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.