When they went outside again, Barrett saw Hahn holding the trilobite on his palm and staring at the strange thing in wonder. Hahn offered it back to him, but Barrett brushed it away.
“Keep it if you like,” he said. “There are more where I got that one. Plenty.”
They went on.
They found Ned Altman beside his hut, crouching on his knees and patting his hands over the crude, lopsided form of what, from the exaggerated mounds where breasts and hips might be, appeared to be the image of a woman. He stood up smartly when they appeared. Altman was a neat little man with yellow hair and transparent-looking light blue eyes. Unlike anyone else in the Station, he had actually been a government man once, fifteen years ago, before seeing through the myth of syndicalist capitalism and joining one of the underground factions. With his insider’s perspective on governmental operations, Altman had been invaluable to the underground, and the government had worked hard to find him and send him here. Eight years at Hawks-bill Station had done things to him.
Altman pointed to his earthen golem and said, “I hoped there’d be lightning in the rain today. That’ll do it, you know. The breath of life. But there isn’t much lightning this time of year, I guess, even when it rains.”
“There’ll be electrical storms soon,” said Barrett.
Altman nodded eagerly. “And lightning will strike her, and she’ll get up alive and walk, and then I’ll need your help, Doc. I’ll need you to give her her shots and trim away some of the rough places.”
Quesada forced a smile. “I’ll be glad to do it, Ned. But you know the terms.”
“Sure. When I’m through with her, you get her. You think I’m a goddam monopolist? Fair is fair. I’ll share her. There’ll be a waiting list, everything in order of application. Just so you guys don’t forget who made her, though. She’ll remain mine, whenever I need her.” He noticed Hahn for the first time. “Who are you?”
“He’s new,” Barrett explained. “Lew Hahn. He came this afternoon.”
“My name’s Ned Altman,” said Altman with a courtly, mincing bow. “Formerly in government service. Hey, you’re pretty young, aren’t you? Still got the bloom on the cheeks. How’s your sex orientation, Lew? Hetero?”
Hahn winced. “I’m afraid so.”
“It’s okay. You can relax. I wouldn’t touch you. I’ve got a project going, here, and I’m off that kind of stuff. But I just want you to know, if you’re hetero, I’ll put you on my list. You’re young and you’ve probably got stronger needs than some of us. I won’t forget about you, even though you’re new here, Lew.”
“That’s—kind of you,” Hahn said.
Altman knelt. He ran his hands delicately over the curves of the clumsy figure, lingering at the tapering conical breasts, shaping them, trying to make them smooth. He might have been caressing a real woman’s quivering flesh.
Quesada coughed. “I think you ought to get some rest now, Ned. Maybe there’ll be lightning tomorrow.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Up, now. Up.”
Altman did not resist. The doctor took him inside and put him to bed. Barrett and Hahn, remaining outside, surveyed the man’s handiwork. Hahn pointed toward the figure’s middle.
“He’s left out something essential, hasn’t he?” he asked. “If he’s planning to make love to this girl after he’s finished creating her, he’d better—”
“It was there yesterday,” said Barrett. “He must be changing orientation again.”
Quesada emerged from Altman’s hut, looking gloomy. The three of them went on, down the rocky path.
Barrett did not make the complete circuit that night. Ordinarily, he would have gone all the way down to Don Latimer’s hut overlooking the sea, for Latimer, with his obsession for finding a psionic gateway through which he could flee Hawksbill Station, was on his list of sick ones who needed special attention. But Barrett had visited Latimer once that day, to introduce him to Hahn, and he didn’t think his aching good leg was up to another hike that far so soon.
So after he and Quesada and Hahn had been to all of the easily accessible huts, he called it a night. They had visited Gaillard, the man who prayed for alien beings to come from another solar system and rescue him from the loneliness and misery of Hawksbill Station. They had visited Schultz, the man who was trying to break into a parallel universe where everything was as it ought to be in the world, a true Utopia. They had visited McDermott, who had not elaborated any imaginative and fanciful psychosis, but simply lay on his cot sobbing for all his wakeful hours, day after day. Then Barrett said good night to his companions and allowed Quesada to escort Hahn back to his hut without him.
“You’re sure you don’t want us to walk up with you?” Hahn asked, eying Barrett’s crutch.
“No. No, I’m fine. I’ll make it.”
They walked away. Barrett set out up the rocky slope.
He had observed Hahn for half a day, now. And, Barrett realized, he did not know much more about him than when the man had first dropped onto the Anvil. That was odd. But maybe Hahn would open up a little more, after he’d been here a while and came to realize that these were the only companions he was ever going to have.
Barrett stared up at the salmon moon, and reached into his pocket by habit to finger the little trilobite, before he remembered that he had given it to Hahn. He shuffled into his hut. He wondered how long ago Hahn had taken that lunar honeymoon.
SIX
It was a couple of years of pretty hard work before Jim Barrett had succeeded in remaking Janet to the proper image. He was unwilling to push her to change, because he knew right away that that would guarantee failure. He was more subtle about it, borrowing some of Norm Pleyer’s tactics of indirect persuasion. They worked. Janet never actually became beautiful, but at least she stopped making a cult out of slovenliness. And the change was considerable. Barrett left home and started living with her when he was nineteen. She was twenty-four, but that didn’t really matter.
By then the revolution had come, and the counterrevolution was getting under way.
The upheaval took place right on schedule in late 1984, fulfilling the prediction of Edmond Hawksbill’s computer, and putting to rest a political system that had celebrated a very grim bicentennial only eight years earlier. The system had simply ceased to work, and into the vacuum had moved, as expected, those who had long mistrusted the democratic process anyway. The Constitution of 1985 was ostensibly intended as a stopgap document, creating a caretaker government that would supervise the restoration of civil liberties in the United States, then wither away. But stopgap constitutions and caretaker governments sometimes fail to wither when the time for withering comes.
Under the new setup, a sixteen-man Council of Syndics led by a Chancellor performed most of the governmental functions. The names were strange ones to a country long accustomed to Presidents, Senators, Secretaries of State, and the like. It had seemed that all those posts were eternal and immutable, and suddenly they were not, for an entire new rhetoric of command had been inserted where the familiar words had been. The change was most emphatic at the highest levels; the bureaucracy and civil service continued much as before, as it had to do if the nation were to avoid total disruption.
The new rulers were oddly assorted. They could not be called either conservatives or liberals, as those abused terms had been understood throughout most of the twentieth century. They believed in an activist government philosophy, strong on public works and central planning, which might qualify them as Marxists or at least as New Deal liberals. But they also believed in the suppression of dissent for the sake of harmonious endeavor, which had never been a New Deal policy, though it was inherent in the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist perversions of Marxism. On the other hand, they were unreconstructed capitalists, most of them, who insisted on the supremacy of the business sector of the economy and devoted much energy to restoring the business climate of, say, 1885. In foreign affairs they were starkly reactionary, isolationis
t, and anti-Communist to the point of xenophobia. It was, to put it mildly, a highly mixed governmental philosophy.
“It isn’t a philosophy at all,” Jack Bernstein maintained, hammering fist against palm. “It’s just a gang of strong-arm men who happened to find a power vacuum and moved right in. They’ve got no overriding program of government. They simply do what they think is necessary to perpetuate their own rule and keep things from blowing up again. They’ve grabbed power, and now they improvise from day to day.”
“Then they’re bound to fall,” Janet said mildly. “Without a central vision of government, a power bloc is certain to collapse, in time. They’ll make critical mistakes and find that there’s no drawing back from the gulf.”
“They’ve been in power for three years, now,” Barrett said. “They don’t show any sign of falling. I’d say they’re stronger than ever. They’re settling in for a thousand years.”
“No,” Janet insisted. “They’re launched on a self-destructive course. It may be another three years, it may be ten, it may be just a matter of months, but they’ll fall apart. They don’t know what they’re doing. You can’t paste together McKinley capitalism and Roosevelt socialism and call it syndicalist capitalism and hope to rule a country this size with it. It’s inevitable—”
“Who says Roosevelt was a socialist?” someone in the back of the room demanded.
“Side issue,” Norman Pleyel warned. “Let’s not get into side issues.”
“I disagree with Janet,” Jack Bernstein said. “I don’t think the present government is inherently unstable. As Barrett says, they’re stronger than ever. And here we sit talking. We talked right along while they took over, and we’ve been talking for three more years—”
“We’ve done more than talk,” Barrett cut in.
Bernstein paced the room, hunched, tense, throbbing with inner energy. “Handbills! Petitions! Manifestoes! Calls for a general strike! What good, what good, what good?” At nineteen, Bernstein was no taller than he had been in the year of the great upheaval, but the baby fat was gone from his face. He was gaunt, fleshless, with savage cheekbones and sallow skin against which the pockmarks and scars of his skin malady gleamed like beacons. He affected a straggly mustache now. Under the pressure of events, they were all transforming themselves; Janet had dieted away her blubber, Barrett had let his hair grow long, even the imperturbable Pleyel had grown a wispy beard that he stroked as though it were a talisman. Bernstein glowered at the little group assembled in the apartment that Barrett and Janet shared. “Do you know why this illegal government has been able to sustain itself in power? Two reasons. First, it maintains an immoral secret police network through which it stifles opposition. Second, it maintains firm control over all the media of communication, and thereby perpetuates itself by persuading the citizens that they’ve got no alternative except three cheers for syndicalism. Do you know what’s going to happen in another generation? This nation will be so firmly wedded to syndicalism that it’ll settle down with it for the next few centuries!”
“Impossible, Jack,” Janet said. “A system of government needs more to sustain itself than a secret police. It—”
“Shut up and let me finish,” Bernstein said. There was a snarl in his tone. He rarely troubled to conceal his intense hatred for her any longer. Sparks flew when he was in the same room with her, which in the nature of things was quite often.
“Go ahead, then. Finish.”
He drew a deep breath. “This is basically a conservative country,” he said. “Always has been. Always will be. The Revolution of 1776 was a conservative revolution in defense of property rights. For the next two hundred years there were no fundamental changes in the political structure here. France had a revolution and six, seven constitutions, Russia had a revolution, Germany and Italy and Austria turned into entirely different countries, even England quietly transformed its whole arrangement, but the United States didn’t budge. Oh, I know, there were changes in the electoral law, little touch-up jobs, and the franchise was extended to women and Negroes, and the powers of the President gradually expanded, but all that was within the original framework. And in the schools the kids were taught that there was something sacred about that framework. It was a built-in stability factor: the citizens wanted the system to remain as it was, because it had always been that way, and so on, round and round and round in an eternal circle. This nation couldn’t change because it didn’t have the capacity to change. It had been schooled to hate change. That’s why incumbent Presidents always got re-elected unless they were absolute dogs. That’s why the constitution was amended maybe twenty times in two centuries, tops. That’s why whenever a man came along who wanted to change things in a big way, like Henry Wallace, like Goldwater, he got stepped on by the power structure. Did you study the Goldwater election? He was supposed to be a conservative, yes? But he lost, and who fought him the hardest but the conservatives, because they knew he was a radical, and they feared letting a radical in?”
“Jack, I think you’re exaggerating the—”
“Damn you, let me finish.” Bernstein’s face was red. Sweat rolled down his haggard cheeks. “It was a country conditioned from birth against fundamental change. But eventually the existing government overextended itself and lost control, and the radicals finally did get in, and they changed things so much that everything fell apart and we got the constitutional crisis of 1982–84, followed by the syndicalist takeover. Okay. The takeover was such a trauma that millions of people are still in shock over it. They open up their newspapers and they see that there’s no President any more, there’s something called a Chancellor, and instead of Congress passing laws there’s a Council of Syndics, and they say, what are these crazy names, what country is this, it can’t be the good old U.S. of A., can it? But it is. And they’re so stunned that they go into retrogression and start thinking they’re hedgehogs. Okay. Okay. But the discontinuity has occurred. The old system’s been replaced with something new. Kids are still being born. The schools are open, and the teachers are teaching syndicalism, because they’d goddam better well teach syndicalism if they want to keep their jobs. The fifth-graders today think of Presidents as dangerous dictators. They smile at the big tridims of Chancellor Arnold every morning. The third-graders don’t even know what Presidents were. In ten more years, those kids will be adults. In twenty more years, they’ll be running society. They’ll have a vested interest in the status quo, the way American adults always have, and to them the status quo will be the syndicalists. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? We’re going to lose unless we grab the kids growing up! The syndicalists are getting them, and educating them to think that syndicalism is true and good and beautiful, and the longer that goes on, the longer it’s going to go on. It’s self-perpetuating. Anybody who wants the old constitution back, or who wants the new constitution amended, is going to look like a dangerous fire-breathing radical, and the syndicalists will be the nice, safe, conservative boys we’ve always had and always want. At which point everything is over and done with.” Bernstein subsided. “Give me a drink, somebody. Fast!”
Pleyel’s soft voice cut across the hubbub. “That’s well reasoned, Jack. But I’d like to hear some suggestions from you, some plan of positive action.”
“I’ve got plenty of suggestions,” Bernstein said. “And they all start by scrapping the existing counterrevolutionary structure we’ve established. We’re using methods appropriate to 1917, or maybe to 1848, and the syndicalists are using 1987 methods and they’re killing us. We’re still passing out handbills and asking people to sign petitions. And they’ve got the television stations, the radio, the computer utilities, the entertainment industry, the whole damned nexus of communications, all turned into a big propaganda network. And the schools.” He held out a hand and ticked off programs on his fingers. “One. Establish electronic means for tying into computer channels and other media to scramble government propaganda. Two. Insert our own counterrevolutionary propaganda where
ver possible, not in printed form but on the media. Three. Assemble a cadre of clever ten-year-olds to spread discontent in the fifth grade. And stop snickering! Four. A program of selected assassinations to remove—”
“Hold it,” Barrett said. “No assassinations.”
“Jim’s right,” said Pleyel. “Assassination isn’t a valid method of political discourse. It’s also futile and self-defeating, since it brings new and hungrier leaders to the fore, and makes martyrs out of villains.”
“Have it your own way, then. You asked me for suggestions. Kill off ten syndics and we’d be that much closer to freedom, but all right. Five. Formulate a coherent schematic plan for a takeover of the government, at least as clear-cut and well organized as the syndicalist bunch used in ’84–’85. That is, find out how many men are needed at the key points, what kind of job it would be to take over the communications media, how we can immobilize the existing leadership, how we can induce the strategic defections among the general staff of the armed forces. The syndicalists used computers to do it. The least we can do is imitate them. Where’s our master plan? Suppose Chancellor Arnold resigned tomorrow and said he was turning the country over to the underground, would we be able to form a government, or would we just be a bunch of fragmented cells spouting stale theories?”
Pleyel said, “There is a master plan, Jack. I’m in contact with many groups.”
“A computer-programmed plan?” Bernstein pressed.
Pleyel spread his long hands out eloquently in the gesture that meant he would rather not reply.
Hawksbill Station Page 6
