The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B Read Free Page A

the
Scavengers on the route to Mars; little, grinning caricatures of ships,
reaching out wiry, tenuous arms that groped for the tumbling, empty shells,
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!
    "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 washing water for the Spacers, water to run their industries, water
for the hydroponic factories they claim to be setting up—but even water to
throw away by the millions of tons.
    "What is the propulsive force that spaceships 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 spaceship leaves Earth carrying nearly a million
tons—not pounds, tons— of water, for the sole purpose of driving it into
space so that it may speed up or slow down.
    "Our ancestors burned the oil of Earth madly and
wilfully. They destroyed its coal recklessly. We despise and condemn them for
that, but at least they had this excuse—they thought that when the need arose,
substitutes would be found. And they were right. We have our plankton farms and
our proton micropiles.
    "But there is no substitute 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 damn fool is deliberately— What's the matter?"
    Rioz had risen uneasily to his feet. "I ought to be
watching the pips."
    "The hell 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 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