Isaac Asimov - Robot Dreams

He entered the hallway of No. 27, climbed a short flight of stairs, and paused with his thumb on the signal.

The sound of voices could be heard quite plainly.

One was a woman’s voice, somewhat shrill. "It’s all right for you to have your Scavenger friends here, isn’t it? I’m supposed to be thankful you manage to get home two months a year. Oh, it’s quite enough that you spend a day or two with me. After that, it’s the Scavengers again.

"I’ve been home for a long time now," said a male voice, "and this is business. For Mars’ sake, let up, Dora. They’ll be here soon."

Long decided to wait a moment before signaling. It might give them a chance to hit a more neutral topic.

"What do I care if they come?" retorted Dora. "Let them hear me. And I’d just as soon the Commissioner kept the moratorium on permanently. You hear me?"

"And what would we live on?" came the male voice hotly. "You tell me that."

"I’ll tell you. You can make a decent, honorable living right here on Mars, just like everybody else. I’m the only one in this apartment house that’s a Scavenger widow. That’s what I am – a widow. I’m worse than a widow, because if I were a widow, I’d at least have a chance to marry someone else – what did you say?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Oh, I know what you said. Now listen here, Dick Swenson – "

"I only said," cried Swenson, "that now I know why Scavengers usually don’t marry."

"You shouldn’t have either. I’m tired of having every person in the neighborhood pity me and smirk and ask when you’re coming home. Other people can be mining engineers and administrators and even tunnel borers. At least tunnel borers’ wives have a decent home life and their children don’t grow up like vagabonds. Peter might as well not have a father – "

A thin boy-soprano voice made its way through the door. It was somewhat more distant, as though it were in another room. "Hey, Mom, what’s a vagabond?"

Dora’s voice rose a notch. "Peter! You keep your mind on your homework."

Swenson said in a low voice, "It’s not right to talk this way in front of the kid. What kind of notions will he get about me?"

"Stay home then and teach him better notions."

Peter’s voice called out again. "Hey, Mom, I’m going to be a Scavenger when I grow up."

Footsteps sounded rapidly. There was a momentary hiatus in the sounds, then a piercing, "Mom! Hey, Mom! Leggo my ear! What did I do?" and a snuffling silence.

Long seized the chance. He worked the signal vigorously.

Swenson opened the door, brushing down his hair with both hands.

"Hello, Ted," he said in a subdued voice. Then loudly, "Ted’s here, Dora. Where’s Mario, Ted?"

Long said, "He’ll be here in a while."

Dora came bustling out of the next room, a small, dark woman with a pinched nose, and hair, just beginning to show touches of gray, combed off the forehead.

"Hello, Ted. Have you eaten?"

"Quite well, thanks. I haven’t interrupted you, have I?"

"Not at all. We finished ages ago. Would you like some coffee?"

"I think so." Ted unslung his canteen and offered it.

"Oh, goodness, that’s all right. We’ve plenty of water."

"I insist."

"Well then – "

Back into the kitchen she went. Through the swinging door, Long caught a glimpse of dishes sitting in Secoterg, the "waterless cleaner that soaks up and absorbs grease and dirt in a twinkling. One ounce of water will rinse eight square feet of dish surface clean as clean. Buy Secoterg. Secoterg just cleans it right, makes your dishes shiny bright, does away with water waste – "

The tune started whining through his mind and Long crushed it with speech. He said, "How’s Pete?"

"Fine, fine. The kid’s in the fourth grade now. You know I don’t get to see him much. Well sir, when I came back last time, he looked at me and said…"

It went on for a while and wasn’t too bad as bright sayings of bright children as told by dull parents go.

The door signal burped and Mario Rioz came in, frowning and red.

Swenson stepped to him quickly. "Listen, don’t say anything about shell-snaring. Dora still remembers the time you fingered a Class A shell out of my territory and she’s in one of her moods now."

"Who the hell wants to talk about shells?" Rioz slung off a fur-lined jacket, threw it over the back of the chair and sat down.

Dora came through the swinging door, viewed the newcomer with a synthetic smile, and said, "Hello, Mario. Coffee for you, too?".

"Yeah," he said, reaching automatically for his canteen.

"Just use some more of my water, Dora," said Long quickly. "He’ll owe it to me."

"Yeah," said Rioz.

"What’s wrong, Mario?" asked Long.

Rioz said heavily, "Go on. Say you told me so. A year ago when Hilder made that speech, you told me so. Say it."

Long shrugged. Rioz said, "They’ve set up the quota. Fifteen minutes ago the news came out."

"Well?"

"Fifty thousand tons of water per trip."

"What?" yelled Swenson, burning. "You can’t get off Mars with fifty thousand!"

"That’s the figure. It’s a deliberate piece of gutting. No more scavenging."

Dora came out with the coffee and set it down all around.

"What’s all this about no more scavenging?" She sat down very firmly and Swenson looked helpless.

"It seems," said Long, "that they’re rationing us at fifty thousand tons and that means we can’t make any more trips."

"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?"

"In half a dozen ways, Mario. How do you spot shells in space up to distances of a hundred thousand miles? One thin metal shell in all that space. How? By radar. Do you think there’s no radar on Earth? Do you think that if Earth ever gets the notion we’re engaged in waterlegging, it won’t be simple for them to set up a radar network to spot ships coming in from space?"

Dora broke in indignantly. "I’ll tell you one thing, Mario Rioz. My husband isn’t going to be part of any raid to get water to keep up his scavenging with."

"It isn’t just scavenging," said Mario. "Next they’ll be cutting down on everything else. We’ve got to stop them now."

"But we don’t need their water, anyway," said Dora. "We’re not the Moon or Venus. We pipe enough water down from the polar caps for all we need. We have a water tap right in this apartment. There’s one in every apartment on this block."