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Page 83
of water used by the colonists is relatively small, but Hilder's campaign succeeds in getting even that closed off. One Martian colonist, Rioz, suggests that the Martians simply take the water, stealthily or by force, from Earth's oceans. But another, Long, says that this is Earth way, the Grounder way, "trying to hold on to the umbilical cord that binds Mars to Earth." The Martian way is to look farther out, where ninety-nine percent of the rest of the matter in the solar system is to be found, including vast amounts of water. Eventually, despite great difficulties, a group of rocket pilots from Mars, whose normal job is reclaiming the metal "shells" or stages left in orbit by ships that have used up their reaction masses, fits a gigantic iceberg from the rings of Saturn with rocket jets and brings it back to Mars.
As the mountain of ice is lowered to the surface of Mars, the committee from Earth led by John Hilder is faced with the humiliation of the Martian colonists offering to sell water to Earth. Hilder sees his own political future turning to water along with the campaign rhetoric of his political party, the anti-Wasters. The Martian way is to accept spaceflight as natural, even to consider planets as a kind of spaceship. [Asimov previsions in this story not only "spaceship Earth" but also a later proposal to tow icebergs from the Antarctic to provide supplies of fresh water.] Eventually, "it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Galaxy." That too is the Martian way.
"Sucker Bait" (Astounding, February, March 1954) is a novella about the failure of a colony on a pleasant, Earth-type planet called Junior. A ship is sent to discover what went wrong. One member of the expedition is temperamental Mark Annuncio of the Mnemonic Service, a young man whose ability to remember everything he has ever read makes him an invaluable resource in a galaxy with nearly 100,000 inhabited planets, where all sorts of information can be lost. He also has hunches based on the correlation of information he has memorized. One correlation leads him to a violent course of action that forces the crew off the planet in a hurry. Annuncio and the man nominally responsible for him, Oswald Mayer Sheffield, are placed on shipboard trial for mutiny and are almost railroaded into a death sentence. Finally, Sheffield persuades the crew to hear Annuncio's testimony. Annuncio reveals that the danger on Junior is in the dust: it contains beryllium that kills by deranging enzymatic reactions. The crew might all be doomed. [Annuncio's intuition may anticipate Golan Trevise's "right" decisions in Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth.]
"Dreaming Is a Private Thing" (Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1955) describes a new art form, the creation of dreamies by means of a

 
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