‘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: