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.”
Rioz said, “We risk our investment and our lives. If we don’t pick them up, no one gets them. What loss is that to Earth?”
“Look,” said Long, “he’s been talking about nothing but the drain that Mars, Venus, and the Moon put on Earth. This is just another item of loss.”