The Frederik Pohl Omnibus

1

Hardee parked his jeep across the street from the Administration Building, opened the hatch and got out, gasping.

It was cold midnight, better than the heat of the day, but he shivered and his breath made a white mist in the thin air.

Mars - curse the place! Too hot by day, too cold by night, the air too thin all the time.

He looked up. The stars were densely drifted in the sky overhead. Both moons were out of sight; the stars made a white light, not bright enough to be obtrusive but enough, after he had turned out the lights of the jeep, to pick out details of the street, the kerbs, the sidewalks, the low buildings. The little town did not possess street lights and, on nights like this, few persons bothered to turn on the outer lights of their homes; it wasn’t necessary.

Around the corner there was a glow of red. Hardee took his sack out of the back of the jeep, grunted as he threw it over his shoulder and headed for the welcome glow.

It came from a sign that read:

BUNNIE’S PLACE

Liveliest Night Spot on Mars

In the doorway, Hardee stood blinking.

It was only a matter of fifty yards or so from the jeep, but he was sweating like a hog because of the weight of the sack. There was no dampness from the sweat - sweat was sucked greedily away into the thin dry air as soon as it was formed. But it was wearing on the muscles and the skin; it was like pounding a treadmill. He was panting, and noise and light beat out at him.

‘Hardee!’ yelled somebody. He nodded and waved, not troubling to identify whoever it was. Squinting, he moved inside and found a table.

Bunnie’s Place. The Liveliest Night Spot on Mars. That was a flat lie - probably. There might be other places, but no one in Bunnie’s Place had ever seen them; and if there were, they were bound to be livelier. What Bunnie’s Place had to offer was:

A piano, dried from the desert air and in sad disrepair, on which, at the present moment, someone was trying to play a medley of familiar tunes, handicapped by the fact that all the B-flat keys in the middle octaves were broken.

A bar stocked with ceaselessly replenished cases of blended whiskey, gin and brandy, but with very little else.

A dozen tables surrounding a cleared space suitable for dancing, now in use.

A record player with several hundred LP records, mostly rock-and-roll, all well worn.

Two pool tables, the felts of which were held together with sticking plaster.

Two ping-pong tables.

A ‘library’. It contained twenty-six books, all novels, dating from the years 1950-1955.

Nearly one hundred persons, about a dozen of them women, the youngest of them thirty years old.

That was Bonnie’s Place. As a night club, it was a failure. As the recreation room for a penal colony, however, it was not so bad; and that was what it was.

Old Man Tavares came over to take Hardee’s order.

‘You’re late,’ he wheezed. He claimed to have had lung trouble once, back on Earth in that former life that each of them talked of endlessly. ‘The Probation Officer was looking for you.’

‘I’ll see him later,’ said Hardee. ‘Get me a highball first.’

Tavares nodded and limped heavily away. The room was crowded. It was the dark of the moon, or nearly - moonrise would precede the morning sun by only an hour or so - so that practically all the trappers, like Hardee, tried to concentrate their monthly probation reports into this short period of three or four days.

If a trapper made his report on a full-moon night, it meant losing a night’s work. A trapper couldn’t afford that. He was on his own, despite being a prisoner. He needed every skitterbug he could catch to pay his bills and provide his stake for the next month.

The alternative was to make your report during daylight hours. But that was bad if you had more than ten or fifteen miles to travel - Hardee had fifty - because at this time of year the desert by day was just plain too hot. Besides, the Probation Officer didn’t like having his day’s sleep interrupted. And he was a prissy, querulous old man who had little real power - he was as much a felon as any of his charges (there was no one in the whole colony who hadn’t been sentenced there) - and so he threw his weight around.

‘Hello, Hardee.’

Hardee looked up, and for the first time smiled.

‘Hello, Joan.’

Joan Bunnell, the ‘Bunnie’ of Bunnie’s Place, was short, warm-faced, honey-haired. Hardee was fond of her; they had slept together several times; they had even talked of getting married. But this was not a place for getting married. There was no rule against it - there were very few rules, everything considered, only the Big Rule against travelling more than a hundred miles from the little town, and a few lesser ones. But how could they talk seriously of getting married when either or both of them might still be married to someone back on Earth?

She had two drinks on a tray, his and one for herself. She sat down, fanning herself. It wasn’t very hot, but the room’s bright colours and loud voices and the juke-box crashing against the sound of the battered piano gave the impression of a cauldron.

‘Drink up,’ said Joan Bunnell, toasting him. ‘You’ve got to keep your liquids up.’

“You gotta keep something up,’ bawled an ape’s voice from behind Hardee. It laughed raucously.

Hardee turned, frowning. He recognized the voice. The man’s name was Wakulla.

There, thought Hardee irritably, was the kind of man this place was made for. You knew just by looking at him that this was no bank embezzler or forger; this was knock-them-dead and loot-their-pockets. There was no finesse or cunning to those sloping shoulders and the curled black body hair that held his thin shirt cushioned an inch from his chest. The man was an ape.

He boomed with an ape’s bellow: ‘Hardee, you dumb chump, how many skits did you bring in this time?’

His shout didn’t exactly silence the room, but it did create a small oasis of quiet - an area roughly equal to the reach of his enormous fists. He was not liked. But he was feared; in a little world without law, he was feared very much.

Hardee said clearly: ‘A hundred and fourteen.’

‘In there?’ Wakulla kicked the sack beside Hardee’s chair.

‘Only about a dozen. The rest are outside in the jeep.’

Wakulla nodded, then grinned an ape’s grin. ‘Good for you, Hardee! You won the pool this month. You know what you won?’

Hardee waited.

‘You won the privilege of buying drinks for the house!’ Wakulla yelled. ‘Come on, boys. Line up!’

Hardee glanced at Joan Bunnell and pressed his shoulders against the back of his chair.

There was a chance, he thought judiciously, that he could take Wakulla. The ape was inches shorter than himself, and that might make a difference. Everything else was going for Wakulla - reach, weight and the indestructible animal combat urge that made all other considerations unimportant. Still, there was that chance.

But it was better to avoid a fight.

Hardee took a deep breath and managed a grin. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

Wakulla scowled, waiting.

‘Why not?’ said Hardee reasonably. ‘But if I win that for bringing in a few lousy skitterbugs, what do I win for this?’

He hefted the sack to the top of the table and opened the draw-strings.

There were a couple of skitterbugs on top. He pulled them out and laid them on the table, where their long jointed legs began to twine feebly under the room lights. Then, beneath them, was what he was looking for.

He took it out, stood up and shook it loose.

It hung from his hand limply. It was a grey canvas coverall, filthy, sweat-stained, spotted with what looked like blood.

Wakulla demanded: ‘What the hell is that?’

‘What does it look like? It’s a coverall. I took it off a man I found out in the desert three days ago. On foot.’

It created a sensation.

Old man Tavares limped up, pushing his way through the men around Hardee’s table, and clutched the filthy garment. ‘The man who was wearing it. He was dead?’

‘What do you think?’

It went without saying. It was possible to walk around the desert for short distances, but not for anything like the distance from one prospector’s prefab to another. For that you needed a jeep. ‘I buried him out in the desert. He was a stranger.’

‘A stranger!’

Tavares let go of the garment and stared at it.

Hardee dropped the skitterbugs back into the sack and closed it; as the light was cut off, the stirring stopped. He downed his drink.

‘You know that old mine, Wakulla - out between your place and mine? I was out there at daybreak and I found this fellow. He wasn’t dead then.’

Wakulla growled: ‘But you just said -’

‘He was close enough to it. He was face-down on the sand and not moving. I stopped and went over.’

Nearly everybody in the room was clustered around, listening. The penal colony had been in existence for five years now - Hardee himself had been there for nearly three - and this was the first time a stranger had ever appeared. It was an event of the first magnitude, almost as though someone had finally completed his term, or as though, somehow, radio contact had been established with Earth.

Hardee’s hand closed over the girl’s.

‘I tried to lift him up,’ he said. ‘He was still breathing, but not too well - you know, gasping. Panting. You know how it was when you first got here? Only it seemed even worse with him. He was on his way out. And then he opened his eyes and looked at me.’

Hardee paused, remembering the dry, opaque eyes in the tortured face.

‘It wasn’t just thirst and exposure,’ he said, ‘because the man was pretty well scarred up. One of his arms was broken, I think. And - well, look at the coverall. You can see the blood. That’s how he was. He raised his head and he said something. I could hardly understand him. And then he sat up and began to choke. And he died. He was pretty far gone, as I say.’

Joan Bunnell demanded: ‘Hardee! What did he say?’

Hardee put down his glass and touched the coverall thoughtfully.

‘He said: “Thank God. A man!”’

2

Four hours later, Hardee was driving up to the shelter of his own prefab.

The moon was peeping over the eastern horizon in a wash of white light that picked out the mountains around them. Hardee opened the door and looked up, gasping - that was the way it always was when you had been sitting for a while. In this thin air, when you began to lift yourself, the lungs strained for oxygen and found it only with difficulty.

Let’s see, thought Hardee, staring at the broad white moon. That would be Deimos. Or Phobos. Some said the big one was Deimos, some the little. Nobody knew for sure, or nobody had yet convinced the rest of the colony. Old man Tavares was the only one who was really likely to know, and he only laughed when he was asked.

Hardee thought the big one was Deimos. That was the one that was bright and useful, and for weeks on end you didn’t see it at all. The other one - what was the use of it? It was a rapid little comet, steel-blue and brighter than a star, yes, but not bright enough. It moved fast, fast every night it soared across the sky two or three times. But it was no good for hunting.

He got out of the jeep, wheezing. He left it with its motor going - he would be right back - and twisted the combination that unlocked the door of his home, his and the boy’s.

Not everyone bothered locking the doors when they went out, but it was habit with Hardee. That was the way he was and, besides, he had something more precious than most to protect.

Inside, he dumped his supplies on the floor and quickly looked into the boy’s room. That was all quiet. He closed the door gently and returned to the larger room, stowed the perishables in the freezer, leaving everything else where it lay. He pulled out of his pocket the little sheaf of vouchers that represented the surplus skitterbugs - those whose profits had not been used up in paying for the supplies, for the instalments on the jeep, the prefab itself and all of its furnishings.

He locked the door behind him and rode out into the desert.

There was still an hour of moonlight before the rising of the sun. It didn’t do to waste hours; there were just so many hours in the month when the skitterbugs could be caught.

Old man Tavares said that the skitterbugs weren’t animals - they were machines.

Tavares might know. He had been in the colony longer than most, and although his mind was wandering and he sometimes thought there was a war going on and all of them were in a concentration camp, he had once been an electronics engineer. Or so he claimed.

Tavares rambled about mussels filtering iodine out of sea water and plants splitting oxygen out of CO₂. Maybe it made sense and maybe not, but what he said was that the skitterbugs all came from one master skitterbug that had been made in a laboratory back on old Earth. There was iron in the sand, said old Tavares, and other elements, and so somebody had invented a sort of basic reproducible pattern for a simple machine operated by sunlight which could extract from sand and rock the ingredients necessary to produce other machines just like itself.

Maybe so. Maybe not. It was true that the skitterbugs looked like machines; they were metal. And yet they grew. The theory was simple. Maybe so. Even Hardee could see that, and he had been only a traffic policeman in the old days on Earth. Or thought he had.

It didn’t matter much, one way or the other, to Hardee. What mattered to him was that during the hours of moonlight it was possible to capture the skits and that if you captured a hundred of them, you kept even with the necessary payments for supplies and instalments to the Probation Officer; if you captured more than that you could even afford luxuries. And that mattered. Not so much for Hardee - he had too much self-punishment yet to inflict on himself for that - but for the boy.

The boy deserved a few luxuries. For he had nothing else.

A mile from the prefab, Hardee switched on the RDF unit.

The radio antenna that sprouted from the tail end of the jeep began to circle slowly, feeling for broadcast radio energy. That was the important thing about moonlit nights.

The skitterbugs, whatever they were, operated on light energy. When light hit their domed, absorbent carapaces, the tiny circuits inside them busily converted the light into heat and kinetic energy. But not quite all of it. There was a certain amount of waste in the form of free radio impulses. This the RDF scanner was designed to locate.

Come to think of it, Hardee pondered, maybe that certain amount of waste was no waste at all. If it was true that the skitterbugs were artificial, it might perfectly well be that the waste was designed into them, for exactly the purpose for which it was used - to locate and harvest them.

But there had to be light to make them radiate and thus be found.

By day, the blinding sunlight made them radiate like mad, of course, but that was no good. In daylight, the skitterbugs could outrun a man and even a jeep; they produced strong signals, but what was the use of that when you couldn’t catch them?

Starlight wasn’t very satisfactory either. On a particularly bright night, you might, if you were very, very lucky, pick up a few stray wisps of signal, but only provided you happened to blunder within fifty yards or so of a skit and then the impulses were too weak to be much help for direction finding. No, it had to be moonlight - the big moon - energy enough to make them radiate, but not so much that they could get away.

Hardee checked the little blips of light on his cathode screen and marked a concentration of a dozen or more. Undoubtedly half of them would be under the legal limit. Half a kilogram was the minimum; you could be fined the vouchers for a dozen full-sized skits for bringing in one under the limit. But with any luck at all, he should be able to bag one or two of the full-grown ones before the others succeeded in tunnelling into the sand and out of sight.

Hardee hunted until the broad red rising sun began to heat the desert and then raced back towards the prefab with four skitterbugs in the shielded locker. He circled the area where a long-abandoned shack marked the old mine, then took his foot off the gas, paused and looked back.

Under the faded board sign that said almost illegibly ‘Joe’s Last Hope Shaft No. 1’ was the shallow grave Hardee had dug out for the stranger. There had been no name, no papers, nothing in the pockets that told him anything, and accordingly, there was no inscription on the little wooden headboard Hardee had hacked out in the growing heat of the morning sun.

Hardee sat there for a moment, his mind vacant, vaguely wondering about the man he had found. But it was growing hot. He put the jeep in gear and headed again for home.

The boy was awake and waiting for him at the door.

‘Daddy, Daddy!’ he chanted, looking grave and sleepy. ‘Did you get it?’

‘Hi,’ said Hardee inadequately. He bent over to pick the child up.

Chuck was small for his age, a serious-faced, brown-eyed, dark-haired little five-year-old. He said immediately, throwing his arms around Hardee’s neck: ‘Daddy, did you get the tractor? I’ve been thinking about it! I woke up three times all night while you were gone.’

‘I’ll bet you did,’ said Hardee. He tousled the boy’s hair. ‘Well, I got it. It’s in the sack.’

‘Oh, Daddy!’ crowed the child. He wriggled frantically to be put down.

As soon as he was on his feet, he raced into the house, through the little foyer where the foot-scrapers waited to get sand off the feet of visitors, and the hooks lined the wall for their clothes. He made a beeline for the pile of supplies. By the time Hardee got rid of his sand boots and sweat-jacket, the boy was making a horrible scraping sound, tugging crates of canned goods out of his way; by the time Hardee reached the door of the room, Chuck had already opened the sack and was feeling inside.

‘Oh, Daddy!’ he cried again, taking the tractor out. It was an exact model of a jeep with a bulldozer blade mounted before it for sand moving; it was battery operated and controlled through a little hand-plate connected to the tractor with a long, thin wire.

‘I’ve only got one battery,’ Hardee warned. ‘Make it last. I don’t know when I can get another one.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, Daddy. I don’t mind that.’

Experimentally, the boy turned on the power. The tractor lurched, whined, began pushing its blade across the linoleum floor.

The boy chortled: ‘Wait till I get outside! I’ll stay near the house, Daddy, I promise. I’m going to make a fort and a castle! I’m going to dig a long canal all the way from the house to the trash burner! I’m going to get the soldier and my red truck and I’m going to make an Army camp that -’

‘Sure you are,’ said Hardee, patting the boy on the head. ‘But first you’re going to have breakfast. Right?’

Hardee managed to keep himself awake while the child and he had breakfast. He even managed to stay awake for nearly an hour afterward, but that was the limit

He stripped off his clothes, hung them neatly and fell into his bed. Outside, the boy was whooping at his new tractor.

It wasn’t, Hardee admitted to himself, the best possible arrangement for him and the boy. But it was important that he be awake nights. And the boy was still too young to be trusted to roam around by himself while Hardee was out hunting.

This way, they didn’t see as much of each other as Hardee would have liked - and, heaven knew, it was tough on Chuck to have to find his amusement for eight hours every day, to take his own meals at least twice a day and even to put himself in for a nap when the big hand and the little hand on the clock met at 12. Children are most marvellously adaptable organisms, but it was too bad, all the same.

But what else was there to do?

This way, the child was completely alone only at night - when Hardee was out hunting, and Chuck himself was asleep. True, that wasn’t entirely safe. Something could happen - a fire, a sudden sickness, even a fall out of bed. It was better being close at hand, even if asleep, by day, when the child was up and about and thus more likely to run into trouble. Chuck could be trusted to wake him up.

Hardee sighed and turned over. Overhead, he heard the engines of a transport plane and, outside, excited shouts from Chuck. Hardee could imagine him cavorting and waving at the plane.

No, thought Hardee, covering himself lightly and closing his eyes, it wasn’t a perfect existence for either of them j but what else could you expect in a penal colony?

3

In the light of the morning, Joan Bunnell closed the door of her room and began to take off her clothes.

She put on light sleeping shorts and a short-sleeved top, patched and faded, but the best she had been able to buy, and stood at the window, looking out at the desert. She was facing west, away from the sunrise. She could see the black shadows streaming away from the sun-touched tops of the buttes and dunes. It was going to be a hot day.

This time of year, you could say that it was going to be a hot day every morning and never be wrong. Funny, she thought, she’d never had any idea that Mars was as hot as this. Back in the old days - before - she hadn’t, in fact, thought about Mars much at all.

There was a lot of talk, she remembered cloudily, about rockets and satellites, and even some dreamers who ventured the hope that men would some day touch the surface of the Moon. But Mars? That was for the Sunday comics. She’d paid no attention to that sort of nonsense. She most especially never had dreamed that some day she herself would be a prisoner on Mars, stripped of her freedom and her memories.

Neither had any of the others - no freedom, no memories.

She cranked down the filter panels that would keep out nearly all of the heat, and went over to her little dressing table to complete her going-to-bed ritual. Cleansing cream. Skin cream. Fifty strokes of the brush on each side of her part. Carefully rubbing in the cream below the eyes, behind the jaws, along the line of the throat - the places where wrinkles and sagging would start first.

No, she told herself brutally, had started. This hot, dry air was devastating on a girl’s skin and hair; it was impossible to let things go for a single day.

She was sleepy, but she sat on the edge of the bed before lying down.

It was impossible for her to go to bed without performing, once again, another and different sort of daily ritual.

She looked across the room at her reflection in the mirror, wondering. Then, hopelessly, automatically, she pushed back the shore sleeves of her jacket and examined the skin of her inner arm, pulled back the hem of her shorts and examined the flesh of the thigh.

There were no needle marks.

‘Dear God,’ whispered Joan wretchedly. She had looked a thousand times before and there had been none. Well, maybe she ought to accept the evidence of her eyes as definite; whatever it was that she had been sentenced to this place for, narcotics addiction was not the answer.

It was the most severe portion of the punishment that not one of the prisoners knew what they were being punished for.

Framed on the wall, over the head of her brass bedstead, was an excerpt from Martian Penal Colony Rules and General Information. She had never seen the manual itself, though it was generally understood that the Probation Officer had a copy. But the excerpt she knew by heart. Everyone did. Nearly every room in the colony had it framed and hung:

You are here because you have been tried, convicted and sentenced for a felony.

In former times, felonies were punished by prison sentences. This ordinarily failed of its purpose, in that it did not act as a deterrent to repetitions of the same offence.

In recent years, a technique has been developed of erasing memories after a certain date - usually, for technical reasons, 16 October 1959. By virtue of the XXVth Amendment, provision for the use of this technique has been incorporated in the Uniform Penal Code of the United States, and under it you have been sentenced to rehabilitation and to transportation to the Martian Penal Colony for an indefinite period.

You will be observed from time to time, and the degree of your rehabilitation evaluated. When you are ready to return to normal life, you will be paroled.

It is not in the interests of your best efforts towards rehabilitation that you be advised of the crime of which you were convicted. However, the categories covered by the Uniform Penal Code include:

Murder, first degree.

Murder, second degree.

Manslaughter, in connection with a felony.

Grand larceny, grand fraud and embezzlement - but only after the third offence in each case.

Habitual use of drugs, without voluntary rehabilitation.

Habitual prostitution.

That was the list. Joan knew it well.

It was a choice selection, and she had to be guilty of one of them. But which one?

Joan Bunnell stared long at her own face, wondering if those eyes were the eyes of a murderess. Had she killed a husband, a lover? Perhaps her parents, seeking to inherit their wealth? Perhaps even a child - had she had a child? Could she have given birth to a baby, perhaps a boy small and grave-faced like Hardee’s youngster - and could she, in madness or in hate, have killed the child?

It was not fair to carve out a piece of her mind and cast it away.

Joan lay back on the pillow, her closed eyes cushioned on her own long hair against her forearm. It was the cruellest of all punishments, this mind-washing they called rehabilitation.

The Arabs chopped off a hand, the ancient English lopped off a finger or an ear, the Indians gouged out an eye... and those were kinder things, much kinder; for at least the victim knew exactly what he had lost.

But here was Joan Bunnell, thirty-one years old, according to the records in the Probation Office. She remembered her childhood in a monotonous brownstone two-family house on a monotonously uniform block in Philadelphia very well. She remembered going to school and she remembered her first job. She remembered a birthday party, and, closing her eyes, was able to count the candles - twenty-one.

She remembered years after that; loves and partings. She remembered yearning after the man she worked for and that he married someone else. (Had she killed him?) She remembered that life coursed full and complete through days compact with trivia and detail, up until a certain day - yes, the sixteenth day of October, in that year of 1959 - when she got up in the morning, dressed herself, ate breakfast at a corner drugstore, got into a subway train to go to work -

And woke up in a place where she had never been.

What had happened?

There was no clue, except the framed excerpt over her bed, and the gossip of the other prisoners.

Like her, they had awakened; like her, they had been questioned endlessly; like her, they had been confined. And, like her, they had been put, blindfold, into an airplane, flown for some hours - and released here.

They knew that they had committed a crime. Of course. That was why they were here.

But what crime?

How many years had been lopped off their minds?

Joan lay against the pillow too tired to weep; wept out.

After a while, and just as she might have slept, she heard a distant roar of engines growing closer.

She got up and looked out the window, pulling back the screens that cut down the light and heat.

A silvery plane was limping in low over the sand hills, from the west. It didn’t circle or seek a traffic pattern; it came in and down, dumping its landing flaps, along the level sand that was kept bulldozed flat for it.

Joan, no longer sleepy, got up and began getting dressed again. The plane meant supplies - perhaps new clothes, and she could use them; perhaps some toys that she might be able to get for Hardee’s son. Most of all, the plane might mean a few new inmates for the colony.

In slacks, blouse and a broad-brimmed sun hat, she hurried out after the growing crowd around the rickety old plane.

Wakulla had stayed over - not even the son of Polish miners wakes up and crosses the desert after drinking a bottle and a half of rye.

‘I got to see these guys,’ he said thickly with a painful grin. ‘I got to see what a free man looks like in case they ever let me out of here.’

‘They never will,’ muttered someone, and Joan edged away as Wakulla lifted his squat head and looked around to see who it was. She wasn’t looking for trouble.

The Probation Officer came up hastily, eagerly panting for the big moment of his being.

‘Out of the way!’ he quavered. ‘Here there, please! Out of the way, Saunders! Here, let me through, Tavares! Come on. Please!’

‘Let the keeper through!’ bawled Wakulla, forgetting about the man who had muttered. ‘Hurry up, Tavares, you old bag of bones!’

The three sputtering propellers of the aircraft coughed and choked and then stopped. Tavares and two other men hurried to push a metal ladder on wheels - with great difficulty - through the clinging sand up to the side of the plane, as the door jerked and then flew open.

Even Joan Bunnell, who was far from a mechanic, had not grown accustomed to the sight of a Ford tri-motor lumbering around in the thin air of Mars. That washboard fuselage, those ancient woodbladed props, they were period accessories from an old movie, not anything you ever expected to see in the air - anywhere. True, some of the men talked wisely about how the old Ford was a great plane for its time and a record-breaker; and they maintained that in all sorts of out-of-the-way places little out-of-the-way airlines had for decades kept up a sort of service using the Fords... but on Mars?

But there it was, as it had always been for all of them - it was the ship each of them had arrived in. And by and by the wonder had grown duller, submerged in the greater, special wonderment that each of them had, that went incessantly: What was it that I did that got me sent here?

The door of the plane swung rasping on its hinges, catching the bright hour-high sun and sending blinding rays into the faces of the colonists. Behind the glare, a man poked his head out - an old, haggard head.

‘Hello, Mr. Griswold!’ cried the Probation Officer in a thin high voice, greeting him. He waved violently. ‘Here I am, Mr. Griswold!’

This was the Probation Officer’s time. Barring this time, he was nobody - not even in the penal colony of brain-blotted felons, not anywhere. All his days and nights at the penal colony were alike; they were partly bookkeeper’s routine and partly file-clerk’s duties, and partly they were without any shape at all. They deserved little respect from anyone and they got none - all those days. But on the few, the very occasional days when the Ford transport waddled in - then he, the Probation Officer, he was the one that Mr. Griswold spoke to.

Mr. Griswold came with the plane, always. Mr. Griswold was the only man they ever saw who went back to freedom. And the Probation Officer was the link between the colony and Mr. Griswold - and, through him the rest of Mars and, more remotely, that unimaginably most distant of dreams, Earth and home.

‘Hello,’ murmured Griswold in a faded, wispy sort of voice. He stood there, haggard and blinking in the sunlight, nodding to the Probation Officer. ‘I’ve got some new mouths to feed,’ said Griswold - and, through him, the rest of Mars and, more remotely, that a joke but could never laugh again.

Joan Bunnell pressed closer, though she disliked Griswold and usually, instinctively, stayed well clear of him. Each time Joan saw him, he appeared decades older, degrees more demon-haunted than the time before. She knew his age well enough, because she remembered him from her own trip to the colony, three years before. He had been about fifty then ... could hardly be fifty-five now... but he looked seventy at the least, or perhaps some remote and meaningless age past a hundred.

His hands shook, his voice shook, his face was a working collision of jumpy muscles and fast-blinking eyes. Drugs? Drink? A terminal disease? It could hardly be any of those things, Joan thought; but if it was his job that made him so decrepit and so weak, then working conditions outside the penal colony must be even worse than within it.

And there was one other thing about Mr. Griswold. He never left the old plane.

In the three years of Joan’s experience, he had yet to climb down that metal ladder to stand on the ground.

Since Griswold would not come down the ladder, the Probation Officer eagerly and importantly puffed up it.

There was a moment while he and Griswold talked to each other, low-voiced, at the door to the cabin of the old tri-motor plane.

Then the Probation Officer stepped aside. ‘Let ‘em out, please,’ he ordered. ‘Let the new fish come down the ladder!’

Five men and women began to file out of the plane, squinting in dazed unbelief at the sunwashed scene around them.

Wakulla caught sight of one of the women and yelled an animal’s cry of glee. ‘That’s for me!’ He meant it for a playful aside, but that voice was not meant for stage whispers. He grinned at the woman; then his expression changed to astonishment.

He wasn’t alone. There was a gasp. ‘She’s got a kid with her!’ cried one of the women beside Joan Bunnell. Joan caught her breath. That was very odd - and very rare and very precious. There were four babies in the colony, born there, three of them in wedlock and one in doubt. But this was a girl of five or six, not a newborn. That was almost without precedent - the only other child who had been brought to the colony was Hardee’s boy.

A dozen hands helped the woman with the child down the ladder. They led her, with the others, across the hot sands towards the shelter.

Joan cast one glance at the plane. Already Tavares’s crew was beginning to unload crates of supplies. Already the tied sacks of skitterbugs, feebly stirring in the light that filtered through the burlap, were being trundled out on wheelbarrows to be loaded into the plane for return to - where? No one had ever said. Back to Earth, perhaps. Perhaps not.

The glass windscreens of the tri-motor’s battered old nose glittered opaquely.

Joan glanced at them and then away - there was nothing there; she never could see inside the cockpit; no one ever had. Behind those glittering windshields were, undoubtedly, the pilot and co-pilot - for surely Griswold was no aviator, not with that tic and those eyes. But she had never seen the pilots, not even when she herself was part of the plane’s cargo, coming here. And she didn’t expect to see them now.

But something was nagging at her.

She looked again, and her eye was caught by old Dom Tavares, who should have been helping to load the plane, and who instead was standing in a queerly tense attitude, staring at the open door.

Joan tried to peer past the door, but it was hard to see from the bright sun outside into the black shadows within. There was Griswold, and there was the Probation Officer, surely - at least there were two shadows. And the taller, fatter shadow was handing something to the lean, bent one - something that looked like a rag, or an old garment; they were talking about it.

Joan hesitated, wondered if it was worth thinking about.

But there were the newcomers - new faces, when all the old faces were worn so familiar.

And Tavares was, it was perfectly true, getting a little odd in his ways anyhow. Everyone knew that.

She turned, dismissing whatever it was that disturbed Tavares, and hurried after the newcomers as they were shepherded into the recreation room.

By day, the ‘Liveliest Night Spot on Mars’ was even less attractive than by night.

The night before had been a big one; the signs of it were all over the room, overturned chairs, spilled drinks, the grime of a couple of dozen men in town. No one had taken the time to tidy up - that was done later, usually in the waning heat of the afternoon - and the new arrivals stared around them with revulsion in their eyes.

‘They’re very young,’ someone whispered to Joan. She nodded. One of the women was middle-aged, but the one with the child was just into her twenties. And of the men, one was little more than a boy.

He was a blond-haired youngster, his eyes violet and innocent, his face far from the time of shaving. What, Joan wondered, had brought him here? For that matter, what was the crime of the dowdy-looking, plump little woman who was staring around in such panic?

The colonists were all over the new women - particularly Wakulla, gallant with an ape’s clumsy politeness. ‘A chair!’ he bawled. ‘A chair for the lady!’ And he wrenched one from Joan’s hand. ‘I’ll take the calf to get the heifer,’ he whispered hoarsely, with an exaggerated wink, and slid the chair clattering to the girl with the child. The girl only stared at him fearfully.

Joan tried to stay back and give the newcomers room.

She had a vivid sense of what they must be feeling; she remembered; she could read their eyes and know what they must bethinking:

The strangeness of their surroundings.

The sudden shock. (For it was always a shock, everyone agreed on it; one minute you were going about your business, a minute later you woke up somewhere else. A strange somewhere, and removed in time - in a white-walled room, with a couple of tense and worried-looking doctors and nurses around you, with television scanner lenses in the walls ... and, very quickly, a tense and worried-looking man in uniform coming in to talk to you, to tell you that you had become a criminal, in a life that was now wiped out of your mind, and that you were on Mars, headed for a penal colony. Shock? It was a wonder that it didn’t prove fatal. And perhaps for some it had; they had no way of knowing.)

But more than these things - after that first shock wore off and you had become reconciled to the fact that your whole life had somehow been perverted into that of a criminal - after you had been bundled, blindfolded, into that rattling old three-motored plane and flown for windowless hours across the unseen Martian deserts - then you arrived.

And that was bad.

For there was always the uneasy, shamefaced question in the crowd: Does this one know who I am? And that other one – why is he grinning like that? Does he know what I did? And what did he himself do, to be in this place?

Nobody ever got it.

But the early days were worst of all, before the pain became an accustomed one.

The heat was beating in on them. The woman with the child, half afraid, half contemptuous of Wakulla’s gallantry, leaned white-faced against the back of her chair. The little girl, a thumb in her mouth and the other hand clutching her mother’s skirt beside her, watched silently.

The boy was talking - his name was Tommy and he had told them he was seventeen years old. ‘That’s what they tell me,’ he said, with a painful effort to be adult and sure of himself. His voice was a soft high mumble, hardly the voice of even a seventeen-year-old. ‘But - I don’t remember that. Really, I don’t. The last thing I remember, I was twelve!’

Twelve! Joan made a faint sound; almost she patted him on the head, though he was taller than she. Twelve! What sort of criminal could have hatched at twelve? Even at seventeen, the thing was ridiculous! But somewhere, this child had lost five years.

She tried to explain it to him: ‘You must have done something, Tommy. Maybe you got involved with the wrong bunch at school - who knows? But somehow, you went wrong. That’s why they send people here, you know. It’s the new law. Instead of putting someone in jail and keeping them there - that would be a waste, you see, and cruel - they wipe out the part of the minds that has the criminal pattern in it. They go back erasing memory, until they come to a part that is clean and unaffected, not only before the crime was committed but before, even, the first seed of the crime was planted. That’s why none of us know what it was we did. It’s been taken away from us. We’ve been given a second chance. We should be grateful.’

But should they? It was the old question; she cast it off.

‘Then,’ she said, ‘after they’re cleaned out our memories and taken us back to the right path, they send us up here. To Mars. This is a colony where we can try to get reoriented and -’ She hesitated. And what? ‘And go back to normal life,’ she finished strongly, though there was still the relentless reminder of her memory that no one had ever gone back. ‘It isn’t so bad, Tommy,’ she promised.

He didn’t look convinced.

Someone was calling her name: ‘Joan! Joan, come here, please!’

It was old man Tavares. He was standing in the door, his face blenched a muddy mottled colour in spite of the dark the sun had given it.

She turned and hurried to him. Heat-stroke, she thought at once. It was far from uncommon, especially when a man as old as Tavares had to work in the blinding sun helping to lift boxes and bales.

But he caught her feverishly by the hand and drew her outside into the sunwashed street.

‘Joan,’ he whispered raggedly, terror peeping out of his eyes. ‘Joan, can you borrow a jeep?’

‘Why - I suppose so. But -’

‘Take me to Hardee,’ he begged. His lined old face was quivering with senile worry and fear; his dry, hot hand was crushing hers. ‘Quickly! It will take hours for us to drive there. And we may not have hours, because they can fly in the plane! Quickly, for his sake and your own!’

Joan said reasonably: ‘Now hold on, Dom. You’re excited. Sit down for a minute.’ She tried to lead him back into the recreation room. She’d seen the signs coming on, she reproached herself, when he behaved so queerly at the plane; she should have done something about it at the time. Poor old man! ‘Come on, Dom,’ she coaxed. ‘I’ll get you a nice cool drink of water and-’

‘Quickly!’ He planted his feet firmly, surprisingly strong, and halted her. His eyes were terrified; they flicked past her, out towards the plane. ‘You don’t understand, Joan! The Probation Officer, he has told Griswold about the stranger Hardee found. It is a terrible thing, do you not realize?’

‘Stranger?’ she repeated.

‘The dead man, Joan! I saw them with the coverall, and then I knew. So I came close and listened and, yes, he was telling Griswold. And Griswold was frantic! Of course. Hurry, Joan!’

Doubtfully, she said: ‘Well, let’s see. You want to go out to Hardee’s place? Wakulla’s not far from here. I suppose I can persuade him to take us out, though he’s got that new woman on his mind. It’s a bad time of day, but -’

‘Hurry!’

The panic in his voice finally reached her. All right, she thought, why not? She could handle Wakulla - even in the face of the constant threat of a boiled-out motor and trouble, the natural risk you took in driving across the sand by summer daylight. But Tavares gave her no choice.

Still she protested, half-resisting: ‘Can’t it wait until night, Dom? Surely it can’t be as serious as all that. After all, what’s so dangerous about a stranger? I suppose he’s merely a man who got lost in the desert - at most, perhaps he escaped from another prison camp, somewhere else on Mars, but certainly that doesn’t -’

‘Mars!’ Tavares hissed in a terrible whisper. Convulsively he squeezed her arm. ‘Joan, do you not understand? All these years - and you still think that this is Mars?’

4

Hardee woke groggily to the sound of the boy’s voice calling: ‘Daddy! Somebody’s coming!’

It was only about noon.

Hardee swung himself out of bed, half asleep, his eyes aching. He stumbled over to the window and pushed back the shutters.

Fierce light beat in. He blinked, dazzled. The sun was directly overhead. The boy had been right; there was a jeep coming, still a long way off, but he could hear the faint whine and echo of its motor as the driver shifted gears, coaxing it around the worst of the bumps, trying to keep it from overheating. Someone driving at this time of day!

It must be an urgent errand, he thought, and began to clamber into his clothes. He couldn’t make out who was in it, in the blinding light; but by the time he was into his shirt and pants and ready to come downstairs, he could hear voices. Tavares and Joan Bunnell - and his son, crying out to greet them.

‘Aunt Joan!’ Chuck was babbling excitedly - it was a great day for him when there were visitors. ‘Look at what Daddy got me, Aunt Joan! A tractor. And see, I can make a farm with Alice and Alfie - see? This is my tractor, and Alice and Alfie are the cows!’ Alice and Alfie were his pet skitterbugs Hardee had captured them with the regular bag; but they were undersized, not of legal limit to bring in, so he had given them to the boy to play with for lack of a kitten or a pup.

Hardee nodded without speaking and started down the stairs. The child was pushing the quiescent skitterbugs around on the floor with the tractor, whooping with joy. In the filtered, screened-down light that came inside the prefab, they had just enough energy to try to creep out of its way.

Joan stared up at Hardee, began to speak, then caught herself. She took the boy’s arm lightly. ‘Chuck,’ she said, ‘listen to me. We have to talk to your father. Go outside and play, please.’

He stood up, his eyes wide and disturbed. ‘Oh, let me stay, Aunt Joan! My tractor’s-’

‘Please, Chuck.’

He looked up at his father, hesitated, and started towards the door. Then he paused, looking at Wakulla and Tavares; even in his child’s mind, he knew that it was not usual to see them there.

With a child’s response, an incantation against evil, he summoned up politeness: ‘Hello, Mr. Tavares. Hello, Mr. Wakulla.’ He hesitated, then remembered one more cantrip. ‘Don’t worry, Daddy,’ he piped. ‘I’ll be careful to stay in the shade.’

Joan Bunnell, torn, said:

‘There isn’t any shade. I tell you what.’ She glanced at Wakulla. ‘You’d better play in Mr. Wakulla’s jeep. Make believe you’re driving it all by yourself.’

‘Whee!’ The boy shouted gleefully. He dropped tractor and skitterbugs, flung the door open and leaped out into the sand.

Sunlight flared in.

One of the bugs - it was impossible to tell which; only the boy could tell them apart - lay squarely in the path of the sun’s rays. There was a sudden crinkling snap of sparking energy as the light it fed on struck it like a released spring, the little spidery metal thing spun around, leaped out the door and was gone.

It was like a meteorite flung up into space, so quick and glittering.

Hardee closed the door behind it and turned to face the others. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.

Old man Tavares sank into a chair. ‘That stranger,’ he croaked. ‘The Probation Officer told Griswold about him, and now there will be trouble. For there is a lie here, Hardee. This is not the sort of place we are told it is. It is not on Mars; we are not criminals. And there must be a reason for this lie. What reason? I do not know, but whoever is telling the lie will protect it.’

He leaned forward. ‘It may cost your life to protect it, Hardee! Others have died, and I think for the same reason - you are in danger, and, with you, all of us because of the fact that you told us!’

Hardee shook his head. He was still more than half drowsy. The world had not yet come into focus he was drugged from heat and sleep and none of this was making sense.

He said thickly: ‘What the hell are you talking about, Tavares?’

‘I am talking about death!’ said the old man. And then he stopped, and there was sudden fear on his face. ‘Listen!’

Outside, a noise. An engine. No - more than one.

‘Someone coming?’ guessed Hardee. ‘A jeep?’

‘It is death that is coming,’ sobbed Tavares. ‘That’s no jeep, Hardee. It is the plane, coming for you!’

They ran to the door and flung it open.

It came from the east, like a faint angry snarl of bees, the sound of the Ford tri-motor’s three labouring engines.

‘There it is!’ cried the girl. ‘Look, over the dunes!’

Sunlight glinted off a wing. It was the plane, all right, hardly five hundred feet up. It was heading off to one side, more in the direction of Wakulla’s hut than Hardee’s; clearly whoever was flying it was unfamiliar with the exact locations of the prefabs.

But clearly also, it would not take long to straighten them out.

‘Come on!’ said Hardee, and flung out the door. Whatever it was that Tavares was talking about, something of the old man’s panic and desperation had reached him. ‘We’ll have to hide! Wakulla, you know the old mining shack? Let’s go!’

Hardee caught his son up and raced for his own jeep, leaving the others to follow in Wakulla’s.

The heat was murderous. Before they had gone a hundred yards, the radiator needle was climbing; in a hundred more, it was pressing perilously against the backstop. But Hardee couldn’t wait to baby the motor now, not when the plane had begun to wheel around towards them. Already it might be too late; it was quite possible that the plane had spotted them. But it was at least a chance that the plane had not. A desert drenched in a vertical sun is not easy to scan, and there was a lot of it.

Next to him, on the seat, the little boy looked up wonderingly at his father, and was silent.

‘It’s all right, Chucky,’ Hardee said, the automatic lie coming to his lips. It wasn’t all right. There was nothing all right There was nothing all right about it.

But it satisfied the boy. He squirmed around and knelt backward on the seat, peering out the rear mirror. ‘They’re catching up, Daddy!’ he yelped cheerfully. ‘Step on it! We’ll beat them!’

Even through heat and worry and overpowering weariness, Hardee had enough left to feel fondness and pride for his child.

At the abandoned old mine site, Hardee spun the jeep in towards the shed. He parked it under the overhang of the dangling board sign marked Joe’s Last Chance No. 1, crowding over as far as he could to make room for the other. In a moment, Wakulla drove up beside him and squeezed in.

Climbing out, they stared at the hostile bright sky. ‘Stay under the shed!’ Hardee said. ‘If they’ve seen us -’

But apparently the plane had not.

They could see it clearly, dropping down over the dunes. It picked out Hardee’s prefab, banked and swung around it twice; then levelled off, headed out across the desert, banked again, came in and landed bruisingly on the uneven sand.

It was a rotten landing, but as good as could be expected for drifted sand. A tyre might have blown or a wheel collapsed, but did not. The plane was lucky and the hidden fugitives were not; they would not be saved by a crash that would destroy their pursuers.

The plane stopped perhaps a quarter of a mile from the prefab but well out of their sight. The motors died.

They waited.

‘Now what?’ demanded Wakulla angrily. He had been dragged away from a woman, and made to drive bouncingly across the hot sand with a hangover, and there was talk he hardly understood of danger that was never quite clear, and he was irritable.

Hardee climbed to the top of the old shed wordlessly. He stretched tall and peered towards his home.

‘Can’t see,’ he called down to the others. ‘I can’t even see the house. I wonder what they’re doing.’

‘Come down,’ said old man Tavares in a tired voice.

He sat on the sand with his back against the weathered boards, his eyes half closing, but not with drowsiness. The heat was very great, especially for a man near seventy, and especially for a man who had lived with outrageous fear for four years and now found his fears exploding in his face.

‘Doing?’ Tavares repeated wearily. ‘I shall tell you what they are doing. They are searching.’ His voice was hardly louder than a whisper, in the perfect quiet of the hot desert air. ‘They see that your jeep is not there, but they search your house. They observe that you are not in it. It takes very little time to do this; there is not much to search.’

‘Right,’ said Hardee roughly, dropping to the sand beside him. ‘Then what will they do next?’

Old man Tavares opened his eyes. He looked out across the sand. ‘Then I think they will take off again in the plane and look all through the desert for you. They will figure to find you easily from the air. But -’ He paused, thinking. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is not a good plane for the purpose and in any case they will want more, for they do not wish to miss you. So more will be summoned.’

‘More planes?’ repeated Joan. ‘I never saw any other planes.’

‘You will,’ said Tavares sadly. ‘In an hour, perhaps, or two hours, there will be many planes flying overhead. But in much less time than that, this one that is by Hardee’s home will search for us.’

Out behind the shed was the blank headboard and the shallow grave where Hardee had buried the stranger. Tavares looked at it longingly.

‘If he were alive,’ he whispered, ‘then perhaps we could learn something.’

‘We could dig him up,’ Wakulla rumbled.

The girl made a faint sound. ‘In this heat? After nearly a week?’

Hardee shook his head. ‘No, we won’t dig him up. Not because of the heat - it’s dry, Joan; he’ll be half a mummy by now. But I put him there and I know what I buried. There’s nothing on him but ragged shorts and a pair of shoes. Nothing that would tell us anything.’ He gestured back towards the ringing hills. ‘That’s where his trail came from. I didn’t follow it, and now the wind has wiped it out, but that’s where it was.’

‘No matter,’ said Tavares with the calm of resignation. ‘It is too late for any of those things.’ He nodded towards where the plane had landed.

‘You think they mean trouble?’ Wakulla demanded.

‘Think?’ Tavares glanced at him opaquely, then once again out across the hot, dry sand. ‘I do not think. I know. Look.’

A flare of flame, almost invisible against the bright sky, fringed with bits of metal and sand and unidentifiable debris, leaped up over the dunes. Smoke followed.

‘They are taking no chances,’ said Tavares slowly. ‘They looked for you, and when you were not to be found, they destroyed your home - perhaps you had hidden, you see. But now they will look some more.’

In a moment, the sound of the explosion reached them.

The boy began to cry.

5

The sky was full of aircraft, high-winged light planes that chopped the desert into sector strips and patrolled them, seeking, seeking; helicopters that darted from place to place.

‘I never saw so many planes,’ breathed Joan Bunnell, one arm around the boy. He was thrilled, so excited that he forgot to be afraid; he had never seen so many planes either, had hardly believed that so many planes existed.

All through the afternoon, they lay there in the waning heat, while the searching planes crisscrossed the sky. Wakulla looked angry, then puzzled, then contemptuous. He said: ‘Stupid! Why don’t they follow our tracks? If it was me up there, I’d find the jeeps in ten minutes!’

Tavares shrugged. He was very silent; he didn’t want to talk, it seemed. Hardee and the others kept probing at him with questions, but he only shook his head. The heat was wearing. Even under the strain of the time, it lulled them, drugged them ...

Hardee woke up, and it was a cold, bright night.

The sun had set.

Overhead, the stars washed across the sky. While he watched, one larger star - no, not a star; the second moon - soared in a great wide arc down towards the eastern horizon, steel-blue and familiar. Hardee squinted up wonderingly. If this was not Mars, then what was this lesser moon in the sky?

He woke the others.

The planes were gone and the desert was silent. They crept out and got into their jeeps and headed back towards the demolished prefab.

They stopped a couple of hundred yards away.

Still in the night, a faint red glow and ruddy smoke showed where part of the destroyed house still smouldered. Hardee caught his breath and touched Tavares on the shoulder.

‘Look,’ he whispered.

In the starlight, metal glinted. It was a wing of the old Ford tri-motor.

The plane was still there!

For an instant, panic filled them all. But there was no sound, only their own breathing and the metallic pinging from the smouldering ruin of the house.

The boy, silent and sleepy, stirred restlessly next to his father. ‘My tractor,’ he mumbled, and was silent. There was no toy tractor any more. There was no house. Only the smouldering metal and plastic were left.

Tavares said quaveringly: ‘I think perhaps they could not get the plane off the ground. There were helicopters, and it may be that they took the crew off with them. It is bad sand here for a plane.’

‘And maybe it’s a trap!’ rumbled Wakulla.

Tavares said softly: ‘Yes. Maybe it is.’

Hardee said: ‘We don’t have any choice. Let’s take a look.’

Cautiously they moved up with the jeeps. Hardee backed his near the open door in the washboard fuselage; Wakulla rolled to a stop a dozen yards away and turned his headlights on the plane. They climbed onto the hood of Hardee’s jeep and peered inside.

Tinkling crystal bells whispered in their ears.

Under the lights from Wakulla’s jeep, a metallic scurry of wavy jointed legs and of sliding, clicking bodies: the hold of the plane was full of skitterbugs.

Hardee took a deep breath.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s look around.’

They clambered into the plane.

The skitterbugs clicked and pinged protestingly underfoot. Chuck dove for a pair of them and came up with them proudly. ‘Daddy, can I keep them? I mean now that Alfie and Alice are gone?’

‘Sure,’ said Hardee gently, and set the boy out of the way. To Wakulla, he said: ‘You come with me. If there’s anybody left in the plane, they’ll probably be up front, by the controls -’

Screech of metal, and a tinny crash.

The door slammed shut. Lights blazed on inside the plane. The elliptical door at the forward end of the ship opened and Griswold, his haunted eyes staring, peered out.

‘There is,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard, all of you.’

Hardee tensed to jump him, and felt Wakulla gathering his muscles beside him - but it was too late, too late! There was a choking sputtering roar from outside - another, and a third; the three engines were spinning, warming up. Griswold stepped back a second before their leap and the door slammed in their faces.

As Hardee and Wakulla piled up against the elliptical door that led to the pilot’s cabin, the engines shrilled louder and louder. The vibrations evened, smoothed, were synchronized.

Then - crash, crash! Two thundering blows smote them. The plane was a croquet ball, and a mallet huger than Thor’s slammed it forward - bump and bump - across the uneven sands. Through the one small window left unblocked, they could see the trail of exhaust flame from the engines; and then, beside that flame and below it, a huger, brighter torch - a JATO unit, hurling the tired old transport up and out and into the thin air.

The JATO rockets flared twenty yards of heaving flame and then they were dark, but by then their work was completely done.

The plane sagged for a second. Waddling in the thin cold air, it began lumpishly to climb and gain altitude.

They were trapped.

A while later, the elliptical door opened again briefly - long enough for Griswold, carrying a gun, to come back to join them.

He said heavily: ‘I was afraid we would catch you.’

He stood regarding them. Queerly, he seemed more afraid than they. ‘Don’t try anything,’ he told them, shouting over the racket of the motors. ‘It’s a waste of time. You see?’

And he held open the elliptical door for them to look. Through it they saw the bucket seats for pilot and co-pilot, and what was in those seats. And then the door was closed again, and Griswold was gone.

Hardee felt a sudden sharp convulsion in his stomach. He heard Wakulla swear and the girl cry out and knew that they had seen what he had seen: In the seats, clinging to a metal grid, a pair of skitterbugs.

And riding on them, like a jockey on a horse: Bright bronze death’s heads with beady black eyes.

Wakulla rumbled: ‘What - what the hell was that?’

‘Martians?’ whispered the girl. ‘But, Dom, you said we weren’t on Mars!’

Tavares shrugged. His face was quiet and resigned now; he had given up. ‘I didn’t say where we were,’ he pointed out. ‘Nor did I say what manner of creature might be with us.’

Hardee shook his head to clear it.

His arm was tight around the shoulders of the boy. Having him there was a help; it made it necessary for Hardee to think. He couldn’t merely give up, for the boy’s life was dependent on what he did now.

He tried to reason it out.

‘We are not on Mars,’ he said, testing the truth of the statement. ‘You’re sure of that, Dom?’

‘Sure?’ Tavares laughed. ‘Can you lift three hundred pounds?’ he asked queerly, his eyes watering. ‘Do you see two tiny moons he asked queerly, his eyes watering. ‘Do you see two tiny moons in the sky? No, not the big moon. That is too big, too bright; that might be Earth’s moon, but not one of those of Mars!’

‘There are two moons,’ Joan said reasonably.

‘No.’ Tavares shook his head. ‘A moon and a satellite. An orbiting spaceship. I believe. It is a hoax. We were never on Mars.’

‘But what’s the purpose of it?’ demanded Hardee.

Tavares shook his head. ‘Don’t you think I’ve wondered, for five years? But I haven’t been able to guess. All that I know is that they told us this was Mars, but it is not. Mars is a red star in the sky. I have seen it myself. This I know. I know nothing else.’

‘And all these years you haven’t said anything?’ asked Hardee roughly.

‘I have not. Why? For the reason that I did not dare, Hardee. Yes, I, Tavares, who was once a fighter in France, in the war that happened before you were born - I did not dare. You recall when you woke up eh?’

‘Woke up? You mean the first time, before I came to the colony?’ Hardee nodded. ‘I remember. I was in a room -’

‘Yes,’ said Tavares. ‘That room. And you were asked many questions, were you not, like the rest of us?’

‘I was. Crazy ones.’

‘No, Hardee! Not crazy. They were for a purpose. Consider. You were asked what you knew about Mars - they said it was because you were being sent there, eh? And you told them, very truly, that you knew nothing. I do not know what would have happened if, by chance, you had been an astronomer, or perhaps a journalist, and had answered that question differently. But I know that you would never have come to the colony.’

Hardee, frowning, ground out: ‘Go on!’

‘And then they began to describe the planet Mars to you - to get you ready for your experience, they said. Right? They described it just as it turned out - in fine, not like Mars itself! And they watched you. And you showed no signs of doubting them.

‘I know that this is so. For, at the time when I awoke, there was another with me, also awakened; and this one doubted, and let them see that he doubted. ‘Mars has a light gravity,’ he told them. ‘And almost no air! And -’ Oh, he went on and on.

‘It was a mistake.’

‘They took him away.’

Hardee said reasonably: ‘But that doesn’t prove anything, Tavares. There could have been some perfectly simple reason.’

‘I heard him scream!’ Tavares plunged his face into his hands, rocking slowly. ‘And so all these years, I have said nothing, I have questioned nothing, for I did not dare. But now it is too late to be afraid. For that stranger you found, Hardee, he proved that all of this is a lie.

‘And now the liars must come out into the open - at least for us here, who know of this lie. And the liars - we have seen them.’

He flung his arm out, pointing towards the elliptical door to the pilot’s chamber - where they had seen the skitterbugs poised calmly on their metalic webs, with the bronze death’s-head riders perched on their shining carapaces.

The flying antique thumped and pounded in strong air currents. But it was not air-sickness that made them feel sick and faint.

The elliptical door opened. Griswold came back, carrying the gun. Behind him they caught another glimpse of the skitterbugs and their bronze inhuman riders.

Griswold closed the door and called: ‘Sit down, all of you. We’re coming down!’

‘Thanks,’ said Hardee shortly. ‘I didn’t expected this much consideration.’

Griswold measured him with the eyes of a man who knew demons. ‘You blame me,’ he said. ‘Of course you do. What can I do about it?’

He motioned Hardee to the tiny window. ‘Look down there,’ he ordered. ‘See that city? It’s full of skitterbugs - hundreds of thousands of them! There’s hardly a human being alive in it, though it used to be full of them. The skitterbugs have taken over!’

‘Taken over?’ Hardee echoed, puzzled. Then - are we -’

‘On Earth, yes.’ Griswold nodded. ‘But it doesn’t belong to the human race any more. You’ll find out’ He stared at Hardee with pity and fright. ‘You could have lived out your life in the colony,’ he said sombrely, ‘but you had to find that man. Now God knows what the bugs will do to you. But you’ll never see the colony again.’

‘And neither will you!’ bawled an enormous voice behind them.

Griswold spun, trying to bring the gun up, but there was no time, and the shifting footing of crawling bugs beneath them tripped him, caught him off balance. Wakulla, grinning like a maddened gorilla, caught the old man with one square hand. The gun fell one way and Griswold fell the other - out cold.

‘Come on!’ shouted Wakulla, and dived for the gun. He stumbled knee deep through the crawling little monsters up towards the elliptical door. Hardee followed, almost without thought. They burst through the door -

Twin bronze creatures turned to regard them out of black and hollow eyes. They were small by human standards, built like huge metallic frogs, golden bronze, with tiny limbs and huge faces. They rode the skitterbugs, but they were not joined to them. One of them made a harsh metallic whistling sound and flopped off its mount, towards something that glittered on the floor - a weapon, perhaps.

Whatever it was, the bronze creature never reached it. Wakulla, bellowing madly, lunged into the cabin and brought his heavy foot down on the creature. There was a screech and a thin crackling sound; and that was the end of that one.

The other was getting into motion by now. But it never had a chance. Wakulla steadied himself, took aim and fired - again and again, pumping bullets at the thing, and though his aim was none too good, enough of them connected to splatter the creature against the control panels.

The ancient plane wobbled and begun to fall off on one wing.

‘Hold on!’ bawled Wakulla, and grabbed for the control wheel.

Hardee, panting, fought his way into the seat beside him. ‘Can you fly one of these things ?’

‘I can try!’ said Wakulla, grinning. Straight ahead of them, through the glass, Hardee could see a patchwork of trees and houses, roads and open land. ‘I’ll land it there!’ Wakulla yelled, horsing the stick back.

They hit the ground hard at more than a hundred miles an hour, bounced, came down on one wheel, blew a tyre and slid crab-wise across an open meadow. If there were brakes, Wakulla didn’t know where to find them; if there was a way to stop the plane before it reached the fence at the edge of the field, he didn’t know it. It hit the brush fence, still going fast.

Hardee felt the windshield fly up and smack him in the face. The last thought he had was: Fire.

6

It was full morning; he had been unconscious for at least an hour.

Over against the trees, an enormous smoke plume showed where the tri-motor was giving up the ghost. Joan Bunnell was leaning over him, her cheek bloody, her clothing torn. ‘Hardee, you’re all right?’ she breathed.

He pushed himself up. ‘I guess so.’ He looked around. ‘Wakulla -?’

‘His neck was broken.’ The girl rocked back on her heels. Tavares was sitting on the damp grass nearby, cradling the boy in his lap. Beside him, Griswold lay face down, unmoving. ‘The rest of us are all right,’ Joan said. ‘Griswold has a bad arm. That’s all.’

Hardee shook his head and began to rub his ears. It felt like golf-tees driven into his eardrums; the old crate had come down fast and the change in pressure was bad. He could hardly hear what Joan was saying.

‘Poor Wakulla,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe he saved our lives.’

‘And maybe he killed us all,’ said Griswold, painfully turning on one side to face them. His face was perspiring, and he clutched one arm with the other hand. ‘They’ll never let this go by,’ he warned.

Hardee got up dizzily and strode over to the old man. ‘Talk!’ he said. ‘What are the bugs? Where are they from?’

Griswold said wretchedly: ‘I don’t know. The bugs don’t matter - it’s the skulls that are important. They’re smart. And they aren’t from Earth.’

He sat up, holding his twisted arm. In the hot sunlight, the field they were in was alive with skitterbugs, flashing and leaping, loosed from the wrecked plane.

Griswold said: ‘The bugs are only brainless machines. They are seeded and grow, and when they are large enough, the skulls harvest them. Sometimes they use human beings for the job of harvesting - like you.’

Hardee walked over to the burning plane. The heat kept him yards away. Wakulla was in there, probably hardly more than a cinder by now, but he couldn’t be seen. Just as well, thought Hardee. A few skitterbugs, damaged in the crash, limped brokenly around on the grass, excited by the floods of radiant energy from the sun and the fire, but unable to move very fast.

And something else metallic lay in the grass.

Hardee bent for it; his head thundered, but he kept his balance and picked it up. It was the gun Wakulla had taken from Griswold. Hardee opened it, looked inside and swore.

Only one bullet left

But it was better than nothing.

Back where the others were waiting, Tavares was relentlessly questioning Griswold. ‘These creatures, you say they came from space, in that great ship that now orbits around the Earth?’

‘Five years ago,’ said Griswold, nodding. ‘They have a ray - I don’t know how it works. But they sprayed the world with it, and every living thing went to sleep. Some are sleeping yet - those that haven’t starved to death, though metabolism is slowed considerably.’

Hardee looked at Joan Bunnell and put his arm protectingly around the boy. ‘Would that be October, 1959?’ he asked.

‘It would,’ said Griswold heavily. ‘You begin to understand, I see. That’s what happened to all of you at the colony. You weren’t criminals - except that, in the eyes of the skulls, it’s a crime to be human at all.’

Not criminals! No forgotten crime to expiate! Hardee could scarcely believe it. But Griswold was still talking:

‘They want our planet,’ he explained. ‘One shipload came, to get things ready, an advance party. I don’t know when the rest of them will be here - but they’re on their way. Perhaps a year or two. And they need to have the human race under control by then.’

He rubbed his arm and stared up at the sky. ‘So some of us are helping them,’ he said flatly. ‘Call us traitors - we are! But what else is there to do? The skulls gave us a very simple alternative. Either we help them study us so that they can learn to rule the human race ... or they go back out into their ship and spray the Earth with another ray. Not a sleep ray, but one that will wipe out all life entirely.’

Griswold spread his hands. ‘It’s a choice that isn’t any choice,’ he said. ‘What else was there? So when they woke me - I was one of the first few hundred; now there must be tens of thousands - they learned, after we established communication, that I was a psychologist. It was exactly what they needed. They set me the problem of contriving an experimental colony - a test farm, if you like, where the human animal could be kept in conditions as close to natural as possible.

‘It was their ship, orbiting out there, that made me think of Mars - it does look like a second moon. Luna was no real problem. A simple post-hypnotic command and none of you could focus on it enough to recognize the features. But I couldn’t erase knowledge of Mars, if it existed in any of you. There is no invention, of course, that causes partial - and selective - amnesia in criminals. That was a lie to make you accept this plateau as a penal colony on Mars.’

‘But what in hell for?’ Hardee asked angrily.

‘So nobody would try to escape. Thinking you were on Mars, you wouldn’t hope to get to Earth. Knowing you were on Earth, you’d do anything to reach civilization - not realizing there wasn’t any left. Skitterbugs wouldn’t get harvested. Skulls would be killed. The colony would be trouble instead of useful - and it would then be wiped out.

‘I wanted to keep as many people alive for as long as I could.’ said Griswold. ‘There was no other chance for humanity.’

‘What do we do now?’ Hardee grimly demanded.

Griswold hesitated. ‘There are a few free humans,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Not many. They live in the woods in hiding, some of them in the cities themselves. Mostly they are ignored by the skulls - because there are so few. If there weren’t, the skulls would take the easy way out. The Earth is their new home, you see, and they regard it as you would your house. You might tolerate a few vermin - but if there are too many, you’ll call in the exterminators. But there are these few, and if we can somehow make our way to them, we might have a chance to -’

‘Hush!’ breathed Joan Bunnell.

She caught the boy to her, pointing. Out of the woods at the side of the field raced a posse of skitterbugs, each with its bronze death’s-head rider.

Hardee tried to fight, though there were hundreds of the creatures. If Wakulla had not been so profligate with his bullets

But he had been; and the single bullet in the gun was more frustrating than none at all.

‘Too late,’ groaned Griswold, his tortured face sagging with fear. ‘Give up, Hardee! Otherwise they’ll kill us right here!’

They were marched down a road and into the environs of a city, the skitterbugs with their bright bronze riders a disorderly rabble around them.

None of them recognized the city; it might have been anywhere. It was a silent city, a city of death. Even from the streets, they could see men and women who had been struck down in the middle of life. A mother with three children around her sprawled in a Laocöon down porch steps; a postman with his two-wheeled cart beside him, his letters long since blown away.

And there were living, waking humans too. Chuck shivered and caught his father’s arm as they rounded a corner and saw a work gang - ten or twelve men, in rags of clothing, clearing rubble from a tumbled house that lay across a side street; they looked up as Hardee and the rest passed, but there was no emotion in their eyes, only weariness.

‘Those others,’ whispered Joan. ‘Are they dead?’

‘No,’ said Tavares heavily, ‘not if what Griswold tells us is true. But they might as well be. Unless -’

‘Don’t even think it!’ begged Griswold. ‘Some of the skulls can understand English!’

‘Let them understand!’ cried Hardee. He stopped and faced them. ‘We’ll fight you!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t have our planet - not now or ever! The human race isn’t going to be taken over by a bunch of bugs from another planet!’

Incuriously, the blank-eyed bronze skulls stared at him; almost as incuriously, the ragged men looked on.

The skulls prodded Hardee on, and the ragged men went back to their work.

The prisoners were taken to a big building that bore on it a sign, Hotel Winchester. Once it had been a commercial hotel; now it seemed to be headquarters for the skitterbugs and the skulls that rode them.

Without a word, they were put in a room on a gallery that overlooked the lobby. The floor of the lobby was a seething mass of skitterbugs with their riders - and some skulls which had found a different sort of mount, for they perched on the shoulders of ragged men.

The door was closed, and they were left alone.

It was a partly glass door; Hardee peered out. ‘They must have come from a light-gravity planet,’ he guessed. ‘They move badly without the skitterbugs. They can’t be very strong.’

‘They don’t need to be,’ said Griswold somberly. ‘Not with their weapons.’

‘What about at night?’ asked Hardee. ‘Surely the skitterbugs can’t operate very well without light. Can’t we -’

But Griswold was shaking his head. ‘They keep all the areas of the city where they move about well lighted. No, Hardee. The skulls are way ahead of you.’ He sat down and sighed. ‘I think they’ll kill us,’ he said without emotion. ‘It’s either that or the labour gangs.’

Old man Tavares said something incandescent in Spanish. ‘You may die, Griswold, but I’ll fight. Look, why can we not get away? Soon it will be dark, as Hardee says, and it is then only a matter of getting away from the lighted areas. Why not?’

‘Wait,’ Hardee interrupted, staring out the glass of the door. ‘Someone’s coming.’

They crowded around.

Down the long gallery that surrounded the lobby, a tall man with angry eyes approached.

Hope surged - a human, and free!

But then they saw that on his shoulder rode one of the bronze skulls, motionless, the hollow eyes emptily staring.

‘He is probably our executioner,’ said Griswold, as though announcing the time of day.

‘Not without a fight,’ said Hardee tensely. ‘Tavares, you stand over here. I’ll wait on the other side. Joan, you take Chuck to the far side of the room. See if you can make the skull look at you! And Griswold -’

‘It won’t work,’ said Griswold stubbornly, but he went with Joan and the boy.

The door opened.

As soon as the man and his rider were inside, Hardee lunged against the door, slammed it shut. ‘Now!’ he shouted, and leaped towards the pair.

The angry eyes of the man opened wide in astonishment. Hastily he stepped back. ‘Wait!’ he cried, stumbling-

And the bronze skull toppled from his shoulder.

It rolled across the room and lay motionless on the floor.

Hardee jumped for it as though it were a hand grenade, fallen back into his own rifle pit; but the new man with the angry eyes yelled: ‘Don’t waste your time! That one’s dead - I killed it myself!’

Hardee stopped short, gaping.

The man grinned tightly. ‘It keeps the others from bothering me,’ he explained. ‘Don’t mess it up - we’ll need it to get out of here. Come on!’

‘Where?’ asked Hardee, trying to take it in. It was hope, it was rescue - when they had expected it least.

‘Down the end of the gallery,’ said the man, ‘there’s a linen closet. In it is a laundry chute. It goes down to the cellar. The skulls don’t go there much - the lights are bad; we keep them that way. And there are sewers and passages. If we reach the chute, we’re safe.’

He opened the door, peered out. ‘You go ahead, all of you. I’ll follow, as though I’m taking you somewhere.’ He closed the door and bent down to recover his skull. ‘Mustn’t forget Oscar,’ he said. ‘He’s our passport.’

He opened a leather strap that passed around his neck and shoulder, bound it around the dead skull, buckled it again. Experimentally he bowed slightly from the waist. The skull wobbled but stayed on.

‘Don’t jar me,’ he said, and crossed his fingers. He opened the door a crack, looked down the corridor and nodded.

‘Let’s go!’ he said, and flung it wide.

The procession moved down the gallery. Dust was thick on the leather settees that lined it; the skulls had no need for them, and no human without a skull possessing it had passed that way in five years. There were skitterbugs with skulls upon them at the end of the gallery, but they didn’t seem to notice anything. Down in the lobby, a few of the men with skull riders glanced up, but no one challenged.

It was twenty yards to the door of the linen closet.

Fifteen yards were easy.

Then, out of a ballroom that was now a pen for the human slaves of the skulls, two skitterbugs with skulls upon them came out. They paused and then one of them opened its queerly articulated transverse mouth and made a sound, a chanting metallic whine - speaking to the skull on the shoulder of their rescuer.

Hardee caught Joan’s arm, took a tighter grip on the hand of the boy by his side, lengthening his stride. So near! And then -

Quick as lightning, the skitterbug with the skull on it leaped forward and clutched at the legs of the man who was shepherding them.

He kicked it away. ‘Run!’ he yelled.

The skull on his shoulder fell free and bumped lifelessly away. Three more skulls, riding skitterbugs, popped out of the ballroom. Down on the lobby floor there was a stirring and a whining commotion.

‘Run!’ he yelled again, and shoved them powerfully forward to the linen closet.

They made the door, just in time. It was the size of a small room, and they all crammed inside.

Hardee slammed the door and held it. ‘Jump! I’ll stay here and keep them out.’

The boy cried out once, then was silent. He glanced at his father as Tavares and the other man lifted him into the chute; but he didn’t say a word when they let go and he slid out of sight.

‘Go ahead, Joan!’ barked Hardee.

Restless scratchings outside told him the skitterbugs were there. Then he could feel the door pressing against him. He cursed the clever, economical designers of the building, who had known better than to put a lock on the inside of a linen closet. If there had been one, they could all escape. But since there was not -

Griswold glanced at the chute, looked at Hardee, and nervously tongued his dry lips.

Tavares was in the chute now; he waved, and dropped out of sight.

Griswold turned his back on the chute.

He walked over to Hardee. ‘I’ve got a broken arm,’ he said, ‘and, you know, I’m not sure the free humans would welcome me. You go, Hardee.’

‘But-’

‘Go ahead!’ Griswold thrust him away. There was more strength than Hardee had expected in the worn, injured body. ‘I doubt I could make it anyway, with this arm - but I can hold them for a minute!’

Already the other man was gone; it was only Griswold and Hardee there, and the scratching and shoving were growing more insistent.

‘All right,’ said Hardee at last. ‘Griswold -’

But he didn’t know what it was, exactly, that he wanted to say; and besides, there was no time.

Griswold, sweat pouring into his eyes, chuckled faintly for the first time since Hardee had known him.

‘Hurry!’ he said, and looked embarrassed as he held up two fingers in a shaky V. But he looked embarrassed only for an instant. The fingers firmed into a spiky, humanly stubborn, defiant sign of victory. ‘Save the children,’ Griswold said. ‘I couldn’t get the skulls to let many into the colony - a waste,they told me, because kids can’t work. Save the children!’

Hardee turned away - towards the laundry chute, and towards a new life.