‘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 i,n 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.’
‘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 vo1unteers—’
‘First,’ said Rioz grumpily, ‘you’ll have to do a lot more explammg. 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.’
5
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 sprmg up mto which sp ceships and their loads could be swallowed whole. He had seen the mmes 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 dim mer 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 Bilder. Near as I can make out, that was the first talk Bilder 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 Bilder 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. Bilder 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 Bilder, but you can’t fight a tremendous, emotion-filled drive with cold mathematics. This man Bilder has invented a name, ‘Wasters.’ Slowly he has built this name up into a gigantic conspiracy; a gang of brutal, profit-seeking 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. Bilder 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 Bilder 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. I 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 Bilder?’
Digby smiled sourly. ‘Politics isn’t pleasant to explain. Bilder 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 side lines 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 re-election.’
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 Co-ordinator.’
‘Think he’ll make it?’
