That evening Crag knocked off the usual three hour work period following evening chow. Nagel tumbled onto his pad and was asleep almost instantly. His breathing was a harsh rasp. At Crag's suggestion Prochaska took the watch until midnight. Crag stood guard the remainder of the night to allow Nagel and Larkwell a full night's rest.
While the others slept, Crag brooded at the port. Once he ran his hand over his face, surprised at the hardness. All bone and no flesh, he thought. He looked toward the north wall of Arzachel.
In a few short hours Drone Charlie would come blazing over the rim, and Red Dog snapping at its heels.
CHAPTER 14
"Adam Crag was not a God-fearing man," the minister stated. His tone implied that Crag had been just the opposite. "Not a bit like his parents. The best family guidance in the world, yet he quit Sunday school almost before he got started. I doubt that he's ever been to church since."
He looked archly at the agent. "Perhaps a godless world like the moon is just retribution."
A garage mechanic, a junk dealer and the proprietor of a tool shop had a lot to say about Adam Crag. So did the owner of a small private airport. They remembered him as a boy with an insatiable appetite for tearing cars apart and converting them to what the junk dealer termed "supersonic jalopies."
Many people in El Cajon remembered Adam Crag. Strangely enough, his teachers all the way back through grade school had little difficulty in recalling his antics and attitudes. An elementary teacher explained it by saying, "He was that kind of a boy."
The family doctor had the most to say about Adam. He had long since retired, a placid seventyish man who had elected to pass his last years in the same house, in an older section of the town, in which he'd been born.