The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (3 page)

Rioz said, "We risk our investment and our lives. If we
don't pick them up, no one gets them. What loss is that to Earth?"

"Look," said Long, "he's been talking about
nothing but the drain that Mars, Venus, and the Moon put on Earth. This is just
another item of loss."

"They'll get their return. We're mining more iron every
year."

"And most of it goes right back into Mars. If you can
believe his figures, Earth has invested two hundred billion dollars in Mars and
received back about five billion dollars' worth of iron. It's put five hundred
billion dollars into the Moon and gotten back a little over twenty-five billion
dollars of magnesium, titanium, and assorted light metals. It's put fifty
billion dollars into Venus and gotten back nothing. And that's what the
taxpayers of Earth are really interested in— tax money out; nothing in."

The screen was filled, as he spoke, with diagrams of the
Scavengers on the route to Mars; little, grinning caricatures of ships,
reaching out wiry, tenuous arms that groped for the tumbling, empty shells,
seizing and snaking them in, branding them MARS PROPERTY in glowing letters,
then scaling them down to Phobos.

Then it was Hilder again. "They tell us eventually they
will return it all to us. Eventually! Once they are a going concern! We don't
know when that will be. A century from now? A thousand years? A million?
'Eventually.' Let's take them at their word. Someday they will give us back all
our metals. Someday they will grow their own food, use their own power, live
their own lives.

"But one thing they can never return. Not in a hundred
million years.
Water!

"Mars has only a trickle of water because it is too
small. Venus has no water at all because it is too hot. The Moon has none
because it is too hot and too small. So Earth must supply not only drinking
water and washing water for the Spacers, water to run their industries, water
for the hydroponic factories they claim to be setting up—but even water to
throw away by the millions of tons.

"What is the propulsive force that spaceships use? What
is it they throw out behind so that they can accelerate forward? Once it was
the gases generated from explosives. That was very expensive. Then the proton
micropile was invented—a cheap power source that could heat up any liquid until
it was a gas under tremendous pressure. What is the cheapest and most plentiful
liquid available? Why, water, of course.

"Each spaceship leaves Earth carrying nearly a million
tons—not pounds,
tons—
of water, for the sole purpose of driving it into
space so that it may speed up or slow down.

"Our ancestors burned the oil of Earth madly and
wilfully. They destroyed its coal recklessly. We despise and condemn them for
that, but at least they had this excuse—they thought that when the need arose,
substitutes would be found. And they were right. We have our plankton farms and
our proton micropiles.

"But there is no substitute for water. None! There
never can be. And when our descendants view the desert we will have made of
Earth, what excuse will they find for us? When the droughts come and
grow—"

Long leaned forward and turned off the set. He said,
"That bothers me. The damn fool is deliberately— What's the matter?"

Rioz had risen uneasily to his feet. "I ought to be
watching the pips."

"The hell with the pips." Long got up likewise,
followed Rioz through the narrow corridor, and stood just inside the pilot
room. "If Hilder carries this through, if he's got the guts to make a real
issue out of it-
Wow!"

He had seen it too. The pip was a Class A, racing after the
outgoing signal like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit.

Rioz was babbling, "Space was clear, I tell you,
clear.
For Mars' sake, Ted, don't just freeze on me. See if you can spot it
visually."

Rioz was working speedily and with an efficiency that was
the result of nearly twenty years of scavenging. He had the distance in two
minutes. Then, remembering Swenson's experience, he measured the angle of
declination and the radial velocity as well.

He yelled at Long, "One point seven six radians. You
can't miss it, man."

Long held his breath as he adjusted the vernier. "It's
only half a radian off the Sun. It'll only be crescent-lit."

He increased magnification as rapidly as he dared, watching
for the one "star" that changed position and grew to have a form,
revealing itself to be no star.

"I'm starting, anyway," said Rioz. "We can't
wait."

"I've got it. I've got it." Magnification was
still too small to give it a definite shape, but the dot Long watched was
brightening and dimming rhythmically as the shell rotated and caught sunlight
on cross sections of different sizes.

"Hold on."

The first of many fine spurts of steam squirted out of the
proper vents, leaving long trails of micro-crystals of ice gleaming mistily in
the pale beams of the distant Sun. They thinned out for a hundred miles or
more. One spurt, then another, then another, as the Scavenger ship moved out of
its stable trajectory and took up a course tangential to that of the shell.

"It's moving like a comet at perihelion!" yelled
Rioz. "Those damned Grounder pilots knock the shells off that way on
purpose. I'd like to—"

He swore his anger in a frustrated frenzy as he kicked steam
backward and backward recklessly, till the hydraulic cushioning of his chair
had soughed back a full foot and Long had found himself all but unable to
maintain his grip on the guard rail.

"Have a heart," he begged.

But Rioz had his eye on the pips. "If you can't take
it, man, stay on Mars!" The steam spurts continued to boom distantly.

The radio came to fife. Long managed to lean forward through
what seemed like molasses and closed contact. It was Swenson, eyes glaring.

Swenson yelled, "Where the hell are you guys going?
You'll be in my sector in ten seconds."

Rioz said, "I'm chasing a shell."

"In
my
sector?"

"It started in mine and you're not in position to get
it. Shut off that radio, Ted."

The ship thundered through space, a thunder that could be
heard only within the hull. And then Rioz cut the engines in stages large
enough to make Long flail forward. The sudden silence was more ear-shattering
than the noise that had preceded it.

Rioz said, "All right. Let me have the 'scope."

They both watched. The shell was a definite truncated cone
now, rumbling with slow solemnity as it passed along among the stars.

"It's a Class A shell, all right," said Rioz with
satisfaction. A giant among shells, he thought. It would put them into the
black.

Long said, "We've got another pip on the scanner. I
think it's Swenson taking after us."

Rioz scarcely gave it a glance. "He won't catch
us."

The shell grew larger still, filling the visiplate.

Rioz's hands were on the harpoon lever. He waited, adjusted
the angle microscopically twice, played out the length allotment. Then he
yanked, tripping the release.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then a metal mesh cable
snaked out onto the visiplate, moving toward the shell like a striking cobra.
It made contact, but it did not hold. If it had, it would have snapped
instantly like a cobweb strand. The shell was turning with a rotational
momentum amounting to thousands of tons. What the cable did do was to set up a
powerful magnetic field that acted as a brake on the shell.

Another cable and another lashed out. Rioz sent them out in
an almost heedless expenditure of energy.

"I'll get this one! By Mars, I'll get this one!"

With some two dozen cables stretching between ship and
shell, he desisted. The shell's rotational energy, converted by breaking into
heat, had raised its temperature to a point where its radiation could be picked
up by the ship's meters.

Long said, "Do you want me to put our brand on?"

"Suits me. But you don't have to if you don't want to.
It's my watch."

"I don't mind."

Long clambered into his suit and went out the lock. It was
the surest sign of his newness to the game that he could count the number of
times he had been out in a suit. This was the fifth time.

He went out along the nearest cable, hand over hand, feeling
the vibration of the mesh against the metal of his mitten.

He burned their serial number in the smooth metal of the
shell. There was nothing to oxidize the steel in the emptiness of space. It
simply melted and vaporized, condensing some feet away from the energy beam,
turning the surface it touched into a gray, powdery dullness.

Long swung back toward the ship.

Inside again, he took off his helmet, white and thick with
frost that collected as soon as he had entered.

The first thing he heard was Swenson's voice coming over the
radio in this almost unrecognizable rage: ". . . straight to the
Commissioner. Damn it, there are rules to this game!"

Rioz sat back, unbothered. "Look, it hit my sector. I
was late spotting it and I chased it into yours. You couldn't have gotten it
with Mars for a backstop. That's all there is to it— You back, Long?"

He cut contact.

The signal button raged at him, but he paid no attention.

"He's going to the Commissioner?" Long asked.

"Not a chance. He just goes on like that because it
breaks the monotony. He doesn't mean anything by it. He knows it's our shell.
And how do you like that hunk of stuff, Ted?"

"Pretty good."

"Pretty good? It's terrific! Hold on. I'm setting it
swinging."

The side jets spat steam and the ship started a slow
rotation about the shell. The shell followed it. In thirty minutes, they were a
gigantic bolo spinning in emptiness. Long checked the
Ephemeris
for the
position of Deimos.

At a precisely calculated moment, the cables released their
magnetic field and the shell went streaking off tangentially in a trajectory
that would, in a day or so, bring it within pronging distance of the shell
stores on the Martian satellite.

Rioz watched it go. He felt good. He turned to Long.
"This is one fine day for us."

"What about Hilder's speech?" asked Long,

"What? Who? Oh, that. Listen, if I had to worry about everything
some damned Grounder said, I'd never get any sleep. Forget it."

"I don't think we should forget it."

"You're nuts. Don't bother me about it, will you? Get
some sleep instead."

Ted Long found the breadth and height of the city's main
thoroughfare exhilarating. It had been two months since the Commissioner had
declared a moratorium on scavenging and had pulled all ships out of space, but
this feeling of a stretched-out vista had not stopped thrilling Long. Even the
thought that the moratorium was called pending a decision on the part of Earth
to enforce its new insistence on water economy, by deciding upon a ration limit
for scavenging, did not cast him entirely down.

The roof of the avenue was painted a luminous light blue,
perhaps as an old-fashioned imitation of Earth's sky. Ted wasn't sure. The
walls were lit with the store windows that pierced it.

Off in the distance, over the hum of traffic and the
sloughing noise of people's feet passing him, he could hear the intermittent
blasting as new channels were being bored into Mars' crust. All his life he
remembered such blastings. The ground he walked on had been part of solid,
unbroken rock when he was born. The city was growing and would keep on
growing—if Earth would only let it.

He turned off at a cross street, narrower, not quite as
brilliantly lit, shop windows giving way to apartment houses, each with its row
of lights along the front facade. Shoppers and traffic gave way to slower-paced
individuals and to squalling youngsters who had as yet evaded the maternal
summons to the evening meal.

At the last minute, Long remembered the social amenities and
stopped off at a corner water store.

He passed over his canteen. "Fill 'er up."

The plump storekeeper unscrewed the cap, cocked an eye into
the opening. He shook it a little and let it gurgle. "Not much left,"
he said cheerfully.

"No," agreed Long.

The storekeeper trickled water in, holding the neck of the
canteen close to the hose tip to avoid spillage. The volume gauge whirred. He
screwed the cap back on.

Long passed over the coins and took his canteen. It clanked
against his hip now with a pleasing heaviness. It would never do to visit a
family without a full canteen. Among the boys, it didn't matter. Not as much,
anyway.

He entered the hallway of No. 27, climbed a short flight of
stairs, and paused with his thumb on the signal.

The sound of voices could be heard quite plainly.

One was a woman's voice, somewhat shrill. "It's all
right for you to have your Scavenger friends here, isn't it? I'm supposed to be
thankful you manage to get home two months a year. Oh, it's quite enough that
you spend a day or two with me. After that, it's the Scavengers again."

"I've been home for a long time now," said a male
voice, "and this is business. For Mars' sake, let up, Dora. They'll be
here soon."

Long decided to wait a moment before signaling. It might
give them a chance to hit a more neutral topic.

"What do I care if they come?" retorted Dora.
"Let them hear me. And I'd just as soon the Commissioner kept the
moratorium on permanently. You hear me?"

"And what would we live on?" came the male voice
hotly. "You tell me that."

"I'll tell you. You can make a decent, honorable living
right here on Mars, just like everybody else. I'm the only one in this
apartment house that's a Scavenger widow. That's what I am—a widow. I'm worse
than a widow, because if I were a widow, I'd at least have a chance to marry
someone else— What did you say?"