He leaned forward, supporting his weight easily on fingertips in the low Martian gravity. “That is what I wish to discuss today,” he said. “Interest rates represent competition for money. Money represents human labor and natural resources. This is true regardless of socioeco-nomic arrangements. You know how desperately short they are of both labor and resources on Earth. Yes, many billions of handsbut because of massive poverty, too few educated brains. Think back to what a political struggle the Foundation had before this base could be established.
“We know what we are here for. To explore. To learn. To make man’s first permanent home outside Earth and Luna. In the end, in the persons of our great-grandchildren, to give Mars air men can breathe, water they can drink, green fields and forests where their souls will have room to grow.” He gestured at the mural, though it seemed more than ever jeering. “We cannot expect starvelings on Earth, or those who speak for them, to believe this is good. Not when each ship bears away metal and fuel and engineering skill that might have gone to keep their children
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alive a while longer. We justify our continued presence here solely by mining the fissionables. The energy this gives back to the tottering economy, over and above what we take out, is the profit.”
He drew a breath of stale, metallic-smelling air. Anoxia made his head whirl. Somehow he stayed erect and continued:
“I believe we, in this tiny solitary settlement, are the last hope for man remaining in space. If we are maintained until we have become fully self-supporting, Syrtis Harbor will be the seedbed of the future. If not”
He had planned more of an exhortation before reaching the climax, but his lungs were too starved, his pulse too fluttery. He gripped the table edge and said through flying rags of darkness: “There will be oxygen for half of us to keep on after a fashion. By suspending their other projects and working exclusively in the mines, they can produce enough uranium and thorium so that the books at least show no net economic loss. The sacrifice will . .. will be … of propaganda value. I call for male volunteers, or we can cast lots, or Naturally, I myself am the first.”
That had been yesterday.
Saburo was among those who elected to go alone, rather than in a group. He didn’t care for hymns about human solidarity; his dream was that someday those who bore some of his and Alice’s chromosomes would not need solidarity. It was perhaps well she had already died in a
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cinderslip. The scene with their children had been as much as he could endure.
He crossed Weinbaum Ridge but stopped when the dome-cluster was out of sight. He must not make the searchers come too far. If nothing else, a quick duststorm might cover his tracks, and he might never be found. Someone could make good use of his airsuit. Almost as good use as the alga tanks could of his body.
For a time, then, he stood looking. The mountainside ran in dark scaurs and fantastically carved pinnacles, down to the softly red-gold-ocher-black-dappled plain. A crater on the near horizon rose out of its own blue shadow like a challenge to the deep purple sky. In this thin airhe could just hear the wind’s ghostly whistle Mars gave to his gaze every aspect of itself, diamond sharp, a beauty strong, subtle, and abstract as a torii gate before a rock garden. When he glanced away from the shrunken but dazzling-bright sun, he could see stars.
He felt at peace, almost happy. Perhaps the cause was simply that now, after weeks, he had a full ration of oxygen.
/ oughtn’t to waste it, though, he thought. He was pleased by the steadiness of his fingers when he closed the valve.
Then he was surprised that his unbelieving self bowed over both hands to the Lodestar and said, “Namu Amida Butsu.”
He opened his faceplate.
That is a gentle death. You are unconscious within thirty seconds.
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He opened himself and did not know where he was. An enormous room whose doorways framed a night heaven riotous with suns, galaxies, the green mysterious shimmer of nebulae? Or a still more huge ship, outward bound so fast that it was as if the Milky Way foamed along the bow and swirled aft in a wake of silver and planets?