“Well, Dick can’t. It’s all very well for you, Ted Long, and this shell stealer here, this Mario, to talk about jaunting off for a year. You’re not married. Dick is. He has a wife and he has a child and that’s enough for him. He can just get a regular job right here on Mars. Why, my goodness, suppose you go to Saturn and find there’s no water there. How’ll you get back? Even if you had water left, you’d be out of food. It’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.”
“No. Now listen,” said Long tightly. “I’ve thought this thing out. I’ve talked to Commissioner Sankov and he’ll help. But we’ve got to have ships and men. I can’t get them. The men won’t listen to me. I’m green. You two are known and respected. You’re veterans. If you back me, even if you don’t go yourselves, if you’ll just help me sell this thing to the rest, get volunteers—”
“First,” said Rioz grumpily, “you’ll have to do a lot more explaining. Once we get to Saturn, where’s the water?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” said Long. “That’s why it’s got to be Saturn. The water there is just floating around in space for the taking.”
5
When Hamish Sankov had come to Mars, there was no such thing as a native Martian. Now there were two-hundred-odd babies whose grandfathers had been born on Mars—native in the third generation.
When he had come as a boy in his teens, Mars had been scarcely more than a huddle of grounded spaceships connected by sealed underground tunnels. Through the years, he had seen buildings grow and burrow widely, thrusting blunt snouts up into the thin, unbreathable atmosphere. He had seen huge storage depots spring up into which spaceships and their loads could be swallowed whole. He had seen the mines grow from nothing to a huge gouge in the Martian crust, while the population of Mars grew from fifty to fifty thousand.
It made him feel old, these long memories—they and the even dimmer memories induced by the presence of this Earthman before him. His visitor brought up those long-forgotten scraps of thought about a soft-warm world that was as kind and gentle to mankind as the mother’s womb.
The Earthman seemed fresh from that womb. Not very tall, not very lean; in fact, distinctly plump. Dark hair with a neat little wave in it, a neat little mustache, and neatly scrubbed skin. His clothing was right in style and as fresh and neatly turned as plastek could be.
Sankov’s own clothes were of Martian manufacture, serviceable and clean, but many years behind the times. His face was craggy and lined, his hair was pure white, and his Adam’s apple wobbled when he talked.