Hawksbill Station Read online

  “I think I would,” Barrett said cautiously. “Besides, you know what happened to Christ.”

  “He wasn’t the first martyr to ideas, and he won’t be the last. Do you want to play it safe all your life? Do you want to sit there wrapped in muscle and fat and let the wolves eat the world? What’s it going to be like when you’re sixty years old, Jimmy, and the world is one big slave camp, and there you sit in chains saying, Well, I’m alive, so everything turned out pretty fair?”

  Barrett said coolly, “Better a live slave than a dead subversive.”

  “If you believe that, you’re more of a moron than I think you are.”

  “I ought to swat you. You buzz, Jack. Like a mosquito.”

  “Do you believe that thing you just said to me about a live slave? Do you? Do you?”

  Barrett shrugged. “What do you think?”

  “Then come to a meeting. Get out of your cocoon and do something, Jimmy. We need men like you.” Jack’s voice had shifted pitch and timbre. It had lost its reedy, querulous tone, and suddenly was lower, more assured, more commanding. “Someone of your size, Jimmy—of your natural authority. You’d be terrific. If I could only get you to see that what we’re doing is important—”

  “How can a bunch of high school kids save the world?”

  Jack’s thin lips quirked and clamped; but he seemed to choke back whatever quick burst of reply had offered itself. After a pause he said, still in that same strange new voice of his, “Not all of us are high school kids, Jimmy. Most kids our age are like you—they lack commitment. We have older people, in their twenties, thirties, some even older than that. If you’d meet them, you’d see what I mean. Talk to Pleyel, if you want to know what true dedication is like. Talk to Hawksbill.” Mischief flared in Jack’s eyes. “You might even want to come just to meet the girls. We’ve got some girls in the group. They’re pretty liberated girls, I might as well tell you. Just in case you care about such things, and maybe you do.”

  “Is this a Communist group, Jack?”

  “No. Definitely not. We’ve got our Marxists, sure, but we run right through the political spectrum. As a matter of fact, our basic orientation is anti-Communist, because we believe in a minimum of State interference with individual life and thought, and you know that Marxists are planners. In that sense we’re virtually anarchists. We might even be termed Radical Rightists, since we’d like to dismantle a lot of the government apparatus. You see how meaningless these political tags are? We’re so far to the left that we’re right-wingers, and we’re so far to the right that we’re left-wingers. But we do have a program. Will you come to a meeting?”

  “Tell me about the girls.”

  “They’re attractive and intelligent and sociable. Some of them might even be interested in an apolitical boor like you, simply because you’re such a big hunk of meat.”

  Barrett nodded. “The next time there’s a meeting, maybe I’ll go.”

  He was tired of Bernstein’s nagging, more than anything else. Large issues of politics had never interested him in a really passionate way. But it pained him to be told that he had no conscience, or that he was sitting idly by while the world went to hell, and in his whining, persistent way, Jack had goaded him into making a move. He would go to a meeting of this underground group. He would get a firsthand look. He expected that he would find it full of embittered nuts and futile dreamers, and he’d never go to a second meeting, but at least Jack would never be able to throw in his face again the accusation that he had rejected the movement out of hand.

  A week later, Jack Bernstein told him that a meeting had been called for the following night. Barrett went. The date was April 11, 1984.

  It was a cold, windy, rainy night, with more than a hint of snow in the air. Typical 1984 weather. There was a hex on the year, people said. That man had written a book about 1984, long ago, predicting all sorts of terrible things, and though none of those particular terrible things had come to pass in the United States, there were other troubles in the land, and everything seemed typified by the weather. Spring was not going to come this year: that looked certain. Mounds of dull gray snow lay heaped everywhere in New York, here in mid-April, except on those streets that had the heating filaments embedded in the pavement, downtown. The trees were still bare, and not even the buds were stirring. A bad year for people, tense and stormy. Not such a bad year for revolution, perhaps.

  Jimmy Barrett met Jack Bernstein at the subway station near the edge of Prospect Park, and they rode into Manhattan, getting off at Times Square. The train they rode on had a shabby, tattered look to it, but that was nothing unusual. Everything was tattered and shabby, here in the ninth year of what was being called the Permanent Depression.

  They walked down Forty-second Street to Ninth Avenue and entered the lobby of a golden tower eighty stories high, one of the last skyscrapers to go up before the Panic. An elevator door creaked open for them. Jack pressed the button for the basement, and down they went.

  “What am I supposed to say when they ask me who I am?” Barrett wondered.

  “Leave everything to me,” Jack said. His pale, blotchy face was transfigured with importance. He was in his element, now. Jack the conspirator. Jack the subversive. Jack the plotter in basement corridors. Barrett felt uncomfortable, awkwardly big and naïve.

  They emerged from the elevator, passed through a low-vaulted passageway, and appeared before a closed green door with a chair propped against it. A girl stood in the hallway beside the chair. She was nineteen or twenty years old, Barrett guessed: short and fat, with thick legs visible beneath her short skirt. She wore her hair short too, in the current fashion, but that was the only fashionable thing about her. Heavy breasts sagged unsupported within a red woolen sweater. Her only makeup was a smear of luminescent blue across her lips, unevenly applied. A cigarette dangled loosely from one corner of her mouth. She looked deliberately slovenly, coarse, cheap, as though she saw some virtue in hunching her shoulders in and pretending she was a peasant. She seemed a caricature of all the left-wing girls who marched in protest demonstrations and waved petitions. Was this sleazy tramp the sort of girl typical of the group? “Attractive, intelligent, and sociable,” Jack had said, cunningly baiting his trap with the promise of passion. But of course Jack’s idea of an attractive girl didn’t necessarily match his. To Jack—unpopular, scrawny, sharp-tongued—any girl who would let him paw her a little would seem like Aphrodite. Grubby boys found virtues in grubby girls that Barrett, not so limited by nature, tended not to see.

  “Evening, Janet,” Jack said. His voice was edgy again.

  The girl surveyed him coolly, then made a show of staring up at Barrett’s full height.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jimmy Barrett. Classmate of mine. He’s all right. Politically naïve, but he’ll learn.”

  “You tell Pleyel you were asking him here?”

  “No. But I’ll vouch for him.” Jack moved closer to her. In a possessive way he put his hand across her wrist. “Stop acting like a commissar and let us in, will you, lover?”

  Janet disengaged herself. “You wait here. I’ll see if it’s okay.”

  She slipped within the green door. Jack turned to Barrett and said, “That’s a marvelous girl. Sometimes she plays tough, but she’s got real spirit. And sensuality. She’s a very sensual girl.”

  “How would you know?” Barrett asked.

  Jack colored and his lips compressed into a flat, angry line. “Believe me. I know.”

  “You mean you’re not a virgin, Bernstein?”

  “Knock it off, will you?”

  The door opened again. Janet was back, and with her was a slim, reserved-looking man whose stubby hair was wholly gray, but whose face was unlined, so that he could have been fifty or thirty, and there was no telling. His eyes were gray too, and managed to be gentle and penetrating at the same time. Barrett saw Jack Bernstein stiffen to attention. “It’s Pleyel,” Bernstein whispered.

  The girl s
aid, “His name’s Jim Barrett. Bernstein says he vouches for him.”

  Pleyel nodded amiably. The gray eyes moved quickly across Barrett’s face, and it was a struggle not to flinch as those eyes excavated him. “Hello, Jim,” Pleyel said. “My name’s Norman Pleyel.”

  Barrett nodded. It sounded strange, hearing Janet and Pleyel calling him Jim. All his life, he had been Jimmy to everyone.

  Jack blurted, “He’s in my class. I’ve been working on him, getting to see his responsibilities to humanity. He finally decided to come down and attend a meeting. He—”

  “Yes,” Pleyel said. “We’re glad to have you here, Jim. But you must understand one thing before you step inside. You’re running risks by attending this meeting, even as an observer. This organization has met with official opposition. Your presence here may be held against you at some future time. Is that quite clear?”

  “—yes.”

  “And also, since the rest of us live under constant risk, I’ll have to remind you that everything that takes place here tonight is confidential. If we learn that you’ve taken advantage of your privilege as a guest to divulge anything you’ve heard, we’ll be forced to take action against you. So if you step inside, you’re exposing yourself to danger both from the presently constituted government and from ourselves. This is your chance to leave without stigma, if you wish.”

  Barrett hesitated. He glanced at Jack, whose face clearly registered distress; obviously Bernstein expected him to sidestep the risks and go home, undoing all the proselytizing work. Barrett considered the idea seriously. They were asking him to make an advance commitment before he knew anything about them; the moment he stepped through that door, he was placing himself in a matrix of responsibilities. To hell with the risks. “I’d still like to go inside, sir,” he murmured.

  Pleyel looked pleased. He opened the door. As Barrett stepped past the short, sullen-looking girl, he was surprised to see her staring at him with warm approval and even, perhaps, desire. She remained outside, guarding the door. Pleyel led the way within. Entering, Jack murmured to him, “That man is one of the most remarkable human beings of all time.” He might have been speaking of Goethe or Leonardo.

  The room was large and cavernous and cold, and had not been painted for at least eight years. Rows of bare wooden benches were lined up facing an empty stage. About a dozen people had pushed some of the benches into a rough circle. They included two or three girls, a balding man, and a group of what looked like college students. One of them was reading aloud from a long yellow slip of paper, and the others were punctuating his words with comments every few seconds.

  “—in this present moment of crisis, we feel that—”

  “No, it ought to be all men must feel that—”

  “I don’t think so. You make it sound stiff and—”

  “Can we go back to the previous sentence, where you talk of the threat to liberty posed by—”

  Barrett watched the wrangling without pleasure. It all seemed impossibly dull and dreary to him, this quibbling over the phraseology of a manifesto. That was essentially what he had expected to find here: a bunch of futilitarian hairsplitters in a drafty basement room, battling furiously over minute semantic differences. Were these the revolutionaries who would hold back the world from chaos? Hardly. Hardly.

  In a moment, the discussion had turned into a scramble, with five people shouting suggestions for revision of the leaflet all at once. Pleyel stood by, looking pained but making no effort to salvage the meeting. There was a wounded and apologetic look on Jack Bernstein’s face. The door opened again, and as a man in his twenties entered the meeting room, Bernstein nudged Barrett and said, “That’s Hawksbill!”

  The famous mathematician was an unimpressive sight. He was plump, frowsily dressed, and needed a shave. He wore thick glasses, no necktie, and a bulky blue pullover; his brown hair was curly but thinning, baring the crown of his scalp, but despite this he had the look of a college sophomore. There had to be more to the man than this, Barrett thought. Last year the newspapers had been full of the doings of Hawksbill; he had been a momentary hero of science, a nine-days’ wonder when he stood up before that scientific congress in Zurich or Basel or wherever and read the text of his paper on the time equations. The newspapers had compared the work of twenty-five-year-old Edmond Hawksbill with the work of twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein, and not to Hawksbill’s disadvantage. So here he was, a member of this seedy revolutionary cell; and all his brilliance was on the inside. How could a man with such piggish little eyes be a genius?

  Hawksbill put down his briefcase and said without preamble, “I ran the distribution vectors through the NYU computer while no one was looking. The indicated outcome is a breakup of both political parties, an inconclusive Presidential election, and the formation of a wholly different and nonrepresentative political system.”

  “When?” Pleyel asked.

  “Within three months after the election, plus or minus fourteen days,” said Hawksbill. The voice that came out of the stocky body was entirely lacking in resonance and inflection; it was a pale stream of flaccid sound. “We can expect persecution to begin by next February as the new administration attempts to stifle dissent in the name of restoring order.”

  “Show us the parameters!” snapped the man who had been reading the draft of the yellow-paper manifesto. “Step by step, lay it out for us, Hawksbill!”

  Pleyel said, “Surely that isn’t necessary. If we—”

  “No, I’ll explain,” the mathematician said, looking unruffled. He started to haul papers from his briefcase. “Item one. The election of President Delafield on the new American Conservative Party ticket in ’72, resulting in fundamental changes in the economic role of the government, leading to the Boom of ’73. Item two, the Panic of ’76, ushering in the Permanent Depression. The victory of the National Liberal Party in ’76, with the American Conservatives carrying only two states, that’s item three. Now, if we cross-index the 1980 election, with its extremely subtle currents of disruption—”

  “We know all that,” came a bored voice.

  Hawksbill shrugged. “It becomes possible to demonstrate mathematically, taking analog blocks of voter power, that neither major party is likely to achieve an electoral-vote majority this November, forcing the election into the House of Representatives, where, as a result of the situation that developed in the Congressional election of 1982, it will become impossible even to elect a President by that method. Whereupon—”

  “The country will be in a mess.”

  “Precisely,” said Hawksbill.

  Barrett was aware that that last comment had come from a point not far from his left elbow. He looked down and saw Janet standing there. Absorbed in Hawksbill’s droning words, he had not even noticed her enter the room, but there she was beside him, quite close, in fact. Jack Bernstein seemed annoyed by that, judging by the glare on his face.

  The girl said, “Don’t you find what they’re saying terrifying?”

  Barrett realized that she was speaking to him. He said tensely, “I knew things were bad, but I hadn’t realized they were that bad. If it really happens—”

  “It will. If Ed Hawksbill’s computer says it’ll happen, it’ll happen. The Second American Revolution, we’re calling it. Norm Pleyel is in contact with important men all over the country, trying to head it off.”

  It seemed unreal to Barrett. Oh, he knew there were strikes, protest parades, sabotage incidents. He knew there were millions of people out of work, that the dollar had been devalued four times since 1976, that the Communist countries were keeping up the pressure even though their economies weren’t in such good shape themselves. And that the nation’s political structure was all snarled up, with the old parties extinct and the new ones split into minority blocs. Yet it had always seemed to him and to everyone he knew that things would settle down after a while. These people seemed to be taking a deliberately pessimistic view. A revolution? An end to the present constitutio
n?

  Janet offered him a cigarette. He took it, nodding his thanks, and flipped the ignition cap. They sat down on the bench together. Her warm thigh pressed against his. Jack was on the far side of her, looking more and more annoyed. Barrett found himself thinking that this Janet wouldn’t be so bad-looking if she lost twenty pounds, got herself a decent brassiere, washed her face more often, put some makeup on…and then he smiled at his own easy acceptance. At first glance she had seemed to be a pig, but he had begun to edit that opinion already.

  Sitting quietly in a corner of the room, he tried to follow the sense of the meeting.

  The focal points were Hawksbill and his hecklers. Pleyel, supposedly the leader of the group, remained to the side. Yet Barrett noticed that whenever the talk got too seriously astray, Pleyel cut in and rescued things. The man had the art of leading without seeming to lead, and Barrett was impressed.

  He was not impressed at all with the rest of what was going on, though.

  Everyone here seemed fundamentally sure that the country was in a bad way, and fundamentally agreed that Something Ought To Be Done About It. But beyond that point all was in haze and chaos. They couldn’t even agree on the text of a manifesto to be distributed outside the White House, let alone on a program for rescuing the constitution. These people seemed as fragmented as a high school chess club, and about as capable of exerting political force. Did Bernstein expect him to take this group seriously? What was their goal? What were their methods? Politically naïve he might be, but he was at least able to assess this committee of dedicated revolutionaries and find them wanting.

  The talk droned on for nearly two hours.

  Sometimes it grew passionate; mostly it was dull, all dialectics and hollow theory. Barrett noticed that Jack Bernstein, who surely was the youngest in the group, talked longest and loudest, shooting off cascades of verbal fireworks. Jack seemed in his element here. But all the talk came to very little. Barrett was taken by Pleyel’s obvious dedication to his cause, by Hawksbill’s obvious penetration of mind, and by Jack’s obvious love for fiery rhetoric, but he was convinced that he had wasted his time by coming here.