“But how can you be so blind? How many times have you fellows been out for over six months without a break?”
Rioz said, “That’s different.”
“Because you’re Martians? Because you’re professional Scavengers?”
“No. Because we’re not on a flight. We can put back for Mars any time we want to.”
“But you don’t want to. That’s my point. Earthmen have tremendous ships with libraries of films, with a crew of fifteen plus passengers. Still, they can only stay out six months maximum. Martian Scavengers have a two-room ship with only one partner. But we can stick it out more than six months.”
Dora said, “I suppose you want to stay in a ship for a year and go to Saturn.”
“Why not, Dora?” said Long. “We can do it. Don’t you see we can? Earthmen can’t. They’ve got a real world. They’ve got open sky and fresh food, all the air and water they want. Getting into a ship is a terrible change for them. More than six months is too much for them for that very reason. Martians are different. We’ve been living on a ship our entire lives.
“That’s all Mars is—a ship. It’s just a big ship forty-five hundred miles across with one tiny room in it occupied by fifty thousand people. It’s closed in like a ship. We breathe packaged air and drink packaged water, which we repurify over and over. We eat the same food rations we eat aboard ship. When we get into a ship, it’s the same thing we’ve known all our lives. We can stand it for a lot more than a year if we have to.”
Dora said, “Dick, too?”
“We all can.”