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 tory 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 life. 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, tumbling 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.
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 of 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 space 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 shell. There was nothing to oxidize the steel in the emptiness of space. It simply melted and vaporized, condensing some feet away from the energy beam, turning the surface it touched into a gray, powdery dullness.
Long swung back towards the ship.
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. Damn 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 button 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 shell. 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 ship started a slow rotation about the shell. The shell fallowed it. In thirty minutes, they were a gigantic bolo spinning in emptiness. Long checked the Ephemeris for the position of Deimos.
At a precisely calculated moment, the cables released their magnetic field and the shell went streaking off tangentially in a trajectory that would, in a day or so, bring it within pronging distance of the shell 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 damned 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.”
IV
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 ships out of space, 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-fashioned 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 passing 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, nar
rower, 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 squawling 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 passed over his canteen. “Fill 'er up.”
The plump storekeeper unscrewed the cap, cocked 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 passed 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 managed 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 many someone else—-What did you say?”
“'Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Oh, I know what you said. Now listen here, Dick 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.”
Peter's voice called out again. “Hey, Mom, I'm going to be a Scavenger when I grow up.”
Footsteps sounded rapidly. There was a momentary hiatus in the sounds, then a piercing, “Mom! Hey, Mom! Leggo my ear! What did I do?” and a snuffling silence.
Long seized the chance. He worked the signal vigorously.
Swenson opened the door, brushing down his hair with both hands.
“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?”
“I 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 thousands 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 o
n 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 pan 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 Co-ordinator, 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.