Robot Dreams Part 21

Rioz said, "We risk our investment and our lives. If we don't pick them up, no one gets them. What loss is that to Earth?"

"Look," said Long, "he's been talking about nothing but the drain that Mars, Venus, and the Moon put on Earth. This is just another item of loss."

"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, t.i.tanium, and a.s.sorted 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-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 s.h.i.+ps, reaching, out wiry, tenuous arms that groped for the tumbling, empty sh.e.l.ls, 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! 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 was.h.i.+ng water for the s.p.a.cers, water to run their industries, water for the hydroponic factories they claim to be setting up-but even water to throwaway by the millions of tons.

"What is the propulsive force that s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps 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 s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p leaves Earth carrying nearly a million tons-not pounds, tons tons-of water, for the sole purpose of driving it into s.p.a.ce so that it may speed up or slow down. water, for the sole purpose of driving it into s.p.a.ce so that it may speed up or slow down.

"Our ancestors burned the oil of Earth madly and willfully. They destroyed its coal recklessly. We despise and condemn them for that, but at least they had this-they thought that when the need arose, subst.i.tutes would be found. And they were right. We have our plankton farms and our proton micropiles.

"But there is no subst.i.tute 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 d.a.m.n fool is deliberately-what's the matter?"

Rioz had risen uneasily to his feet. "I ought to be watching the pips." his feet. "I ought to be watching the pips."

"The h.e.l.l 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 Cla.s.s A, racing after the outgoing signal like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit.

Rioz was babbling, "s.p.a.ce was clear, I tell you, clear. clear. For Mars' sake, Ted, don't just freeze on me. See if you can spot it visually." 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, "Once 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 sh.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+p moved out of its stable trajectory and took up a course tangential to that of the sh.e.l.l.

"It's moving like a comet at perihelion!" yelled Rioz. "Those d.a.m.ned Grounder pilots knock the sh.e.l.ls 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 cus.h.i.+oning of his chair had sloughed 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 life. Long managed to lean forward through what seemed like mola.s.ses and closed contact. It was Swenson, eyes glaring.

Swenson yelled; "Where the h.e.l.l are you guys going? You 'll be in my sector in ten seconds."

Rioz said, "I'm chasing a sh.e.l.l. "

"In my my sector?" sector?"

"It started in mine and you're not in position to get it. Shut off that radio, Ted."

The s.h.i.+p thundered through s.p.a.ce, 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 sh.e.l.l was a definite truncated cone now, tumbling with slow solemnity as it pa.s.sed along among the stars.

"It's a Cla.s.s A sh.e.l.l, all right," said Rioz with satisfaction.

A giant among sh.e.l.ls, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l.

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 s.h.i.+p and sh.e.l.l, he desisted. The sh.e.l.l's rotational energy, converted by breaking into heat, had raised its temperature to a point where its radiation could be picked up by the s.h.i.+p's meters.

Long said, "Do you want me to put our brand on?"

"Suits me. But you don't have to if you don't want to. It's my watch."

"I don't mind."

Long clambered into his suit and went out the lock. It was the surest sign of his newness to the game that he could count the number of times he had been out in s.p.a.ce in a suit. This was the fifth time.

He went out along the nearest cable, hand over hand, feeling the vibration of the mesh against the metal of his mitten.

He burned their serial number in the smooth metal of the sh.e.l.l. There was nothing to oxidize the steel in the emptiness of s.p.a.ce. It simply melted and vaporized, condensing some feet away from the energy beam, turning the surface it touched into gray, powdery dullness.

Long swung back toward the s.h.i.+p.

Inside again, he took off his helmet, white and thick with frost that collected as soon as he had entered.

The first thing he heard was Swenson's voice coming over the radio in this almost unrecognizable rage; "...straight to the Commissioner. d.a.m.n it, there are rules to this game!"

Rioz sat back, unbothered. "Look, it hit my sector. I was late spotting it and I chased it into yours. You couldn't have gotten it with Mars for a backstop. That's all there is to it-you back, Long?"

He cut contact.

The signal b.u.t.ton raged at him, but he paid no attention.

"He's going to the Commissioner?" Long asked.

"Not a chance. He just goes on like that because it breaks the monotony. He doesn't mean anything by it. He knows it's our sh.e.l.l. And how do you like that hunk of stuff, Ted?"

"Pretty good."

"Pretty good? It's terrific! Hold on. I'm setting it swinging."

The side jets spat steam and the s.h.i.+p started a slow rotation about the sh.e.l.l. The sh.e.l.l followed it. In thirty minutes, they were a gigantic bolo spinning in emptiness. Long checked the Ephemeris Ephemeris for the position of Deimos. for the position of Deimos.

At a precisely calculated moment, the cables released their magnetic field and the sh.e.l.l went streaking off tangentially in a trajectory that would, in a day or so, bring it within p.r.o.nging distance of the sh.e.l.l stores on the Martian satellite.

Rioz watched it go. He felt good. He turned to Long. "This is one fine day for us."

"What about Hilder's speech?" asked Long.

"What? Who? Oh, that. Listen, if I had to worry about every thing some d.a.m.ned Grounder said, I'd never get any sleep. Forget it."

"I don't think we should forget it."

"You're nuts. Don't bother me about it, will you? Get some sleep instead."

4.

Ted Long found the breadth and height of the city's main thoroughfare exhilarating. It had been two months since the Commissioner had declared a moratorium on scavenging and had pulled all s.h.i.+ps out of s.p.a.ce, but this feeling of a stretched-out vista had not stopped thrilling Long. Even the thought that the moratorium was called pending a decision on the part of Earth to enforce its new insistence on water economy, by deciding upon a ration limit for scavenging, did not cast him entirely down.

The roof of the avenue was painted a luminous light blue, perhaps as an old-fas.h.i.+oned imitation of Earth's sky. Ted wasn't sure. The walls were lit with the store windows that pierced it.

Off in the distance, over the hum of traffic and the sloughing noise of people's feet pa.s.sing him, he could hear the intermittent blasting as new channels were being bored into Mars' crust. All his life he remembered such blastings. The ground he walked on had been part of solid, unbroken rock when he was born. The city was growing and would keep on growing-if Earth would only let it.

He turned off at a cross street, narrower, not quite as brilliantly lit, shop windows giving way to apartment houses, each with its row of lights along the front facade. Shoppers and traffic gave way to slower-paced individuals and to squalling youngsters who had as yet evaded the maternal summons to the evening meal.

At the last minute, Long remembered the social amenities and stopped off at a corner water store.

He pa.s.sed over his canteen. "Fill 'er up."

The plump storekeeper unscrewed the cap, c.o.c.ked an eye into the opening. He shook it a little and let it gurgle. "Not much left," he said cheerfully.

"No," agreed Long.

The storekeeper trickled water in, holding the neck of the canteen close to the hose tip to avoid spillage. The volume gauge whirred. He screwed the cap back on.

Long pa.s.sed over the coins and took his canteen. It clanked against his hip now with a pleasing heaviness. It would never do to visit a family without a full canteen. Among the boys, it didn't matter. Not as much, anyway.

He entered the hallway of No. 27, climbed a short flight of stairs, and paused with his thumb on the signal.

The sound of voices could be heard quite plainly.

One was a woman's voice, somewhat shrill. "It's all right for you to have your Scavenger friends here, isn't it? I'm supposed to be thankful you manage to get home two months a year. Oh, it's quite enough that you spend a day or two with me. After that, it's the Scavengers again.

"I've been home for a long time now," said a male voice, "and this is business. For Mars' sake, let up, Dora. They'll be here soon."

Long decided to wait a moment before signaling. It might give them a chance to hit a more neutral topic.

"What do I care if they come?" retorted Dora. "Let them hear me. And I'd just as soon the Commissioner kept the moratorium on permanently. You hear me?"

"And what would we live on?" came the male voice hotly. "You tell me that."

"I'll tell you. You can make a decent, honorable living right here on Mars, just like everybody else. I'm the only one in this apartment house that's a Scavenger widow. That's what I am-a widow. I'm worse than a widow, because if I were a widow, I'd at least have a chance to marry someone else-what did you say?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Oh, I know what you said. Now listen here, d.i.c.k Swenson-"

"I only said," cried Swenson, "that now I know why Scavengers usually don't marry."

"You shouldn't have either. I'm tired of having every person in the neighborhood pity me and smirk and ask when you're coming home. Other people can be mining engineers and administrators and even tunnel borers. At least tunnel borers' wives have a decent home life and their children don't grow up like vagabonds. Peter might as well not have a father-"

A thin boy-soprano voice made its way through the door. It was somewhat more distant, as though it were in another room. "Hey, Mom, what's a vagabond?"

Dora's voice rose a notch. "Peter! You keep your mind on your homework."

Swenson said in a low voice, "It's not right to talk this way in front of the kid. What kind of notions will he get about me?"

"Stay home then and teach him better notions."