“Well, what of it?” Dora sipped her coffee and smiled gaily. “If you want my opinion, it’s a good thing. It’s time all you Scavengers found yourselves a nice, steady job here on Mars. I mean it. It’s no life to be running all over space—”
“Please, Dora,” said Swenson.
Rioz came close to a snort.
Dora raised her eyebrows. “I’m just giving my opinions.”
Long said, “Please feel free to do so. But I would like to say something. Fifty thousand is just a detail. We know that Earth—or at least Hilder’s party—wants to make political capital out of a campaign for water economy, so we’re in a bad hole. We’ve got to get water somehow or they’ll shut us down altogether, right?”
“Well, sure,” said Swenson.
“But the question is how, right?”
“If it’s only getting water,” said Rioz in a sudden gush of words, “there’s only one thing to do and you know it. If the Grounders won’t give us water, we’ll take it. The water doesn’t belong to them just because their fathers and grandfathers were too damned sick-yellow ever to leave their fat planet. Water belongs to people wherever they are. We’re people and the water’s ours, too. We have a right to it.”
“How do you propose taking it?” asked Long.
“Easy! They’ve got oceans of water on Earth. They can’t post a guard over every square mile. We can sink down on the night side of the planet any time we want, fill our shells, then get away. How can they stop us?”