The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (8 page)

The steam jet ceased.

Long bent in his seat and covered his eyes. He hadn't eaten
in two days. He could eat now, though. Not another planetoid was close enough
to interrupt them, even if it began an approach that very moment.

Back on the planetoid's surface, Swenson said, "All the
time I watched that damned rock coming down, I kept saying to myself, 'This
can't happen. We can't let it happen.'"

"Hell," said Rioz, "we were all nervous. Did
you see Jim Davis? He was green. I was a little jumpy myself."

"That's not it. It wasn't just—dying, you know. I was
thinking— I know it's funny, but I can't help it—I was thinking that Dora warned
me I'd get myself killed, she'll never let me hear the last of it. Isn't that a
crummy sort of attitude at a time like that?"

"Listen," said Rioz, "you wanted to get
married, so you got married. Why come to me with your troubles?"

The flotilla, welded into a single unit, was returning over
its mighty course from Saturn to Mars. Each day it flashed over a length of
space it had taken nine days outward.

Ted Long had put the entire crew on emergency. With
twenty-five ships embedded in the planetoid taken out of Saturn's rings and
unable to move or maneuver independently, the co-ordination of their power
sources into unified blasts was a ticklish problem. The jarring that took place
on the first day of travel nearly shook them out from under their hair.

That, at least, smoothed itself out as the velocity raced
upward under the steady thrust from behind. They passed the
one-hundred-thousand-mile-an-hour mark late on the second day, and climbed
steadily toward the million-mile mark and beyond.

Long's ship, which formed the needle point of the frozen
fleet, was the only one which possessed a five-way view of space. It was an
uncomfortable position under the circumstances. Long found himself watching
tensely, imagining somehow that the stars would slowly begin to slip backward,
to whizz past them, under the influence of the multi-ship's tremendous rate of
travel.

They didn't, of course. They remained nailed to the black
backdrop, their distance scorning with patient immobility any speed mere man
could achieve.

The men complained bitterly after the first few days. It was
not only that they were deprived of the space-float. They were burdened by much
more than the ordinary pseudo-gravity field of the ships, by the effects of the
fierce acceleration under which they were living. Long himself was weary to
death of the relentless pressure against hydraulic cushions.

They took to shutting off the jet thrusts one hour out of
every four and Long fretted.

It had been just over a year that he had last seen Mars
shrinking in an observation window from this ship, which had then been an
independent entity. What had happened since then? Was the colony still there?

In something like a growing panic, Long sent out radio
pulses toward Mars daily, with the combined power of twenty-five ships behind
it. There was no answer. He expected none. Mars and Saturn were on opposite
sides of the Sun now, and until he mounted high enough above the ecliptic to
get the Sun well beyond the line connecting himself and Mars, solar
interference would prevent any signal from getting through.

High above the outer rim of the Asteroid Belt, they reached
maximum velocity. With short spurts of power from first one side jet, then
another, the huge vessel reversed itself. The composite jet in the rear began
its mighty roaring once again, but now the result was deceleration.

They passed a hundred million miles over the Sun, curving
down to intersect the orbit of Mars.

A week out of Mars, answering signals were heard for the
first time, fragmentary, ether-torn, and incomprehensible, but they were
coining from Mars. Earth and Venus were at angles sufficiently different to
leave no doubt of that.

Long relaxed. There were still humans on Mars, at any rate.

Two days out of Mars, the signal was strong and clear and
Sankov was at the other end.

Sankov said, "Hello, son. It's three in the morning
here. Seems like people have no consideration for an old man. Dragged me right
out of bed."

"I'm sorry, sir."

"Don't be. They were following orders. I'm afraid to
ask, son. Anyone hurt? Maybe dead?"

"No deaths, sir. Not one."

"And-and the water? Any left?"

Long said, with an effort at nonchalance,
"Enough."

"In that case, get home as fast as you can. Don't take
any chances, of course."

"There's trouble, then."

"Fair to middling. When will you come down?"

"Two days. Can you hold out that long?"

"I'll hold out."

Forty hours later Mars had grown to a ruddy-orange ball that
filled the ports and they were in the final planet-landing spiral.

"Slowly," Long said to himself,
"slowly." Under these conditions, even the thin atmosphere of Mars
could do dreadful damage if they moved through it too quickly.

Since they came in from well above the ecliptic, their
spiral passed from north to south. A polar cap shot whitely below them, then
the much smaller one of the summer hemisphere, the large one again, the small
one, at longer and longer intervals. The planet approached closer, the
landscape began to show features.

"Prepare for landing!" called Long.

Sankov did his best to look placid, which was difficult
considering how closely the boys had shaved their return. But it had worked out
well enough.

Until a few days ago, he had no sure knowledge that they had
survived. It seemed more likely—inevitable, almost—that they were nothing but
frozen corpses somewhere in the trackless stretches from Mars to Saturn, new
planetoids that had once been alive.

The Committee had been dickering with him for weeks before
the news had come. They had insisted on his signature to the paper for the sake
of appearances. It would look like an agreement, voluntarily and mutually
arrived at. But Sankov knew well that, given complete obstinacy on his part,
they would act unilaterally and be damned with appearances. It seemed fairly
certain that Hilder's election was secure now and they would take the chance of
arousing a reaction of sympathy for Mars.

So he dragged out the negotiations, dangling before them
always the possibility of surrender.

And then he heard from Long and concluded the deal quickly.

The papers had lain before him and he had made a last
statement for the benefit of the reporters who were present.

He said, "Total imports of water from Earth are twenty
million tons a year. This is declining as we develop our own piping system. If
I sign this paper agreeing to an embargo, our industry will be paralyzed, any
possibilities of expansion will halt. It looks to me as if that can't be what's
in Earth's mind, can it?"

Their eyes met his and held only a hard glitter. Assemblyman
Digby had already been replaced and they were unanimous against him.

The Committee Chairman impatiently pointed out, "You
have said all this before."

"I know, but right now I'm kind of getting ready to
sign and I want it clear in my head. Is Earth set and determined to bring us to
an end here?"

"Of course not. Earth is interested in conserving its
irreplaceable water supply, nothing else."

"You have one and a half quintillion tons of water on
Earth."

The Committee Chairman said, "We cannot spare
water."

And Sankov had signed.

That had been the final note he wanted. Earth had one and a
half quintillion tons of water and could spare none of it.

Now, a day and a half later, the Committee and the reporters
waited in the spaceport dome. Through thick, curving windows, they could see
the bare and empty grounds of Mars Spaceport.

The Committee Chairman asked with annoyance, "How much
longer do we have to wait? And, if you don't mind, what are we waiting
for?"

Sankov said, "Some of our boys have been out in space,
out past the asteroids."

The Committee Chairman removed a pair of spectacles and
cleaned them with a snowy-white handkerchief. "And they're
returning?"

"They are."

The Chairman shrugged, lifted his eyebrows in the direction
of the reporters.

In the smaller room adjoining, a knot of women and children
clustered about another window. Sankov stepped back a bit to cast a glance
toward them. He would much rather have been with them, been part of their
excitement and tension. He, like them, had waited over a year now. He, like
them, had thought, over and over again, that the men must be dead.

"You see that?" said Sankov, pointing.

"Hey!" cried a reporter. "It's a ship!"

A confused shouting came from the adjoining room.

It wasn't a ship so much as a bright dot obscured by a
drifting white cloud. The cloud grew larger and began to have form. It was a double
streak against the sky, the lower ends billowing out and upward again. As it
dropped still closer, the bright dot at the upper end took on a crudely
cylindrical form.

It was rough and craggy, but where the sunlight hit,
brilliant highlights bounced back.

The cylinder dropped toward the ground with the ponderous
slowness characteristic of space vessels. It hung suspended on those blasting
jets and settled down upon the recoil of tons of matter hurling downward like a
tired man dropping into his easy chair.

And as it did so, a silence fell upon all within the dome.
The women and children in one room, the politicians and reporters in the other
remained frozen, heads craned incredulously upward.

The cylinder's landing flanges, extending far below the two
rear jets, touched ground and sank into the pebbly morass. And then the ship
was motionless and the jet action ceased.

But the silence continued in the dome. It continued for a
long time.

Men came clambering down the sides of the immense vessel,
inching down, down the two-mile trek to the ground, with spikes on their shoes
and ice axes in their hands. They were gnats against the blinding surface.

One of the reporters croaked, "What is it?"

"That," said Sankov calmly, "happens to be a
chunk of matter that spent its time scooting around Saturn as part of its
rings. Our boys fitted it out with travel-head and jets and ferried it home. It
just turns out the fragments in Saturn's rings are made up out of ice."

He spoke into a continuing deathlike silence. "That
thing that looks like a spaceship is just a mountain of hard water. If it were
standing like that on Earth, it would be melting into a puddle and maybe it
would break under its own weight. Mars is colder and has less gravity, so
there's no such danger.

"Of course, once we get this thing really organized, we
can have water stations on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and on the
asteroids. We can scale in chunks of Saturn's rings and pick them up and send
them on at the various stations. Our Scavengers are good at that sort of thing.

"We'll have all the water we need. That one chunk you
see is just under a cubic mile—or about what Earth would send us in two hundred
years. The boys used quite a bit of it coming back from Saturn.

They made it in five weeks, they tell me, and used up about
a hundred million tons. But, Lord, that didn't make any dent at all in that
mountain. Are you getting all this, boys?"

He turned to the reporters. There was no doubt they were
getting it.

He said, "Then get this, too. Earth is worried about
its water supply. It only has one and a half quintillion tons. It can't spare
us a single ton out of it. Write down that we folks on Mars are worried about
Earth and don't want anything to happen to Earth people. Write down that we'll
sell water to Earth. Write down that we'll let them have million-ton lots for a
reasonable fee. Write down that in ten years, we figure we can sell it in
cubic-mile lots. Write down that Earth can quit worrying because Mars can sell
it all the water it needs and wants."

The Committee Chairman was past hearing. He was feeling the
future rushing in. Dimly he could see the reporters grinning as they wrote
furiously.

Grinning.

He could hear the grin become laughter on Earth as Mars
turned the tables so neatly on the anti-Wasters. He could hear the laughter
thunder from every continent when word of the fiasco spread. And he could see
the abyss, deep and black as space, into which would drop forever the political
hopes of John Hilder and of every opponent of space flight left on Earth—his
own included, of course.

In the adjoining room, Dora Swenson screamed with joy, and
Peter, grown two inches, jumped up and down, calling, "Daddy! Daddy!"

Richard Swenson had just stepped off the extremity of the
flange and, face showing clearly through the clear silicone of the headpiece,
marched toward the dome.

"Did you ever see a guy look so happy?" asked Ted
Long. "Maybe there's something in this marriage business."

"Ah, you've just been out in space too long," Rioz
said.

The city hovered, then settled silently through the early
morning darkness toward the broad expanse of heath which the planet's Proctors
had designated as its landing place. At this hour, the edge of the misty acres
of diamonds which were the Greater Magellanic Cloud was just beginning to touch
the western horizon; the whole cloud covered nearly 35° of the sky. The cloud
would set at 5:12 a.m.; at 6:00 the near edge of the home galaxy would rise,
but, during the summer the sun rose earlier and would blot it out.

All of which was quite all right with Mayor Amalfi. The fact
that no significant amount of the home galaxy would begin to show in the night
sky for months was one of the reasons why he had chosen this planet to settle
on. The situation confronting the city posed problems enough without its being
complicated by an unsatisfiable homesickness.