The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (2 page)

"What are you after?" he asked.

"I thought I'd get Hilder," said Long.

Rioz propped his rump on the corner of a table shelf. He
lifted a conical can of milk from the companion shelf just above his head. Its
point popped under pressure. He swirled it gently as he waited for it to warm.

"What for?" he said. He upended the cone and
sucked noisily.

"Thought I'd listen."

"I think it's a waste of power."

Long looked up, frowning. "It's customary to allow free
use of personal video sets."

"Within reason," retorted Rioz.

Their eyes met challengingly. Rioz had the rangy body, the
gaunt, cheek-sunken face that was almost the hallmark of the Martian Scavenger,
those Spacers who patiently haunted the space routes between Earth and Mars.
Pale blue eyes were set keenly in the brown, lined face which, in turn, stood
darkly out against the white surrounding syntho-fur that lined the up-turned
collar of his leathtic space jacket.

Long was altogether paler and softer. He bore some of the
marks of the Grounder, although no second-generation Martian could be a
Grounder in the sense that Earthmen were. His own collar was thrown back and
his dark brown hair freely exposed.

"What do you call within reason?" demanded Long.

Rioz's thin lips grew thinner. He said, "Considering
that we're not even going to make expenses this trip, the way it looks, any
power drain at all is outside reason."

Long said, "If we're losing money, hadn't you better
get back to your post? It's your watch."

Rioz grunted and ran a thumb and forefinger over the stubble
on his chin. He got up and trudged to the door, his soft, heavy boots muting
the sound of his steps. He paused to look at the thermostat, then turned with a
flare of fury.

"I
thought
it was hot. Where do you think you
are?"

Long said, "Forty degrees isn't excessive."

"For you it isn't, maybe. But this is space, not a
heated office at the iron mines." Rioz swung the thermostat control down
to minimum with a quick thumb movement. "Sun's warm enough."

"The galley isn't on Sunside."

"It'll percolate through, damn it."

Rioz stepped through the door and Long stared after him for
a long moment, then turned back to the video. He did not turn up the
thermostat.

The picture was still flickering badly, but it would have to
do. Long folded a chair down out of the wall. He leaned forward, waiting
through the formal announcement, the momentary pause before the slow
dissolution of the curtain, the spotlight picking out the well-known bearded
figure which grew as it was brought forward until it filled the screen.

The voice, impressive even through the flutings and
croakings induced by the electron storms of twenty millions of miles, began:

"Friends! My fellow citizens of Earth. . ."

Rioz's eye caught the flash of the radio signal as he
stepped into the pilot room. For one moment, the palms of his hands grew clammy
when it seemed to him that it was a radar pip; but that was only his guilt
speaking. He should not have left the pilot room while on duty theoretically,
though all Scavengers did it. Still, it was the standard nightmare, this
business of a strike turning up during just those five minutes when one knocked
off for a quick coffee because it seemed certain that space was clear. And the
nightmare had been known to happen, too.

Rioz threw in the multi-scanner. It was a waste of power,
but while he was thinking about it, he might as well make sure.

Space was clear except for the far-distant echoes from the
neighboring ships on the scavenging line.

He hooked up the radio circuit, and the blond, long-nosed
head of Richard Swenson, copilot of the next ship on the Marsward side, filled
it.

"Hey, Mario," said Swenson.

"Hi. What's new?"

There was a second and a fraction of pause between that and
Swen-son's next comment, since the speed of electromagnetic radiation is not
infinite.

"What a day I've
had."

"Something happened?" Rioz asked.

"I had a strike."

"Well, good."

"Sure, if I'd roped it in," said Swenson morosely.

"What happened?"

"Damn it, I headed in the wrong direction."

Rioz knew better than to laugh. He said, "How did you
do that?"

"It wasn't my fault. The trouble was the shell was
moving way out of the ecliptic. Can you imagine the stupidity of a pilot that
can't work the release maneuver decently? How was I to know? I got the distance
of the shell and let it go at that. I just assumed its orbit was in the usual
trajectory family. Wouldn't you? I started along what I thought was a good line
of intersection and it was five minutes before I noticed the distance was still
going up. The pips were taking their sweet time returning. So then I took the
angular projections of the thing, and it was too late to catch up with
it."

"Any of the other boys getting it?"

"No. It's 'way out of the ecliptic and'll keep on going
forever. That's not what bothers me so much. It was only an inner shell.

But I hate to tell you how many tons of propulsion I wasted
getting up speed and then getting back to station. You should have heard
Canute."

Canute was Richard Swenson's brother and partner.

"Mad, huh?" said Rioz.

"Mad? Like to have killed me! But then we've been out
five months now and it's getting kind of sticky. You know."

"I know."

"How are you doing, Mario?"

Rioz made a spitting gesture. "About that much this
trip. Two shells in the last two weeks and I had to chase each one for six
hours."

"Big ones?"

"Are you kidding? I could have scaled them down to
Phobos by hand. This is the worst trip I've ever had."

"How much longer are you staying?"

"For my part, we can quit tomorrow. We've only been out
two months and it's got so I'm chewing Long out all the time."

There was a pause over and above the electromagnetic lag.

Swenson said, "What's he like, anyway? Long, I
mean."

Rioz looked over his shoulder. He could hear the soft,
crackly mutter of the video in the galley. "I can't make him out. He says
to me about a week after the start of the trip, 'Mario, why are you a
Scavenger?' I just look at him and say, 'To make a living. Why do you suppose?'
I mean, what the hell kind of a question is that? Why is anyone a Scavenger?

"Anyway, he says, 'That's not it, Mario.'
He's
telling
me,
you see. He says, 'You're a Scavenger because this is part of the
Martian way.'"

Swenson said, "And what did he mean by that?"

Rioz shrugged. "I never asked him. Right now he's
sitting in there listening to the ultra-microwave from Earth. He's listening to
some Grounder called Hilder."

"Hilder? A Grounder politician, an Assemblyman or
something, isn't he?"

"That's right. At least, I think that's right. Long is
always doing things like that. He brought about fifteen pounds of books with
him, all about Earth. Just plain dead weight, you know."

"Well, he's your partner. And talking about partners, I
think I'll get back on the job. If I miss another strike, there'll be murder
around here."

He was gone and Rioz leaned back. He watched the even green
line that was the pulse scanner. He tried the multi-scanner a moment Space was
still clear.

He felt a little better. A bad spell is always worse if the
Scavengers all about you are pulling in shell after shell; if the shells go
spiraling down to the Phobos scrap forges with everyone's brand welded on
except your own. Then, too, he had managed to work off some of his resentment
toward Long.

It was a mistake teaming up with Long. It was always a mistake
to team up with a tenderfoot. They thought what you wanted was conversation,
especially Long, with his eternal theories about Mars and its great new role in
human progress. That was the way he said it-Human Progress: the Martian Way;
the New Creative Minority. And all the time what Rioz wanted wasn't talk, but a
strike, a few shells to call their own.

At that, he hadn't any choice, really. Long was pretty well
known down on Mars and made good pay as a mining engineer. He was a friend of
Commissioner Sankov and he'd been out on one or two short scavenging missions
before. You can't turn a fellow down flat before a tryout, even though it did
look funny. Why should a mining engineer with a comfortable job and good money
want to muck around in space?

Rioz never asked Long that question. Scavenger partners are
forced too close together to make curiosity desirable, or sometimes even safe.
But Long talked so much that he answered the question.

"I had to come out here, Mario," he said.
"The future of Mars isn't in the mines; it's in space."

Rioz wondered how it would be to try a trip alone. Everyone
said it was impossible. Even discounting lost opportunities when one man had to
go off watch to sleep or attend to other things, it was well known that one man
alone in space would become intolerably depressed in a relatively short while.

Taking a partner along made a six-month trip possible. A
regular crew would be better, but no Scavenger could make money on a ship large
enough to carry one. The capital it would take in propulsion alone!

Even two didn't find it exactly fun in space. Usually you
had to change partners each trip and you could stay out longer with some than
with others. Look at Richard and Canute Swenson. They teamed up every five or
six trips because they were brothers. And yet whenever they did, it was a case
of constantly mounting tension and antagonism after the first week.

Oh well. Space was clear. Rioz would feel a little better if
he went back in the galley and smoothed down some of the bickering with Long.
He might as well show he was an old spacehand who took the irritations of space
as they came.

He stood up, walked the three steps necessary to reach the
short, narrow corridor that tied together the two rooms of the spaceship.

Once again Rioz stood in the doorway for a moment, watching.
Long was intent on the flickering screen.

Rioz said gruffly, "I'm shoving up the thermostat. It's
all right—we can spare the power."

Long nodded. "If you like."

Rioz took a hesitant step forward. Space was clear, so to
hell with sitting and looking at a blank, green, pipless line. He said,
"What's the Grounder been talking about?"

"History of space travel mostly. Old stuff, but he's
doing it well. He's giving the whole works—color cartoons, trick photography,
stills from old films, everything."

As if to illustrate Long's remarks, the bearded figure faded
out of view, and a cross-sectional view of a spaceship flitted onto the screen.
Hilder's voice continued, pointing out features of interest that appeared in
schematic color. The communications system of the ship outlined itself in red
as he talked about it, the storerooms, the proton micropile drive, the
cybernetic circuits . . .

Then Hilder was back on the screen. "But this is only
the travel-head of the ship. What moves it? What gets it off the Earth?"

Everyone knew what moved a spaceship, but Hilder's voice was
like a drug. He made spaceship propulsion sound like the secret of the ages,
like an ultimate revelation. Even Rioz felt a slight tingling of suspense, though
he had spent the greater part of his life aboard ship.

Hilder went on. "Scientists call it different names.
They call it the Law of Action and Reaction. Sometimes they call it Newton's
Third Law. Sometimes they call it Conservation of Momentum. But we don't have
to call it any name. We can just use our common sense. When we swim, we push
water backward and move forward ourselves. When we walk, we push back against
the ground and move forward. When we fly a gyroflivver, we push air backward
and move forward.

"Nothing can move forward unless something else moves
backward. It's the old principle of 'You can't get something for nothing.'

"Now imagine a spaceship that weighs a hundred thousand
tons lifting off Earth. To do that, something else must be moved downward.
Since a spaceship is extremely heavy, a great deal of material must be moved
downward. So much material, in fact, that there is no place to keep it all
aboard ship. A special compartment must be built behind the ship to hold
it."

Again Hilder faded out and the ship returned. It shrank and
a truncated cone appeared behind it. In bright yellow, words appeared within
it: MATERIAL TO BE THROWN AWAY.

"But now," said Hilder, "the total weight of
the ship is much greater. You need still more propulsion and still more."

The ship shrank enormously to add on another larger shell
and still another immense one. The ship proper, the travel-head, was a little
dot on the screen, a glowing red dot.

Rioz said, "Hell, this is kindergarten stuff."

"Not to the people he's speaking to, Mario,"
replied Long. "Earth isn't Mars. There must be billions of Earth people
who've never even seen a spaceship; don't know the first thing about it."

Hilder was saying, "When the material inside the
biggest shell is used up, the shell is detached. It's thrown away, too."

The outermost shell came loose, wobbled about the screen.

"Then the second one goes," said Hilder, "and
then, if the trip is a long one, the last is ejected."

The ship was just a red dot now, with three shells shifting
and moving, lost in space.

Hilder said, "These shells represent a hundred thousand
tons of tungsten, magnesium, aluminum, and steel. They are gone forever from
Earth. Mars is ringed by Scavengers, waiting along the routes of space travel,
waiting for the cast-off shells, netting and branding them, saving them for
Mars. Not one cent of payment reaches Earth for them. They are salvage. They
belong to the ship that finds them."