And then he shrugged and, game loser, said: 'Ah, why not? I'll come along.'
• • • •
And why not, when you come to think of it? I mean ruling a city is nice and all that, but a sea voyage is a refreshing change. And while a hundred and nine to one is a respectable female-male ratio, still it must be wearing; and eighty to thirty isn't so bad, either. At least, I guess that was what was in the Major's mind. I know it was what was in mine.
And I discovered that it was in Amy's, for the first thing she did was to march me over to the typewriter and say: 'You've had it, Sam. We'll dispose with the wedding march--just get your friend Arthur here to marry us.'
'Arthur?'
'The captain,' she said. 'We're on the high seas and he's empowered to perform marriages.'
Vern looked at me and shrugged, meaning, you asked for this one, boy. And I looked at him and shrugged, meaning, it could be worse.
And indeed it could. We'd got our ship; we'd got our ship's company--
because, naturally, there wasn't any use stealing a big ship for just a couple of us. We'd had to manage to get a sizeable colony aboard. That was the whole idea.
The world, in fact, was ours. It could have been very much worse indeed, even though Arthur was laughing so hard as he performed the ceremony that he jammed up all his keys.
Mars by Moonlight
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 cha
ir.
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 CO. 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 w
aste 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.
The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC Page 16
