Isaac Asimov, The Martian Way (1952)

Martian settlers have their water supply cut off by a nasty Earth demagogue whipping up anti-Martian feeling. But they get one over on Earth by organising a ramshackle expedition to Saturn, lassoing some massy chunks of ice from the rings, and bringing them back to the red planet. The story ends with a ner-ner-n'NER-ner moment, when the Martian President (I think he is) Sankov offers to sell some of the Saturnian water back to Earth. 'Write this down,' he tells the assembled reporters ('there was no doubt they were getting it'). 'Earth is worried about its water supply. It only has one and a half quintillion tons. It can't spare us a single ton of it. Write down that we folks on Mars are worried about Earth and don't want anything to happen to Earth people. Write down that we'll sell water to Earth. Write down that we'll let them have million-ton lots for a reasonable fee.' Yeah! Take THAT Earth! We're sticking it to the Man! I like to picture the assembled reporters all at once rushing for a bank of wooden booths, each booth containing a coin-operated public telephone, like that scene in Airplane!, and the whole bank of booths falling over. But Asimov didn't write that scene.

The thing that sticks out from this fairly meh Asimov yarn, though, is the name of the Earther demagogue who is whipping up irrational fears about 'outsiders' stealing our water. He's called 'Hilder'. I'm assuming Asimov considered 'Satlin', 'Mussonili' and 'Moe Tse-Tung' as names, but decided they weren't subtle enough.

The image at the top is the Panther edition I owned as a kid, long since lost, and beautiful in a 'look up Chris Foss in the Dictionary and it says nothing to do with the story whatsoever' sort of way. I re-read it recently because I picked up a job-lot of SF paperbacks -- including this edition of The Martian Way:

That bell-bottom lower-case 'a', granting views onto an (I think) walnut whip, is certainly striking. And by 'striking' I mean: 'obese looking'.