“Hello, Ted,” he said in a subdued voice. Then loudly, “Ted’s here, Dora. Where’s Mario, Ted?”
Long said, “He’ll be here in a while.”
Dora came bustling out of the next room, a small, dark woman with a pinched nose, and hair, just beginning to show touches of gray, combed off the forehead.
“Hello, Ted. Have you eaten?”
“Quite well, thanks. I haven’t interrupted you, have I?”
“Not at all. We finished ages ago. Would you like some coffee?”
“1 think so.” Ted unslung his canteen and offered it.
“Oh, goodness, that’s all right. We’ve plenty of water.”
“I insist.”
“Well, then—”
Back into the kitchen she went. Through the swinging door, Long caught a glimpse of dishes sitting in Secoterg, the “waterless cleaner that soaks up and absorbs grease and dirt in a twinkling. One ounce of water will rinse eight square feet of dish surface clean as clean. Buy Secoterg. Secoterg just cleans it right, makes your dishes shiny bright, does away with water waste—”
The tune started whining through his mind and Long crushed it with speech. He said, “How’s Pete?”
“Fine, fine. The kid’s in the fourth grade now. You know I don’t get to see him much. Well, sir, when I came back last time, he looked at me and said…”
It went on for a while and wasn’t too bad as bright sayings of bright children as told by dull parents go.
The door signal burped and Mario Rioz came in, frowning and red.
Swenson stepped to him quickly. “Listen, don’t say anything about shell-snaring. Dora still remembers the time you fingered a Class A shell out of my territory and she’s in one of her moods now.”
“Who the hell wants to talk about shells?” Rioz slung off a fur-lined jacket, threw it over the back of the chair, and sat down.
Dora came through the swinging door, viewed the newcomer with a synthetic smile, and said, “Hello, Mario. Coffee for you, too?”
“Yeah,” he said, reaching automatically for his canteen.
“Just use some more of my water, Dora,” said Long quickly. “He’ll owe it to me.”
“Yeah,” said Rioz.
“What’s wrong, Mario?” asked Long.
Rioz said heavily, “Go on. Say you told me so. A year ago when Hilder made that speech, you told me so. Say it.”
Long shrugged.
Rioz said, “They’ve set up the quota. Fifteen minutes ago the news came out.”
“Well?”
“Fifty thousand tons of water per trip.”
“What?” yelled Swenson, burning. “You can’t get off Mars with fifty thousand!”
“That’s the figure. It’s a deliberate piece of gutting. No more scavenging.”
Dora came out with the coffee and set it down all around.
“What’s all this about no more scavenging?” She sat down very firmly and Swenson looked helpless.
“It seems,” said Long, “that they’re rationing us at fifty thousand tons and that means we can’t make any more trips.”
“Well, what of it?” Dora sipped her coffee and smiled gaily. “If you want my opinion, it’s a good thing. It’s time all you Scavengers found yourselves a nice, steady job here on Mars. I mean it. It’s no life to be running all over space—”
“Please, Dora,” said Swenson.
Rioz came close to a snort.
Dora raised her eyebrows. “I’m just giving my opinions.”
Long said, “Please feel free to do so. But I would like to say something. Fifty thousand is just a detail. We know that Earth—or at least Hilder’s party—wants to make political capital out of a campaign for water economy, so we’re in a bad hole. We’ve got to get water somehow or they’ll shut us down altogether, right?”
“Well, sure,” said Swenson.
“But the question is how, right?”
“If it’s only getting water,” said Rioz in a sudden gush of words, “there’s only one thing to do and you know it. If the Grounders won’t give us water, we’ll take it. The water doesn’t belong to them just because their fathers and grandfathers were too damned sick-yellow ever to leave their fat planet. Water belongs to people wherever they are. We’re people and the water’s ours, too. We have a right to it.”
“How do you propose taking it?” asked Long.
“Easy! They’ve got oceans of water on Earth. They can’t post a guard over every square mile. We can sink down on the night side of the planet any time we want, fill our shells, then get away. How can they stop us?”
“In half a dozen ways, Mario. How do you spot shells in space up to distances of a hundred thousand miles? One thin metal shell in all that space. How? By radar. Do you think there’s no radar on Earth? Do you think that if Earth ever gets the notion we’re engaged in waterlegging, it won’t be simple for them to set up a radar network to spot ships coming in from space?”
Dora broke in indignantly. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mario Rioz. My husband isn’t going to be part of any raid to get water to keep up his scavenging with.”
“It isn’t just scavenging,” said Mario. “Next they’ll be cutting down on everything else. We’ve got to stop them now.”
“But we don’t need their water, anyway,” said Dora. “We’re not the Moon or Venus. We pipe enough water down from the polar caps for all we need. We have a water tap right in this apartment. There’s one in every apartment on this block.”
Long said, “Home use is the smallest part of it. The mines use water. And what do we do about the hydroponic tanks?”
“That’s right,” said Swenson. “What about the hydroponic tanks, Dora? They’ve got to have water and it’s about time we arranged to grow our own fresh food instead of having to live on the condensed crud they ship us from Earth.”
“Listen to him,” said Dora scornfully. “What do you know about fresh food? You’ve never eaten any.”
“I’ve eaten more than you think. Do you remember those carrots I picked up once?”
“Well, what was so wonderful about them? If you ask me, good baked protomeal is much better. And healthier, too. It just seems to be the fashion now to be talking fresh vegetables because they’re increasing taxes for these hydroponics. Besides, all this will blow over.”
Long said, “I don’t think so. Not by itself, anyway. Hilder will probably be the next Coordinator, and then things may really get bad. If they cut down on food shipments, too—”
“Well, then,” shouted Rioz, “what do we do? I still say take it! Take the water!”
“And I say we can’t do that, Mario. Don’t you see that what you’re suggesting is the Earth way, the Grounder way? You’re trying to hold on to the umbilical cord that ties Mars to Earth. Can’t you get away from that? Can’t you see the Martian way?”
“No, I can’t. Suppose you tell me.”
“I will, if you’ll listen. When we think about the Solar System, what do we think about? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Phobos, and Deimos. There you are—seven bodies, that’s all. But that doesn’t represent 1 per cent of the Solar System. We Martians are right at the edge of the other 99 per cent. Out there, farther from the Sun, there’s unbelievable amounts of water!”
The others stared.
Swenson said uncertainly, “You mean the layers of ice on Jupiter and Saturn?”
“Not that specifically, but it is water, you’ll admit. A thousand-mile-thick layer of water is a lot of water.”
“But it’s all covered up with layers of ammonia or—or something, isn’t it?” asked Swenson. “Besides, we can’t land on the major planets.”