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?’