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.