Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  “It ought to be,” Bernstein said. “We’ve got a man right in our group who’s the greatest mathematical genius since Descartes, for God’s sake. Hawksbill ought to be plotting templates for us. Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  “He doesn’t come around much any more,” Barrett said.

  “I know that. But why not?”

  “He’s busy, Jack. He’s trying to build a time machine, or some such thing.”

  Bernstein gaped. A burst of bitter laughter, harsh and grinding, erupted from his throat. “A time machine? You mean, a literal and actual thing for traveling in time?”

  “I think that’s what he said,” Barrett murmured. “He didn’t exactly call it that. I’m no mathematician, and I couldn’t follow too much of what he was saying, but—”

  “There’s a genius for you.” Bernstein cracked his knuckles furiously. “A dictatorship in control, the secret police making arrests daily, the situation deteriorating all the time, and he sits around inventing time machines. Where’s his common sense? If he wants to be an inventor, why doesn’t he invent some way of tossing out the government?”

  “Perhaps,” Pleyel said gently, “this machine of his can be of some use to us. If, say, we could go back in time to 1980 or 1982, and take corrective action to forestall the causes of the constitutional crisis—”

  “You’re really serious, aren’t you?” Bernstein asked. “While the crisis was going on, we sat on our cans and deplored the sad state of the cosmos, and eventually the thing we all predicted was going to happen happened, and we hadn’t done a damned thing to prevent it. And now you talk about taking a crazy machine and going back and changing the past. I’ll be damned. I’ll be absolutely damned.”

  “We know much more about the vectors of the revolution, Jack,” Pleyel said. “It might just work.”

  “With judicious assassinations, maybe. But you’ve already ruled out assassination as a means of political discourse. So what will you do with Hawksbill’s machine? Send Barrett back to 1980 to wave banners at rallies? Oh, this is crazy. Pardon me, but you all make me sick. I’m going to go over to Union Square and puke, I think.”

  He stormed out of the room.

  “He’s unstable,” Barrett said to Pleyel. “He was practically frothing at the mouth. I wish he’d quit the movement, you know? One of these days he’ll get so disgusted with our stick-in-the-mud ways that he’ll denounce us all to the secret police.”

  “I doubt that, Jim. He’s excitable, yes. But he’s tremendously brilliant. He spouts ideas of all sorts, some of them worthless, some of them not. We’ve got to see him through the rough moments, because we need him. You should know that better than any of us, Jim. He’s your childhood friend, isn’t he?”

  Barrett shook his head. “Whatever there was between Jack and me, I don’t think it could have been called friendship. And it’s been over for years, anyway. He hates my guts. He’d love to see me trampled in the gutter.”

  The meeting broke up soon afterward. There were the usual motions to investigate the recommendations put forth, and there were the customary assignments to prepare special reports on the findings. And that was that. The members of the counterrevolutionary cell drifted out. At last only Janet and Barrett were left, emptying ashtrays, straightening chairs.

  She said, “It was frightening to watch Jack tonight. He seemed to be possessed by demons. He could have talked for hours without running out of words.”

  “What he said made some sense.”

  “Some of it, yes, Jim. He’s right that we ought to be planning in greater detail, and that we ought to be putting Ed Hawksbill to more use. But it’s the way he spoke, not what he said, that scared me. He was like a little demagogue, standing up there, pacing back and forth, spitting out words. I imagine Hitler must have been like that when he was starting out. Napoleon, maybe.”

  “Well, then, we’re lucky Jack’s on our side,” Barrett said.

  “Are you sure he is?”

  “Did he sound like a syndicalist tonight?”

  Janet gathered a bundle of discarded papers and stuffed them in the disposall. “No, but I could imagine him going over to the other side very easily. As you yourself said, he’s unstable. Brilliant but unstable. Given the right sort of motivation, he could very well switch sides. He’s restless here. He wants to challenge Pleyel for the leadership of the group, but he’s afraid to hurt Norm’s feelings, so he’s stymied, and someone like Jack doesn’t take well to being stymied.”

  “Besides which, he hates us.”

  “He only hates you and me,” Janet said. “I don’t think he’s got anything personal against the others.”

  “Yet.”

  “He might transfer his hatred of us to the whole group,” Janet conceded.

  Barrett scowled. “I haven’t been able to talk rationally with him in two years. I keep getting this tremendous surge of jealousy from him. Loathing. All because I happened to move in on his girlfriend, without knowing what I was doing. There are other women in the world.”

  “And I was never his girlfriend,” Janet said. “Haven’t you realized that by now? I dated him three, four times before you joined the group. But there was nothing serious going between him and me. Nothing.”

  “You slept with him, didn’t you?”

  Her cool dark eyes rose and leveled with his. “Once. Because he begged me. It was like sleeping with a dentist’s drill. I never let him touch me again. He had no claim on me. Even if he thinks he did, it’s his own fault for what happened. He introduced you to me.”

  “Yes,” Barrett said. “He begged me to join the group. He harangued me. He accused me of having no commitment to humanity, and I suppose he was right. I was just a big naïve sixteen-year-old clod who liked sex and beer and bowling, and now and then looked at a newspaper and wondered what the hell all the headlines meant. Well, he set out to awaken my conscience, and he did, and in the course of events I found a girl, and now—”

  “Now you’re a big naïve nineteen-year-old clod who likes sex and beer and bowling and counterrevolutionary activities.”

  “Right.”

  “So to hell with Jack Bernstein,” Janet said. “One of these days he’ll grow up and stop envying you, and we can all start working together to fix up the mess that the world’s gotten itself into. Meanwhile we just go along from day to day and do our best. What else is there?”

  “I suppose,” Barrett said.

  He walked to the window and nudged the control. The opaquing faded, and he looked out through the darkness to the street fifteen stories below. Two bottle-green police cars were angle-parked across the street; they had stopped a small blue-and-gold electric runabout, and the police were questioning its driver. From this far up, Barrett couldn’t see much, but the man’s high-pitched protests of innocence rose to window level. After a moment a third police car arrived. Still protesting, the man was shoved into it and taken away. Barrett opaqued the window again. As it turned gray and clouded, it showed him the reflection of Janet, standing nude behind him, the full globes of her breasts rising and falling expectantly. He turned. She looked immensely better, now that she had taken off that weight, but he couldn’t find any delicate way of telling her that without implying that she had been a slob before.

  “Come to bed,” she said. “Stop staring out windows.”

  He moved toward her. He was more than two feet taller than she was, and when he stood beside her he felt like a tree above a shrub. His arms enclosed her, and he felt the soft warmth of her against him, and as they sank into the mattress he imagined he could hear Jack Bernstein’s reedy, angry voice howling through the night, and he reached for her and pulled her fiercely into a tight embrace.

  SEVEN

  Rudiger’s catch was spread out in front of the main building the next morning when Barrett came up for breakfast. Rudiger had had a good night’s fishing, obviously. He usually did. Rudiger went out into the Atlantic three or four nights a week when the weather was good, u
sing the little dinghy that he had cobbled together a few years ago from salvaged packing crates and other miscellaneous materials, and he took with him a team of friends whom he had trained in the deft use of the trawling nets. They generally returned with a good haul of seafood.

  It was an irony that Rudiger, the anarchist, the man who profoundly believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions, should be so good at leading a team of fishermen. Rudiger didn’t care for the concept of teamwork in the abstract. But it was hard to manipulate the nets alone, he had quickly discovered, and he had begun to assemble his little microcosm of a society. Hawksbill Station had many small ironies of that sort. Political theorists, Barrett knew well, tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic matters of survival.

  The prize of the catch was a cephalopod about a dozen feet long—a rigid greenish conical tube out of which some limp orange squid-like tentacles dangled, throbbing fitfully. There was plenty of meat on that one, Barrett thought. Rubbery but good, if you cultivated a taste for it. Dozens of trilobites were arrayed around the cephalopod. They ranged in size from the inch-long kind that went into trilobite cocktails to the three-footers with baroquely involuted exoskeletons. Rudiger fished both for food and for knowledge; evidently these trilobites were discards, representatives of species that he had already studied, or he wouldn’t have left them here to go into the food hoppers. His hut was stacked ceiling-high with trilobites, classified and sorted according to genus and species. It kept Rudiger sane to collect and analyze and write about them, and no one here begrudged him his hobby.

  Near the heap of trilobites were some clusters of hinged brachiopods, looking like scallops that had gone awry, and a pile of snails. The warm, shallow waters just off the coastal shelf teemed with invertebrate life, in striking contrast to the barren land. Rudiger had also brought in a mound of shiny black seaweed for salads. Barrett hoped that someone would gather all this stuff up and get it into the Station’s heat-sink cooler before it spoiled. The bacteria of decay worked a lot slower here than they did Up Front, but a few hours in the mild air would do Rudiger’s haul no good. Barrett hobbled into the kitchen and found three men on morning mess duty. They nodded respectfully to him.

  “There’s food lying by the door,” Barrett said. “Rudiger’s back, and he dumped a load.”

  “He could have told somebody, huh?”

  “Perhaps there was nobody here to tell when he came by. Will you collect it and get it under refrigeration?”

  “Sure, Jim. Sure.”

  Today Barrett planned to recruit some men for the annual Inland Sea expedition. Traditionally, it was a trek that he always had led himself, but the injury to his foot made it impossible for him even to consider going on the trip this year, or ever again.

  Each year, a dozen or so able-bodied men went out on a wide-ranging reconnaissance that took them in a big circular arc, looping northwestward until they reached the Inland Sea, then coming around to the south and back up the strip of land to the Station. One purpose of the trip was to gather any temporal garbage that might have materialized in the vicinity of the Station during the past year. There was no way of knowing how wide a margin of error had been allowed during the early attempts to set the Station up, and the scattershot technique of hurling material into the past had been pretty unreliable.

  New stuff was turning up all the time. It had been aimed for Minus One Billion, Two Thousand Oh Five A.D., but didn’t arrive until a few decades later. Now, in A.D. Minus One Billion, Two Thousand Twenty-Nine, things were still appearing that had been intended to arrive in the Station’s first year of operation. Hawksbill Station needed all the spare equipment it could get, and Barrett didn’t miss a chance to round up any of the debris from the future.

  There was another and subtler reason for making the Inland Sea expeditions, though. They served as a focus for the year, an annual ritual, something to peg a custom to. The expedition was the local rite of spring. The dozen strongest men, going on foot to the distant rock-rimmed shores of the tepid sea that drowned the heart of North America, were performing the closest thing Hawksbill Station had to a religious function, although they did nothing more mystical when they reached the Inland Sea than to net a few trilobites and eat them.

  The trip meant more to Barrett himself than he had ever suspected, also. He realized that now, when he was unable to go. He had led every such expedition for twenty years. Across the changeless, monotonous scenery, beyond the slippery slopes, down to the sea, eyes ranging the horizon at all times for the telltale signs of temporal garbage. Trilobite stew cooked over midnight fires far from the dreary huts of Hawksbill Station. A rainbow lancing into the sea somewhere over what was to be Ohio. The stunning crackle of distant lightning, the tang of ozone in the nostrils, the rewarding sensation of aching muscles at the end of a day’s march. The pilgrimage was the pivot on which the year turned, for Barrett. And to see the grayish-green waters of the Inland Sea come into view was strangely like coming home to him.

  But last year at the edge of the sea Barrett had gone scrabbling over boulders loosened by the tireless action of the waves, venturing into risky territory for no rational reason that he could name, and his aging muscles had betrayed him. Often at night he woke sweating and trembling to escape from the dream in which he relived that ugly moment: slipping and sliding, clawing at the rocks, a mass of stone dislodged from somewhere and crashing down with improbably agonizing impact against his foot, pinning him, crushing him.

  He could not forget that sound of grinding bones.

  Nor was he likely to lose the memory of the homeward march, across hundreds of miles of bare rock under a huge sun, his bulky body slung between the bowed forms of his companions. He had never been a burden to anyone before. “Leave me behind,” he had said, not really meaning it, and they knew he was making only a formalized gesture of apology for troubling them, and they said, “Don’t be a fool,” and hauled him onward. But they worked hard to carry him along, and in the moments when the pain allowed him to think clearly, he felt guilty about troubling them in this way. He was so big. If any of the others had suffered such an accident, it would not have been such a chore to transport him. But he was the biggest one.

  Barrett thought he would have to lose the foot. But Quesada had spared him from the amputation. The foot would stay, though Barrett would not be able to touch it to the ground and put weight on it, not now or ever again. It might have been simpler to have the dead appendage sliced off; Quesada had vetoed that, though.

  “Who knows,” he had said, “someday they might send us a transplant kit. I can’t rebuild a leg that’s been amputated. Once we cut it off, all I can do is give you a prosthetic, and I don’t have any prosthetics here.”

  So Barrett had kept his crushed foot. But he had never been quite the same since the accident. More than blood had leaked from him as he lay on the glistening rocks beside the Inland Sea. And now someone else would have to lead this year’s march.

  Who would it be, he wondered?

  Quesada was the likeliest choice. Next to Barrett, he was the strongest man here, in all the ways that it was important to be strong. But Quesada couldn’t be spared from his responsibilities at the Station. It might be handy to have a medic along on the trip, but it was vital to have one here.

  After some reflection Barrett put down Charley Norton as the leader of the expedition. Norton was bouncy and talkative and got worked up too easily, but he was basically a sensible man capable of commanding respect. Barrett added Ken Belardi to the list—someone for Norton to talk to during the long dull hours of trekking from nowhere to nowhere. Let them go on debating—an endless ballet of fixed postures.

  Rudiger? Rudiger had been a tower of strength on the journey last year after Barrett had been injured. He had taken charge beautifully while the others dithered around and gaped at the sight of their fallen, battered leader. Barrett didn’t particularly want to let Rudiger leave the Station so long
, though. He needed able men for the expedition, true, but he didn’t care to strip the home base down to a population of invalids, crackpots, and psychotics.

  So Rudiger stayed behind. Barrett put two members of his fishing team on the list, Dave Burch and Mort Kasten. Then he added the names of Sid Hutchett and Arny Jean-Claude.

  Barrett thought about putting Don Latimer in the group. Latimer was coming to be something of a borderline mental case, but he was rational enough except when he lapsed into his psionic meditations, and he’d pull his own weight on the expedition. On the other hand, Latimer was Lew Hahn’s bunkmate, and Barrett wanted Latimer around to observe Hahn at close range. He toyed with the idea of sending both of them out, but nixed it. Hahn was still an unknown quantity. It was too risky to let him go with the Inland Sea party this year. Probably he’d be in next year’s group, though. It would be foolish not to take advantage of Hahn’s youthful vigor. Let him get to know the ropes, and he’d be an ideal expedition leader for years to come.

  Finally Barrett had chosen a dozen men. A dozen would be enough. He chalked their names on the slate in front of the mess hall, and went inside to find Charley Norton.

  Norton was sitting alone, breakfasting. Barrett eased himself into the bench opposite him, going through the complex series of motions that constituted his way of sitting down without letting go of his crutch.

  “You pick the men?” Norton asked.

  Barrett nodded. “The list’s posted outside.”

  “Am I going?”

  “You’re in command.”

  Norton looked flattered. “That sounds strange, Jim. I mean, for anyone else but you to be in command—”

  “I’m not making the trip this year, Charley.”

  “It takes some getting used to. Who’s going?”

  “Hutchett. Belardi. Burch. Kasten. Jean-Claude. And some others.”

  “Rudiger?”

  “No, not Rudiger. Not Quesada either, Charley. I need them here.”

  “All right, Jim. You have any special instructions for us?”