And there was one other thing about Mr. Griswold. He never left the old plane.
In the three years of Joan’s experience, he had yet to climb down that metal ladder to stand on the ground.
Since Griswold would not come down the ladder, the Probation Officer eagerly and importantly puffed up it.
There was a moment while he and Griswold talked to each other, low-voiced, at the door to the cabin of the old tri-motor plane.
Then the Probation Officer stepped aside. ‘Let ‘em out, please,’ he ordered. ‘Let the new fish come down the ladder!’
Five men and women began to file out of the plane, squinting in dazed unbelief at the sunwashed scene around them.
Wakulla caught sight of one of the women and yelled an animal’s cry of glee. ‘That’s for me!’ He meant it for a playful aside, but that voice was not meant for stage whispers. He grinned at the woman; then his expression changed to astonishment.
He wasn’t alone. There was a gasp. ‘She’s got a kid with her!’ cried one of the women beside Joan Bunnell. Joan caught her breath. That was very odd - and very rare and very precious. There were four babies in the colony, born there, three of them in wedlock and one in doubt. But this was a girl of five or six, not a newborn. That was almost without precedent - the only other child who had been brought to the colony was Hardee’s boy.
A dozen hands helped the woman with the child down the ladder. They led her, with the others, across the hot sands towards the shelter.
Joan cast one glance at the plane. Already Tavares’s crew was beginning to unload crates of supplies. Already the tied sacks of skitterbugs, feebly stirring in the light that filtered through the burlap, were being trundled out on wheelbarrows to be loaded into the plane for return to - where? No one had ever said. Back to Earth, perhaps. Perhaps not.
The glass windscreens of the tri-motor’s battered old nose glittered opaquely.
Joan glanced at them and then away - there was nothing there; she never could see inside the cockpit; no one ever had. Behind those glittering windshields were, undoubtedly, the pilot and co-pilot - for surely Griswold was no aviator, not with that tic and those eyes. But she had never seen the pilots, not even when she herself was part of the plane’s cargo, coming here. And she didn’t expect to see them now.
But something was nagging at her.
She looked again, and her eye was caught by old Dom Tavares, who should have been helping to load the plane, and who instead was standing in a queerly tense attitude, staring at the open door.
Joan tried to peer past the door, but it was hard to see from the bright sun outside into the black shadows within. There was Griswold, and there was the Probation Officer, surely - at least there were two shadows. And the taller, fatter shadow was handing something to the lean, bent one - something that looked like a rag, or an old garment; they were talking about it.
Joan hesitated, wondered if it was worth thinking about.
But there were the newcomers - new faces, when all the old faces were worn so familiar.
And Tavares was, it was perfectly true, getting a little odd in his ways anyhow. Everyone knew that.
She turned, dismissing whatever it was that disturbed Tavares, and hurried after the newcomers as they were shepherded into the recreation room.
By day, the ‘Liveliest Night Spot on Mars’ was even less attractive than by night.
The night before had been a big one; the signs of it were all over the room, overturned chairs, spilled drinks, the grime of a couple of dozen men in town. No one had taken the time to tidy up - that was done later, usually in the waning heat of the afternoon - and the new arrivals stared around them with revulsion in their eyes.
‘They’re very young,’ someone whispered to Joan. She nodded. One of the women was middle-aged, but the one with the child was just into her twenties. And of the men, one was little more than a boy.
He was a blond-haired youngster, his eyes violet and innocent, his face far from the time of shaving. What, Joan wondered, had brought him here? For that matter, what was the crime of the dowdy-looking, plump little woman who was staring around in such panic?
The colonists were all over the new women - particularly Wakulla, gallant with an ape’s clumsy politeness. ‘A chair!’ he bawled. ‘A chair for the lady!’ And he wrenched one from Joan’s hand. ‘I’ll take the calf to get the heifer,’ he whispered hoarsely, with an exaggerated wink, and slid the chair clattering to the girl with the child. The girl only stared at him fearfully.
Joan tried to stay back and give the newcomers room.
She had a vivid sense of what they must be feeling; she remembered; she could read their eyes and know what they must bethinking:
The strangeness of their surroundings.
The sudden shock. (For it was always a shock, everyone agreed on it; one minute you were going about your business, a minute later you woke up somewhere else. A strange somewhere, and removed in time - in a white-walled room, with a couple of tense and worried-looking doctors and nurses around you, with television scanner lenses in the walls ... and, very quickly, a tense and worried-looking man in uniform coming in to talk to you, to tell you that you had become a criminal, in a life that was now wiped out of your mind, and that you were on Mars, headed for a penal colony. Shock? It was a wonder that it didn’t prove fatal. And perhaps for some it had; they had no way of knowing.)
But more than these things - after that first shock wore off and you had become reconciled to the fact that your whole life had somehow been perverted into that of a criminal - after you had been bundled, blindfolded, into that rattling old three-motored plane and flown for windowless hours across the unseen Martian deserts - then you arrived.
And that was bad.
For there was always the uneasy, shamefaced question in the crowd: Does this one know who I am? And that other one – why is he grinning like that? Does he know what I did? And what did he himself do, to be in this place?
Nobody ever got it.
But the early days were worst of all, before the pain became an accustomed one.
The heat was beating in on them. The woman with the child, half afraid, half contemptuous of Wakulla’s gallantry, leaned white-faced against the back of her chair. The little girl, a thumb in her mouth and the other hand clutching her mother’s skirt beside her, watched silently.
The boy was talking - his name was Tommy and he had told them he was seventeen years old. ‘That’s what they tell me,’ he said, with a painful effort to be adult and sure of himself. His voice was a soft high mumble, hardly the voice of even a seventeen-year-old. ‘But - I don’t remember that. Really, I don’t. The last thing I remember, I was twelve!’
Twelve! Joan made a faint sound; almost she patted him on the head, though he was taller than she. Twelve! What sort of criminal could have hatched at twelve? Even at seventeen, the thing was ridiculous! But somewhere, this child had lost five years.
She tried to explain it to him: ‘You must have done something, Tommy. Maybe you got involved with the wrong bunch at school - who knows? But somehow, you went wrong. That’s why they send people here, you know. It’s the new law. Instead of putting someone in jail and keeping them there - that would be a waste, you see, and cruel - they wipe out the part of the minds that has the criminal pattern in it. They go back erasing memory, until they come to a part that is clean and unaffected, not only before the crime was committed but before, even, the first seed of the crime was planted. That’s why none of us know what it was we did. It’s been taken away from us. We’ve been given a second chance. We should be grateful.’