‘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.