But the silence continued in the dome. It continued for a long time.
Men came clambering down the sides of the immense vessel, inching down, down the two-mile trek to the ground, with spikes on their shoes and ice axes in their hands. They were gnats against the blinding surface.
One of the reporters croaked, ‘What is it?’
‘That,’ said Sankov calmly, ‘happens to be a chunk of matter that spent its time scooting around Saturn as part of its rings. Our boys fitted it out with travel-head and jets and ferried it home. It just turns out the fragments in Saturn’s rings are made up out of ice.’
He spoke into a continuing deathlike silence. ‘That thing that looks like a spaceship is just a mountain of hard water. If it were standing like that on Earth, it would be melting into a puddle and maybe it would break under its own weight. Mars is colder and has less gravity, so there’s no such danger.
‘Of course, once we get this thing really organized, we can have water stations on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and on the asteroids. We can scale in chunks of Saturn’s rings and pick them up and send them on at the various stations. Our Scavengers are good at that sort of thing.
‘We’ll have all the water we need. That one chuH.k you see is just under a cubic mile – or about what Earth would send us in two hundred years. The boys used quite a bit of it coming back from Saturn. They made it in five weeks, they tell me, and used up about a hundred million tons. But, Lord, that didn’t make any dent at all in that mountain. Are you getting all this, boys?’
He turned to the reporters. There was no doubt they were getting it.
He said, ‘Then get this, too. Earth is worried about its water supply. It only has one and a half quintillion tons. It can’t spare us a single ton of it. Write down that we folks on Mars are worried about Earth and don’t want anything to happen to Earth people. Write down that we’ll sell water to Earth. Write down that we’ll let them have million-ton lots for a reasonable fee. Write down that in ten years, we figure we can sell it in cubic-mile lots. Write down that Earth can quit worrying because Mars can sell it all the water it needs and wants.’
The Committee Chairman was past hearing. He was feeling the future rushing in. Dimly he could see the reporters grinning as they wrote furiously.
Grinning.
He could hear the grin become laughter on Earth as Mars turned the tables so neatly on the anti-Wasters. He could hear the laughter thunder from every continent when word of the fiasco spread. And he could see the abyss, deep and black as space, into which would drop forever the political hopes of John Hilder and of every opponent of space flight left on Earth – his own included, of course.
In the adjoining room, Dora Swenson screamed with joy, and Peter, grown two inches, jumped up and down, calling, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’
Richard Swenson had just stepped off the extremity of the flange and, face showing clearly through the clear silicone of the headpiece, marched toward the dome.
‘Did you ever see a guy look so happy?’ asked Ted Long. ‘Maybe there’s something in this marriage business.’
‘Ah, you’ve just been out in space too long,’ Rioz said.
The Monkey’s Finger
‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,’ said Marmie Tallinn, in sixteen different inflections and pitches, while the Adam’s apple in his long neck bobbed convulsively. He was a science fiction writer.
‘No,’ said Lemuel Hoskins, staring stonily through his steel-rimmed glasses. He was a science fiction editor.
‘Then you won’t accept a scientific test. You won’t listen to me. I’m outvoted, eh?’ Marmie lifted himself on his toes, dropped down, repeated the process a few times, and breathed heavily. His dark hair was matted into tufts, where fingers had clutched.
‘One to sixteen,’ said Hoskins.
‘Look,’ said Marmie, ‘’what makes you always right? What makes me always wrong?’
‘Marmie, face it. We’re each judged in our own way. If magazine circulation were to drop, I’d be a flop. I’d be out on my ear. The president of Space Publishers would ask no questions, believe me. He would just look at the figures. But circulation doesn’t go down; it’s going up. That makes me a good editor. And as for you-when editors accept you, you’re a talent. When they reject you, you’re a bum. At the moment, you are a bum.’
‘There are other editors, you know. You’re not the only one.’ Marmie held up his hands, fingers outspread. ‘Can you count? That’s how many science fiction magazines on the market would gladly take a Tallinn yam, sight unseen.’
‘Gesundheit,’ said Hoskins.
‘Look,’ Marmie’s voice sweetened, ‘you wanted two changes, right? You wanted an introductory scene with the battle in space. Well, I gave that to you. It’s right here.’ He waved the manuscript under Hoskin’s nose and Hoskin moved away as though at a bad smell.
‘But you also wanted the scene on the spaceship’s hull cut into with a flashback into the interior,’ went on Marmie, ‘and that you can’t get. If I make that change, I ruin an ending which, as it stands, has pathos and depth and feeling.’
Editor Hoskins sat back in his chair and appealed to his secretary, who throughout had been quietly typing. She was used to these scenes.
Hoskins said, ‘You hear that, Miss Kane? He talks of pathos, depth, and feeling. What does a writer know about such things? Look, if you insert the flashback, you increase the suspense; you tighten the story; you make it more valid.’
‘How do I make it more valid?’ cried Marmie in anguish. ‘You mean to say that having a bunch of fellows in a spaceship start talking politics and sociology when they’re liable to be blown up makes it more valid? Oh, my God.’
‘There’s nothing else yqu can do. If you wait till the climax is past and then discuss your politics and sociology, the reader will go to sleep on you.’
‘But I’m trying to tell you that you’re wrong and I can prove it. What’s the use of talking when I’ve arranged a scientific experiment—’
‘What scientific experiment?’ Hoskins appealed to his secretary again. ‘How do you like that, Miss Kane. He thinks he’s one of his own characters.’
‘It so happens I know a scientist.’
‘Who?’
‘Dr Arndt Torgesson, professor of psychodynamics at Columbia.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘I suppose that means a lot,’ said Marmie, with contempt. ‘Tou never heard of him. You never heard of Einstein until your writers started mentioning him in their stories.’
‘Very humorous. A yuk. What about this Torgesson?’
‘He’s worked out a system for determining scientifically the value of a piece of writing. It’s a tremendous piece of work. It’s-it’s—’
