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.