"Nice stuff," he said, kind of mincing. "Buddy, do you know what you can do with your sandgems and your windstones?"
"We brought back some other things too. There was a good bit of uranium and—"
"We don't need it!" He was getting purple. "We don't need anything from you."
"And maybe we don't need you." I was getting sort of fired up myself. "Carversville is self-sufficient now. You can't give us anything."
"Well, why the hell don't you stay there? Why don't all of you stay off Earth? There's no place for you here."
I could have pointed out that we brought things that Earth really needed, that Mars and Venus had literally worlds of natural resources, while Earth had almost finished hers. But he began to quiet down then and I began to feel the loneliness again, the sense of loss. You can't go home again ... that phrase kept poking around in my skull.
Suddenly he sat up and looked straight at me, and his eyes really focused for the first time. "What lousy luck. What incredibly lousy luck. And how could anyone have known?"
It wasn't hard to peg what he was talking about. "It was probably good luck that the first space crew was selected the way it was," I said. "Otherwise you'd have had a dead ship full of dead men and no knowing why. But that one man brought the ship back."
"Yeah, yeah. I know. And the scientists figured everything out. About radiation in space being lethal to almost all types of man. But there was one thing that made a man immune. One thing."
"The scientists tried to find a protective covering that would be practicable. They tried to synthesize slaves that would protect you. It wasn't our fault that they couldn't."