rioz said, "They've set up the quota. Fifteen minutes
ago the news came out."

"Well?"

"Fifty thousand tons of water per trip."

"What?" yelled Swenson, burning. "You can't
get off Mars with fifty thousand!"

"That's the figure. It's a deliberate piece of gutting.
No more scavenging."

Dora came out with the coffee and set it down all around.

"What's all this about no more scavenging?" She
sat down very firmly and Swenson looked helpless.

"It seems," said Long, "that they're rationing
us at fifty thousand tons and that means we can't make any more trips."

"Well, what of it?" Dora sipped her coffee and
smiled gaily. "If you want my opinion, it's a good thing. It's time all
you Scavengers found yourselves a nice, steady job here on Mars. I mean it.
It's no life to be running all over space—"

"Please, Dora," said Swenson.

Rioz came close to a snort.

Dora raised her eyebrows. "I'm just giving my
opinions."

Long said, "Please feel free to do so. But I would like
to say something. Fifty thousand is just a detail. We know that Earth—or at
least Hilder's party—wants to make political capital out of a campaign for
water economy, so we're in a bad hole. We've got to get water somehow or
they'll shut us down altogether, right?"

"Well, sure," said Swenson.

"But the question is how, right?"

"If it's only getting water," said Rioz in a
sudden gush of words, "there's only one thing to do and you know it. If
the Grounders won't give us water, we'll take it. The water doesn't belong to
them just because their fathers and grandfathers were too damned sick-yellow
ever to leave their fat planet. Water belongs to people wherever they are.
We're people and the water's ours, too. We have a right to it."

"How do you propose taking it?" asked Long.

"Easy! They've got oceans of water on Earth. They can't
post a guard over every square mile. We can sink down on the night side of the
planet any time we want, fill our shells, then get away. How can they stop
us?"

"In half a dozen ways, Mario. How do you spot shells in
space up to distances of a hundred thousand miles? One thin metal shell in all
that space. How? By radar. Do you think there's no radar on Earth? Do you think
that if Earth ever gets the notion we're engaged in waterlegging, it won't be
simple for them to set up a radar network to spot ships coming in from
space?"

Dora broke in indignantly. "I'll tell you one thing,
Mario Rioz. My husband isn't going to be part of any raid to get water to keep
up his scavenging with."

"It isn't just scavenging," said Mario. "Next
they'll be cutting down on everything else. We've got to stop them now."

"But we don't need their water, anyway," said
Dora. "We're not the Moon or Venus. We pipe enough water down from the
polar caps for all we need. We have a water tap right in this apartment.
There's one in every apartment on this block."

Long said, "Home use is the smallest part of it. The
mines use water. And what do we do about the hydroponic tanks?"

"That's right," said Swenson. "What about the
hydroponic tanks, Dora? They've got to have water and it's about time we
arranged to grow our own fresh food instead of having to live on the condensed
crud they ship us from Earth."

"Listen to him," said Dora scornfully. "What
do you know about fresh food? You've never eaten any."

"I've eaten more than you think. Do you remember those
carrots I picked up once?"

"Well, what was so wonderful about them? If you ask me,
good baked protomeal is much better. And healthier, too. It just seems to be
the fashion now to be talking fresh vegetables because they're increasing taxes
for these hydroponics. Besides, all this will blow over."

Long said, "I don't think so. Not by itself, anyway.
Hilder will probably be the next Coordinator, and then things may really get
bad. If they cut down on food shipments, too—"

"Well, then," shouted Rioz, "what do we do? I
still say take it! Take the water!"

"And I say we can't do that, Mario. Don't you see that
what you're suggesting is the Earth way, the Grounder way? You're trying to hold
on to the umbilical cord that ties Mars to Earth. Can't you get away from that?
Can't you see the Martian way?"

"No, I can't. Suppose you tell me."

"I will, if you'll listen. When we think about the
Solar System, what do we think about? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars,
Phobos, and Deimos. There you are—seven bodies, that's all. But that doesn't
represent 1 per cent of the Solar System. We Martians are right at the edge of
the other 99 per cent. Out there, farther from the Sun, there's unbelievable
amounts of water!"

The others stared.

Swenson said uncertainly, "You mean the layers of ice
on Jupiter and Saturn?"

"Not that specifically, but it
is
water, you'll
admit. A thousand-mile-thick layer of water is a lot of water."

"But it's all covered up with layers of ammonia or—or
something, isn't it?" asked Swenson. "Besides, we can't land on the
major planets."

"I know that," said Long, "but I haven't said
that was the answer. The major planets aren't the only objects out there. What
about the asteroids and the satellites? Vesta is a two-hundred-mile-diameter
asteroid that's hardly more than a chunk of ice. One of the moons of Saturn is
mostly ice. How about that?"

Rioz said, "Haven't you ever been in space, Ted?"

"You know I have. Why do you ask?"

"Sure, I know you have, but you still talk like a
Grounder. Have you thought of the distances involved? The average asteroid is a
hundred twenty million miles from Mars at the closest. That's twice the
Venus-Mars hop and you know that hardly any liners do even that in one jump. They
usually stop off at Earth or the Moon. After all, how long do you expect anyone
to stay in space, man?"

"I don't know. What's your limit?"

"You know the limit. You don't have to ask me. It's six
months. That's handbook data. After six months, if you're still in space,
you're psychotherapy meat. Right, Dick?"

Swenson nodded.

"And that's just the asteroids," Rioz went on.
"From Mars to Jupiter is three hundred and thirty million miles, and to
Saturn it's seven hundred million. How can anyone handle that kind of distance?
Suppose you hit standard velocity or, to make it even, say you get up to a good
two hundred kilomiles an hour. It would take you—let's see, allowing time for
acceleration and deceleration—about six or seven months to get to Jupiter and
nearly a year to get to Saturn. Of course, you could hike the speed to a
million miles an hour, theoretically, but where would you get the water to do
that?"

"Gee," said a small voice attached to a smutty
nose and round eyes. "Saturn!"

Dora whirled in her chair. "Peter, march right back
into your room!"

"Aw, Ma."

"Don't 'Aw, Ma' me." She began to get out of the
chair, and Peter scuttled away.

Swenson said, "Say, Dora, why don't you keep him
company for a while? It's hard to keep his mind on homework if we're all out
here talking."

Dora sniffed obstinately and stayed put. "I'll sit
right here until I find out what Ted Long is thinking of. I tell you right now
I don't like the sound of it."

Swenson said nervously, "Well, never mind Jupiter and
Saturn. I'm sure Ted isn't figuring on that. But what about Vesta? We could
make it in ten or twelve weeks there and the same back. And two hundred miles
in diameter. That's four million cubic miles of ice!"

"So what?" said Rioz. "What do we do on
Vesta? Quarry the ice? Set up mining machinery? Say, do you know how long that
would take?"

Long said, "I'm talking about Saturn, not Vesta."

Rioz addressed an unseen audience. "I tell him seven
hundred million miles and he keeps on talking."

"All right," said Long, "suppose you tell me
how you know we can only stay in space six months, Mario?"

"It's common knowledge, damn it."

"Because it's in the
Handbook of Space Flight.
It's
data compiled by Earth scientists from experience with Earth pilots and
spacemen. You're still thinking Grounder style. You won't think the Martian
way."

"A Martian may be a Martian, but he's still a
man."

"But how can you be so blind? How many times have you
fellows been out for over six months without a break?"

Rioz said, "That's different."

"Because you're Martians? Because you're professional
Scavengers?"

"No. Because we're not on a flight. We can put back for
Mars any time we want to."

"But you
don't
want to. That's my point.
Earthmen have tremendous ships with libraries of films, with a crew of fifteen
plus passengers. Still, they can only stay out six months maximum. Martian
Scavengers have a two-room ship with only one partner. But we can stick it out
more than six months."

Dora said, "I suppose you want to stay in a ship for a
year and go to Saturn."

"Why not, Dora?" said Long. "We can do it.
Don't you see we can? Earthmen can't. They've got a real world. They've got
open sky and fresh food, all the air and water they want. Getting into a ship
is a terrible change for them. More than six months is too much for them for
that very reason. Martians are different. We've been living on a ship our
entire lives.

"That's all Mars is—a ship. It's just a big ship
forty-five hundred miles across with one tiny room in it occupied by fifty
thousand people. It's closed in like a ship. We breathe packaged air and drink
packaged water, which we repurify over and over. We eat the same food rations
we eat aboard ship. When we get into a ship, it's the same thing we've known
all our lives. We can stand it for a lot more than a year if we have to."

Dora said, "Dick, too?"

"We all can."

"Well, Dick can't. It's all very well for you, Ted
Long, and this shell stealer here, this Mario, to talk about jaunting off for a
year. You're not married. Dick is. He has a wife and he has a child and that's
enough for him. He can just get a regular job right here on Mars. Why, my
goodness, suppose you go to Saturn and find there's no water there. How'll you
get back? Even if you had water left, you'd be out of food. It's the most
ridiculous thing I ever heard of."