“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.