Turn Left at Thursday (1961) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  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?'

  '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: 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.

  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 broughtto 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.