The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (5 page)

"No. Now listen," said Long tightly. "I've
thought this thing out. I've talked to Commissioner Sankov and he'll help. But
we've got to have ships and men. I can't get them. The men won't listen to me.
I'm green. You two are known and respected. You're veterans. If you back me,
even if you don't go yourselves, if you'll just help me sell this thing to the
rest, get volunteers—"

"First," said Rioz grumpily, "you'll have to
do a lot more explaining. Once we get to Saturn, where's the water?"

"That's the beauty of it," said Long. "That's
why it's got to be Saturn. The water there is just floating around in space for
the taking."

When Hamish Sankov had come to Mars, there was no such thing
as a native Martian. Now there were two-hundred-odd babies whose grandfathers
had been born on Mars—native in the third generation.

When he had come as a boy in his teens, Mars had been
scarcely more than a huddle of grounded spaceships connected by sealed
underground tunnels. Through the years, he had seen buildings grow and burrow
widely, thrusting blunt snouts up into the thin, unbreathable atmosphere. He
had seen huge storage depots spring up into which spaceships and their loads
could be swallowed whole. He had seen the mines grow from nothing to a huge
gouge in the Martian crust, while the population of Mars grew from fifty to
fifty thousand.

It made him feel old, these long memories—they and the even
dimmer memories induced by the presence of this Earthman before him. His
visitor brought up those long-forgotten scraps of thought about a soft-warm
world that was as kind and gentle to mankind as the mother's womb.

The Earthman seemed fresh from that womb. Not very tall, not
very lean; in fact, distinctly plump. Dark hair with a neat little wave in it,
a neat little mustache, and neatly scrubbed skin. His clothing was right in
style and as fresh and neatly turned as plastek could be.

Sankov's own clothes were of Martian manufacture,
serviceable and clean, but many years behind the times. His face was craggy and
lined, his hair was pure white, and his Adam's apple wobbled when he talked.

The Earthman was Myron Digby, member of Earth's General
Assembly. Sankov was Martian Commissioner.

Sankov said, "This all hits us hard, Assemblyman."

"It's hit most of us hard, too, Commissioner."

"Uh-huh. Can't honestly say then that I can make it
out. Of course, you understand, I don't make out that I can understand Earth
ways, for all that I was born there. Mars is a hard place to live, Assemblyman,
and you have to understand that. It takes a lot of shipping space just to bring
us food, water, and raw materials so we can live. There's not much room left
for books and news films. Even video programs can't reach Mars, except for
about a month when Earth is in conjunction, and even then nobody has much time
to listen.

"My office gets a weekly summary film from Planetary
Press. Generally, I don't have time to pay attention to it. Maybe you'd call us
provincial, and you'd be right. When something like this happens, all we can do
is kind of helplessly look at each other."

Digby said slowly, "You can't mean that your people on
Mars haven't heard of Hilder's anti-Waster campaign."

"No, can't exactly say that. There's a young Scavenger,
son of a good friend of mine who died in space"—Sankov scratched the side
of his neck doubtfully—"who makes a hobby out of reading up on Earth
history and things like that. He catches video broadcasts when he's out in
space and he listened to this man Hilder. Near as 1 can make out, that was the
first talk Hilder made about Wasters.

"The young fellow came to me with that. Naturally, I
didn't take him very serious. I kept an eye on the Planetary Press films for a
while after that, but there wasn't much mention of Hilder and what there was
made him out to look pretty funny."

"Yes, Commissioner," said Digby, "it all
seemed quite a joke when it started."

Sankov stretched out a pair of long legs to one side of his
desk and crossed them at the ankles. "Seems to me it's still pretty much
of a joke. What's his argument? We're using up water. Has he tried looking at
some figures? I got them all here. Had them brought to me when this committee
arrived.

"Seems that Earth has four hundred million cubic miles
of water in its oceans and each cubic mile weighs four and a half billion tons.
That's a lot of water. Now we use some of that heap in space flight. Most of
the thrust is inside Earth's gravitational field, and that means the water
thrown out finds its way back to the oceans. Hilder doesn't figure that in. When
he says a million tons of water is used up per flight, he's a liar. It's less
than a hundred thousand tons.

"Suppose, now, we have fifty thousand flights a year.
We don't, of course; not even fifteen hundred. But let's say there are fifty
thousand. I figure there's going to be considerable expansion as time goes on.
With fifty thousand flights, one cubic mile of water would be lost to space
each year. That means that in a million years, Earth would lose
one quarter
of 1 per cent
of its total water supply!"

Digby spread his hands, palms upward, and let them drop.
"Commissioner, Interplanetary Alloys has used figures like that in their
campaign against Hilder, but you can't fight a tremendous, emotion-filled drive
with cold mathematics. This man Hilder has invented a name, 'Wasters.' Slowly
he has built this name up into a gigantic conspiracy; a gang of brutal,
profitseeking wretches raping Earth for their own immediate benefit.

"He has accused the government of being riddled with
them, the Assembly of being dominated by them, the press of being owned by
them. None of this, unfortunately, seems ridiculous to the average man. He
knows all too well what selfish men can do to Earth's resources. He knows what
happened to Earth's oil during the Time of Troubles, for instance, and the way
topsoil was ruined.

"When a farmer experiences a drought, he doesn't care
that the amount of water lost in space flight isn't a droplet in a fog as far
as Earth's over-all water supply is concerned. Hilder has given him something
to blame and that's the strongest possible consolation for disaster. He isn't
going to give that up for a diet of figures."

Sankov said, "That's where I get puzzled. Maybe it's
because I don't know how things work on Earth, but it seems to me that there
aren't just droughty farmers there. As near as I could make out from the news
summaries, these Hilder people are a minority. Why is it Earth goes along with
a few farmers and some crackpots that egg them on?"

"Because, Commissioner, there are such things as worried
human beings. The steel industry sees that an era of space flight will stress
increasingly the light, nonferrous alloys. The various miners' unions worry
about extraterrestrial competition. Any Earthman who can't get aluminum to
build a prefab is certain that it is because the aluminum is going to Mars. 1
know a professor of archaeology who's an anti-Waster because he can't get a
government grant to cover his excavations. He's convinced that all government
money is going into rocketry research and space medicine and he resents
it."

Sankov said, "That doesn't sound like Earth people are
much different from us here on Mars. But what about the General Assembly? Why
do they have to go along with Hilder?"

Digby smiled sourly. "Politics isn't pleasant to explain.
Hilder introduced this bill to set up a committee to investigate waste in space
flight. Maybe three fourths or more of the General Assembly was against such an
investigation as an intolerable and useless extension of bureaucracy—which it
is. But then how could any legislator be against a mere investigation of waste?
It would sound as though he had something to fear or to conceal. It would sound
as though he were himself profiting from waste. Hilder is not in the least
afraid of making such accusations, and whether true or not, they would be a
powerful factor with the voters in the next election. The bill passed.

"And then there came the question of appointing the
members of the committee. Those who were against Hilder shied away from
membership, which would have meant decisions that would be continually
embarrassing. Remaining on the sidelines would make that one that much less a
target for Hilder. The result is that I am the only member of the committee who
is outspokenly anti-Hilder and it may cost me reelection."

Sankov said, "I'd be sorry to hear that, Assemblyman.
It looks as though Mars didn't have as many friends as we thought we had. We
wouldn't like to lose one. But if Hilder wins out, what's he after,
anyway?"

"I should think," said Digby, "that that is
obvious. He wants to be the next Global Coordinator."

"Think he'll make it?"

"If nothing happens to stop him, he will."

"And then what? Will he drop this Waster campaign
then?"

"I can't say. I don't know if he's laid his plans past
the Coordinacy. Still, if you want my guess, he couldn't abandon the campaign
and maintain his popularity. It's gotten out of hand."

Sankov scratched the side of his neck. "All right. In
that case, I'll ask you for some advice. What can we folks on Mars do? You know
Earth. You know the situation. We don't. Tell us what to do."

Digby rose and stepped to the window. He looked out upon the
low domes of other buildings; red, rocky, completely desolate plain in between;
a purple sky and a shrunken sun.

He said, without turning, "Do you people really like it
on Mars?"

Sankov smiled. "Most of us don't exactly know any other
world, Assemblyman. Seems to me Earth would be something queer and
uncomfortable to them."

"But wouldn't Martians get used to it? Earth isn't hard
to take after this. Wouldn't your people learn to enjoy the privilege of
breathing air under an open sky? You once lived on Earth. You remember what it
was like."

"I sort of remember. Still, it doesn't seem to be easy
to explain. Earth is just there. It fits people and people fit it. People take
Earth the way they find it. Mars is different. It's sort of raw and doesn't fit
people. People got to make something out of it. They got to
build
a
world, and not take what they find. Mars isn't much yet, but we're building, and
when we're finished, we're going to have just what we like. It's sort of a
great feeling to know you're building a world. Earth would be kind of
unexciting after that."

The Assemblyman said, "Surely the ordinary Martian
isn't such a philosopher that he's content to live this terribly hard life for
the sake of a future that must be hundreds of generations away."

"No-o, not just like that." Sankov put his right
ankle on his left knee and cradled it as he spoke. "Like I said, Martians
are a lot like Earthmen, which means they're sort of human beings, and human
beings don't go in for philosophy much. Just the same, there's something to
living in a growing world, whether you think about it much or not.

"My father used to send me letters when I first came to
Mars. He was an accountant and he just sort of stayed an accountant. Earth
wasn't much different when he died from what it was when he was born. He didn't
see anything happen. Every day was like every other day, and living was just a
way of passing time until he died.

"On Mars, it's different. Every day there's something
new—the city's bigger, the ventilation system gets another kick, the water
lines from the poles get slicked up. Right now, we're planning to set up a
news-film association of our own. We're going to call it Mars Press. If you
haven't lived when things are growing all about you, you'll never understand
how wonderful it feels.

"No, Assemblyman, Mars is hard and tough and Earth is a
lot more comfortable, but seems to me if you take our boys to Earth, they'll be
unhappy. They probably wouldn't be able to figure out why, most of them, but
they'd feel lost; lost and useless. Seems to me lots of them would never make
the adjustment."

Digby turned away from the window and the smooth, pink skin
of his forehead was creased into a frown. "In that case, Commissioner, I
am sorry for you. For all of you."

"Why?"

"Because I don't think there's anything your people on
Mars can do. Or the people on the Moon or Venus. It won't happen now; maybe it
won't happen for a year or two, or even for five years. But pretty soon you'll
all have to come back to Earth, unless—"

Sankov's white eyebrows bent low over his eyes.
"Well?"

"Unless you can find another source of water besides
the planet Earth."

Sankov shook his head. "Don't seem likely, does
it?"

"Not very."

"And except for that, seems to you there's no
chance?"

"None at all."

Digby said that and left, and Sankov stared for a long time
at nothing before he punched a combination of the local communiline.

After a while, Ted Long looked out at him.

Sankov said, "You were right, son. There's nothing they
can do. Even the ones that mean well see no way out. How did you know?"

"Commissioner," said Long, "when you've read
all you can about the Time of Troubles, particularly about the twentieth
century, nothing political can come as a real surprise."

"Well, maybe. Anyway, son, Assemblyman Digby is sorry
for us, quite a piece sorry, you might say, but that's all. He says we'll have
to leave Mars—or else get water somewhere else. Only he thinks that we can't
get water somewhere else."

"You know we can, don't you, Commissioner?"

"I know we
might,
son. It's a terrible
risk."

"If I find enough volunteers, the risk is our
business."

"How is it going?"

"Not bad. Some of the boys are on my side right now. I
talked Mario Rioz into it, for instance, and you know he's one of the
best."