Hawksbill Station Read online

  Toward eleven, Janet said, “Where do you live?”

  “Brooklyn. You know where Prospect Park is?”

  “I’m from the Bronx. You work?”

  “School.”

  “Oh. Yes. Right. You’re in Jack’s class.” She seemed to be measuring him. “Does that mean you’re the same age he is?”

  “Sixteen, yes.”

  “You look a lot older, Jim.”

  “You’re not the first to say that.”

  “Maybe we could get together sometime,” she said. “I mean, for nonrevolutionary purposes. I’d like to know you better.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Fine idea.”

  Very quickly, he found himself arranging a date. He rationalized it by telling himself that it was the decent thing to do, letting this fat, homely girl enjoy a little glamor once in her life. No doubt she’d be an easy make. It did not occur to him then that he was casually disemboweling Jack Bernstein by picking up Janet this way, but later, when he thought about it, he decided that he had done nothing wrong. Jack had nagged him into coming here, promising him that he’d meet girls, and was it his fault that the promise had been fulfilled?

  On the train back to Brooklyn that night Jack was taut and cheerless. “It was a dull meeting,” he said. “They aren’t all that bad.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Sometimes a few of them get carried away with dialectics. But the cause is a good one.”

  “Yes,” Barrett agreed. “I suppose.”

  He did not then plan ever to attend another meeting. But he was wrong about that, as he would prove to be wrong about so many other things in those years. Barrett did not realize then that the pattern of his adult life had been fixed in that drafty basement room, or that he had involved himself in a binding commitment, or that he had begun a lasting love affair, or that he had been face to face with his nemesis that evening. Nor did he imagine that he had transformed a friend into a savage, vindictive enemy who would one day hurl him to a strange fate.

  FIVE

  On the evening of Lew Hahn’s arrival, as on every evening, the men of Hawksbill Station gathered in the main building for dinner and recreation. It was not mandatory—very little was, here—and some men usually chose to eat alone. But tonight nearly everyone who was in full possession of his faculties showed up, because this was one of the infrequent occasions when a newcomer was on hand, available to be questioned about events Up Front in the world of mankind.

  Hahn looked uneasy about his sudden notoriety. He seemed to be basically a shy man, unwilling to accept all the attention now being thrust upon him. There he sat in the middle of the group of exiles, while men who were twenty and thirty years his senior crowded in on him with their questions. It was obvious that he wasn’t enjoying the session.

  Sitting to one side, Barrett took little part in the talk. His curiosity about the ideological shifts of the world Up Front had ebbed a long time ago. It was an effort for him to recall that he had once been furiously concerned about concepts like syndicalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the guaranteed annual wage. When he was sixteen, and Jack Bernstein was dragging him to cell meetings, he had hardly cared about such things. But the virus of revolution had infected him, and when he was twenty-six and even when he was thirty-six he had still been so deeply involved in burning issues that he had been willing to risk imprisonment and exile over them. Now he had come full circle again, back to the political apathy of his adolescence.

  It was not that his concern for the sufferings of humanity had waned—merely the degree of his involvement in the political difficulties of the twenty-first century. After two decades at Hawksbill Station, Up Front had become misty and faint to Jim Barrett, and his energies centered around the crises and challenges of what he had come to think of as “his own” time—the Late Cambrian.

  So he listened, but more with an ear for what the talk revealed about Lew Hahn than for what it might reveal about current events Up Front. And what it revealed about Lew Hahn was mainly a matter of what was not revealed.

  Hahn didn’t say much at all. He seemed to be feinting and evading.

  Charley Norton wanted to know, “Is there any sign of a weakening of the phony conservatism yet? I mean, they’ve been promising the end of big government for thirty years, and it gets bigger all the time. When does the dismantling process begin, anyway?”

  Hahn moved restlessly in his chair. “They still promise. As soon as conditions become stabilized—”

  “Which happens when?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose they’re just making fancy words.”

  “What about the Martian Commune?” demanded Sid Hutchett. “Have they been infiltrating agents onto Earth?”

  “I couldn’t really say,” Hahn murmured. “We don’t hear much news about Mars.”

  “How about the Gross Global Product?” Mel Rudiger wanted to know. “What’s its curve? Still holding level, or has it started to drop?”

  Hahn tugged thoughtfully at his ear. “I think it’s slowly edging down. Yes, down.”

  “But where does the index stand?” Rudiger asked. “The last figures we had, for ’25, it was at 909. But in four years’ time—”

  “It might be something like 875 now,” said Hahn. “I’m not really sure.”

  It struck Barrett as a little odd that an economist would be so hazy about the basic economic statistic. Of course, he didn’t know how long Hahn had been imprisoned before getting the Hammer. Maybe he simply wasn’t up on the recent figures. Barrett held his peace.

  Charley Norton jabbed a stubby forefinger forward and said, “Tell me about the basic legal rights of citizens nowadays. Is habeas corpus back? Search warrants? Where do they stand on gathering evidence through data channels without the knowledge of the accused?”

  Hahn couldn’t tell him.

  Rudiger asked about the impact of weather control—whether the supposedly conservative government of liberators, dedicated to upholding the rights of the governed against the abuses of the rulers, was still ramming programmed weather down the mouths of the citizens.

  Hahn wasn’t sure.

  Hahn couldn’t rightly say much about the functions of the judiciary, whether it had recovered any of the power stripped from it by the Enabling Act of ’18. He didn’t have any comments to offer on the tricky subject of population control. He didn’t know much about tax rates. In fact, his performance was striking for its lack of hard information.

  Charley Norton came over to the silent Barrett and grumbled, “He isn’t saying a damned thing that’s worth anything. First man we’ve had here in six months, and he’s a clam. He’s putting up a good smokescreen. Either he’s not telling what he knows, or he doesn’t know.”

  “Maybe he’s just not very bright,” Barrett suggested.

  “What did he do to get sent here, then? He must have had some kind of deep commitment. But it doesn’t show, Jim! He’s an intelligent kid, but he doesn’t seem plugged in to anything that ever mattered to any of us.”

  Doc Quesada offered a thought. “Suppose this boy isn’t a political at all! Suppose they’re sending a different kind of prisoner back here now. Ax murderers, or something. A quiet kid who very quietly hauled out a laser and chopped up sixteen people one Sunday morning. Naturally he isn’t interested in politics.”

  “And he’s pretending to be an economist,” Norton said, “because he doesn’t want us to know why he really got sent here. Eh?”

  Barrett shook his head. “I doubt that. I think he’s just clamming up on us because he’s shy or ill at ease. This is his first night here, remember. He’s just been kicked out of his own world, and there’s no going back, and it hurts. He may have left a wife and baby behind, you know. Or he may simply not give a damn tonight about sitting up there in the midst of you characters and spouting the latest word on abstract philosophical theory, when all he wants to do is go off and cry his eyes out. I say we ought to leave him alone. He’ll talk when he feels li
ke talking.”

  Quesada looked convinced. After a moment, Norton furrowed his forehead and said, “All right. Maybe.”

  Barrett didn’t spread his thoughts about Hahn any further. He let the quizzing of Hahn continue until it petered out of its own accord as the new man proved an unsatisfactory subject. The men began to drift away. A couple of them went into the back room to convert Hahn’s vague generalities and evasive comments into the lead story for the next handwritten edition of the Hawksbill Station Times. Mel Rudiger stood on a table and shouted out that he was going night-fishing, and four men stepped forward to join him. Charley Norton sought out his customary debating partner, the nihilist Ken Belardi, and reopened, like a festering wound, their discussion of planning versus laissez faire, a discussion which by now bored them both to the point of screaming, but which they could not end. The nightly games of stochastic chess began. The loners who had broken their routine by making visits to the main building this evening, simply to see the new man and hear what he had to say, went back to their huts to do whatever it was they did in them alone each night.

  Hahn stood apart, fidgeting and uncertain.

  Barrett went up to him and drew a quick, uneasy smile. “I guess you didn’t really want to be quizzed tonight, eh?” he said.

  Hahn looked unhappy. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more informative. I’ve been out of circulation a while, you see.”

  “Of course. I understand.” Barrett had been out of circulation too, for quite a while, before they had decided to send him to Hawksbill Station. Sixteen months in a maximum-security interrogation chamber, and only one visitor during those sixteen months. Jack Bernstein had come to see him quite frequently. Good old Jack. After more than twenty years, Barrett hadn’t forgotten a syllable of those conversations. Good. Old. Jack. Or Jacob, as he had liked to be called then. Barrett said, “You were politically active, I take it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Hahn said. “Of course.” He flicked his tongue over his lips. “What’s supposed to happen now?”

  “Nothing in particular. We don’t have organized activities here. It’s every man for himself, essentially: the compleat anarchist community. In theory.”

  “Does the theory hold up?”

  “Not very well,” Barrett admitted. “But we try to pretend it does, and lean on each other when we need support, all the same. Doc Quesada and I are going out on sick call now. Care to join us?”

  “What does it involve?” Hahn asked.

  “Visiting some of the worst cases. Aid and comfort for hopeless causes, mostly. It can be grim, but you’ll get a panoramic view of Hawksbill Station in a hurry. But if you prefer, you can—”

  “I’d like to go.”

  “Good.” Barrett gestured to Quesada, who came across the room to meet them. The three of them left the building. It was a mild, humid night. Thunder sounded in the distance, somewhere out over the Atlantic, and the dark ocean slapped at the obstinate ridge of rock that separated it from the waters of the Inland Sea.

  Sick call was a nightly ritual for Barrett, difficult as it was for him since he had hurt his foot. He hadn’t missed his rounds in years. Before turning in he stomped through the Station, visiting the goofy ones and the psycho ones and the catatonic ones, tucking them in, wishing them a good night’s sleep and a healed mind in the morning. Someone had to show them that someone cared. Barrett did.

  Outside, Hahn peered up at the moon. It was nearly full tonight, shining like a burnished coin, its face a pale salmon color and hardly pockmarked at all.

  “It looks so different here,” Hahn said. “The craters—where are the craters?”

  “Most of them haven’t been formed yet,” Barrett told him. “A billion years is a long time even for the moon. Most of its upheavals are still ahead. We think it may still have an atmosphere, too. That’s why it looks pink to us. And if it’s got an atmosphere, why, it’ll vaporize most of the meteors smashing into it, so there won’t be so many craters gouged out. Of course, Up Front hasn’t bothered to send us much in the way of astronomical equipment. We can only guess.”

  Hahn started to say something. He cut himself off after one blurted syllable.

  Quesada said, “Don’t hold it back. What were you about to suggest?”

  Hahn laughed, a self-mocking snort. “That you ought to fly up there and take a look. It struck me as odd that you’d spend all these years theorizing about whether the moon’s got an atmosphere, and wouldn’t ever once go up there to look. But I forgot.”

  “It would be useful if we got a commute ship from Up Front,” Barrett agreed. “But it hasn’t occurred to them to send us one. All we can do is look and guess. The moon’s a popular place in ’29, is it?”

  “The biggest resort in the System.”

  “They were just starting to develop it when I came here,” Barrett said. “Government personnel only. A rest camp for bureaucrats in the middle of the big military complex up there.”

  Quesada said, “They opened it to selected nongovernmental elite before my trial. That was in ’17, ’18.”

  “Now it’s a commercial resort,” said Hahn. “I was there on my honeymoon. Leah and I—”

  He stopped again.

  Barrett said hurriedly, “This is Bruce Valdosto’s hut. Val’s a revolutionary from way back, grew up with me, more or less. He stayed under cover longer. They didn’t send him here till ’22.” As he opened the door, Barrett went on, “He cracked up a few weeks ago, and he’s in bad shape. When we go in, Hahn, stand behind us so he doesn’t see you. He might be violent with a stranger. Val’s unpredictable.”

  Valdosto was a husky man in his late forties, with swarthy skin, coarse curling black hair, and the broadest shoulders any man had ever had. Sitting down, he looked even burlier than Jim Barrett, which was saying a great deal. But Valdosto had short, stumpy legs, the legs of a man of ordinary stature tacked wantonly to the trunk of a giant, which spoiled the effect completely when he stood up. It would have been possible, while he was still living Up Front, for Valdosto to have a different pair of legs fitted to his body. But in his years Up Front he had totally refused to go in for prosthetics. He wanted his own true legs, gnarled and malproportioned though they were. He believed in living with deformities and adjusting to them.

  Right now he was strapped tightly into a webfoam cradle. His domed forehead was flecked with beads of sweat, and his eyes were glittering like mica in the darkness. Valdosto was a very sick man. Once he had been clear-minded enough to throw a sleet-bomb into a meeting of the Council of Syndics, giving a dozen of them a bad case of gamma poisoning, but now he scarcely knew up from down, right from left. It chilled Barrett to see Valdosto come apart this way. Barrett had known him more than thirty years, and hoped that he was not seeing in Valdosto’s collapse a prefiguring of his own eventual decay.

  The air in the hut was moist, as if a cloud of perspiration hovered below the roof. Barrett leaned over the sick man and said, “How are you, Val?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jim. It’s a beautiful night tonight, Val. We had some rain, but it’s over, and the moon is out. How’d you like to come outside and get some fresh air? It’s almost a full moon.”

  “I’ve got to rest. The committee meeting tomorrow—’”

  “It’s been postponed.”

  “But how can it? The Revolution—”

  “That’s been postponed too. Indefinitely.”

  The muscles of Valdosto’s cheeks writhed. “Are they disbanding the cells?” he asked harshly.

  “We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for orders, and until they come we’ve just got to sit tight. Come outside, Val. The air will do you good.”

  “Kill all those bastards, that’s the only way,” Valdosto muttered. “Who told them they could run the world? A bomb right in their faces—a good little sleet-bomb, a fragmentation job loaded with hard radiation—”

  “Easy, Val. There’ll be time for throwing bombs later. Let’s get you out of
the cradle.”

  Still muttering, Valdosto allowed himself to be unlaced. Quesada and Barrett pulled him to his feet and let him get his balance. He was terribly unsteady, shifting his weight again and again, flexing his massive twisted calves. After a moment Barrett took him by the arm and propelled him through the door of the hut. He caught sight of Hahn standing in the shadows, his face somber with distress.

  They all stood together just outside the hut. Barrett pointed to the moon. “There it is. It’s got such a lovely color here, eh? Not like the dead thing that shines Up Front. And look, look down there, Val. The sea breaking on the rocky shore. Rudiger’s out fishing. I can see his boat by the moonlight.”

  “Striped bass,” said Valdosto. “Sunnies. Maybe he’ll catch some sunnies.”

  “There aren’t any sunnies here. They haven’t evolved yet.” Barrett reached into his pocket and drew out something ridged and hard and glossy, about two inches long. It was the exoskeleton of a small trilobite. He offered it to Valdosto, who shook his head brusquely.

  “Don’t give me that cockeyed crab.”

  “It’s a trilobite, Val. It’s extinct, but so are we. We’re living a billion years in our own past.”

  “You must be crazy,” Valdosto said in a calm, low voice that belied his wild-eyed appearance. He took the trilobite from Barrett and hurled it against the rocks. “Cockeyed crab,” he muttered. Then he said, “Look, why are we here? Why do we have to keep on waiting? Tomorrow, let’s get some stuff and go get them. First we get Bernstein, right? He’s the dangerous one. And then the others. One by one, we pick them off, get all the goddam murderers out of the world so it’s a safe place again. I’m sick of waiting. I hate it here, Jim. Jim? That’s who you are, yeah? Jim—Barrett—”

  Quesada shook his head sadly as Valdosto let a trickle of saliva run down his chin. The terrorist folded into a tight crouch, keening softly to himself, pressing his swollen knees against the rock. His hands clutched at the barrenness, searching for and not finding even enough dirt to make a decent handful. Quesada lifted him to his feet, and he and Barrett led the sick man into the hut again. Valdosto did not protest as the medic pressed the snout of the sedative capsule against his arm and activated it. His weary mind, rebelling entirely against the monstrous concept that he had been exiled forever to the inconceivably remote past, welcomed sleep.