Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  “No. We’ll find her and we’ll spring her somehow.”

  “You’re not thinking this through, Jim. Each individual member of this group is expendable. We can’t risk personnel in the hope of getting Janet free. Unless you want to think of yourself as someone privileged, who can risk the lives or freedom of your comrades simply to recover someone you’re emotionally involved with, even if her usefulness to the organization has ended—”

  “You make me sick,” Barrett snapped.

  But he knew that Bernstein was speaking sense. No one in their immediate group had ever been arrested before, yet Barrett was aware of the general pattern of events that followed such an arrest. It was hopeless to think of forcing the government to disgorge a prisoner unless it wanted to. There were a dozen interrogation camps scattered about the country, and at this moment Janet might be in Kentucky or North Dakota or Nevada, no telling where, facing an uncertain prison sentence on an undefined charge. On the other hand, she might already be free and on her way home. Capriciousness is of the essence of things, in running a totalitarian government; this government was nothing if not capricious. Janet was gone, and no action of his could undo that, only the mysterious mercies of the government.

  “Maybe you ought to have a drink,” Bernstein suggested. “Get yourself settled down a little. You aren’t even remotely thinking straight, Jim.”

  Barrett nodded. He went to the liquor cabinet. They kept a meager supply there, a couple of bottles of scotch, some gin, light rum for the daiquiris Janet liked so much. But the cabinet was empty. The visitors had cleaned it out. Barrett peered at the bare shelves for a long while, idly following the dance of dust motes within.

  “The liquor’s gone,” he said at length. “It figures. Come on, let’s get out of here. I can’t stand the sight of this place any more.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Pleyel’s office.”

  “They may have guards posted there waiting to arrest anyone who shows up,” Bernstein said.

  “So they’ll arrest me. Why fool ourselves? They can arrest any of us, whenever the mood takes them. Will you come with me?”

  Bernstein shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’re in charge, Jim. You do what you think is proper. I’ll keep in touch, okay.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’d advise you to be less emotional, if you want to stay free much longer.”

  They went out. Barrett crossed town to the employment agency, checked the building cautiously from the street, saw nothing amiss, and entered it. The office was undisturbed. He locked himself in and began making calls to cell chiefs in other districts: Jersey City, Greenwich, Nyack, Suffern. The reports he got showed a distinct pattern of sudden simultaneous arrests, not necessarily of top leaders at all. Two or three members of each cell had been picked up in midafternoon. Some had been questioned and released unharmed; others remained in custody. No one had any clear idea of where anybody was, although Valkenburg of the Greenwich group had learned from an unidentified source that the prisoners were being distributed among four interrogation camps in the South and Southwest. He had no specific news of Janet. None of them did. They all sounded badly shaken.

  Barrett spent the night on a couch in Pleyel’s office. In the morning he went back to the apartment and started the dreary job of cleaning it up, hoping that Janet would appear. He kept picturing her in custody, a plump, dark-eyed girl with strands of white prematurely streaking her black hair, twisting and writhing in agony as the interrogators went to work on her, demanding names, dates, goals. He knew how they questioned women. There was always a component of sexual indignity in their approach; their theory, and it was a sound one, was that a naked woman being questioned by six or seven men wasn’t likely to put up much resistance. Janet was tough, but how much pinching and prodding and leering could she take? Interrogators didn’t have to use red-hot pokers, thumbscrews, or the rack to extract information. Simply transform a person into so much metabolizing meat, handle her flesh until she loses sight of her soul, and the will crumbles.

  Not that Janet could tell them anything they didn’t already know. The underground was scarcely a secret organization, despite the passwords and pretense. The police already knew names, dates, goals. These arrests were made purely to shatter morale, the government’s sly way of letting its opponents know that they weren’t fooling anybody. Capriciousness: it was the essence. Keep the enemy off balance. Arrest, interrogate, imprison, possibly even execute—but always in an amiable, impersonal way, with no aspect of vindictiveness. No doubt a government computer had suggested picking up X members of the underground today, as a strategic move in the continuing subterranean struggle. And so it had been done. And so Janet was gone.

  She was not released that day. Nor the next.

  Pleyel came back from Baltimore, grim, bleak-faced. He had been working on the problem from down there. He had learned that Janet had been taken to the Louisville interrogation camp the first day, transferred to Bismarck on the second, to Santa Fe on the third. After that the trail had fizzled out. This, too, was part of the government’s campaign of psychological warfare: move the prisoners about, shuttle them here, shuttle them there, baffle the rubes with the old shell game. Where was she? No one knew. Somehow life went on. A long-planned protest meeting was held in Detroit; government police stood benignly by, smugly tolerating the event but ready to suppress it if it grew violent. New leaflets were distributed in Los Angeles, Evansville, Atlanta, and Boise. Ten days after Janet’s disappearance, Barrett cleared out of the apartment and took another one a block away.

  It was as though the sea had closed over her and swallowed her up.

  For a while, he continued to hope that she would be released, or that at the very least his information network would be able to tell him where she was being kept. But no news of her was forthcoming. In its impersonally arbitrary way, the government had chosen a small group of victims that day. Perhaps they were dead, perhaps they were merely hidden in the lowest level of some maximum-security dungeon. It did not matter. They were gone.

  Barrett never saw her again. He never found out what they had done to her.

  The pain became an ache, and in time, to his surprise, even the ache went away, and the work of the underground went on steadily, a ceaseless striving toward an always more distant goal.

  NINE

  A couple of days passed before Barrett had the chance to draw Lew Hahn aside for a spot of political discussion. The Inland Sea party had set out by then, and in a way that was too bad, for Barrett could have used Charley Norton’s services in penetrating Hahn’s armor. Norton was the most gifted theorist at the Station, a man who could weave a tissue of dialectic from the least promising material. If anyone could find out the depth of Hahn’s revolutionary commitment, it was Norton.

  But Norton was away leading the expedition, and so Barrett had to do the interrogating himself. His Marxism was a trifle rusty, and he couldn’t thread a path through the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyite, Khrushchevist, Maoist, Berenkovskyite and Mgumbweist schools with Charley Norton’s skills. Yet he knew what questions to ask. He had served his time on the ideological battlefront, though it had been a long while past.

  He picked a rainy evening when Hahn seemed to be in a fairly outgoing mood. There had been an hour’s entertainment at the Station that night, an ingenious computer-composed film that Sid Hutchett had programmed the week before. Up Front had been kind enough to ship back a modest computer, and Hutchett had rigged it to do animations by specifying line widths, shades of gray, and progressions of raster units. It was a simple but remarkably clever business, and it brightened the dull nights. He was able to produce cartoons, satiric lampoons, erotic amusements, anything at all.

  Afterward, sensing that Hahn was relaxed enough tonight to lower his guard a bit, Barrett sat down beside him and said, “Good show tonight?”

  “Very entertaining.”

  “It’s Sid Hutchett’s work. He’s a r
are one, that Hutchett. Did you get a chance to meet him before he went off on the Inland Sea trip?”

  “Tall fellow with a sharp nose and no chin?”

  “That’s the one,” Barrett said. “A clever boy. He was the top computer man for the Continental Liberation Front until they caught him back in ’19. He programmed that fake broadcast in which Chancellor Dantell denounced his own regime. God, I wish I had been there to hear that one! Remember it?”

  “I’m not sure I do.” Hahn frowned. “How long ago was this?”

  “The broadcast was in 2018. Would that be before your time? Only eleven years ago—”

  “I was nineteen, then. I guess I wasn’t very politically oriented. I was an unsophisticated kid, you might say. Slow to awaken.”

  “A lot of us were. Still, you were nineteen, that’s pretty grown up. Too busy studying economics, I suppose.”

  Hahn grinned. “That’s right. I was deep in the dismal science.”

  “And you never heard that broadcast? Or even heard of it?”

  “I must have forgotten.”

  “The biggest hoax of the century,” Barrett said, “and you forgot it. The greatest achievement of the Continental Liberation Front. You’re familiar with the Continental Liberation Front, of course.”

  “Of course.” Hahn looked uneasy.

  “Which group did you say you were with?”

  “The People’s Crusade for Liberty.”

  “I don’t know it, I’m afraid. One of the newer groups?”

  “Less than five years old. It started in California in the summer of ’25.”

  “What’s its program?”

  “Oh, the usual revolutionary line,” Hahn said. “Free elections, representative government, an opening of the security files, an end to preventive detention, restoration of habeas corpus and other civil liberties.”

  “And the economic orientation? Pure Marxist or one of the offshoots?”

  “Not really any, I guess. We believed in a kind of—well, capitalism with some government restraints.”

  “A little to the right of state socialism, and a little to the left of pure laissez faire?” Barrett suggested.

  “Something like that.”

  “But they tried that system and it failed, didn’t it, in the middle of the twentieth century? It had its day. It led inevitably to total socialism, which produced the compensating backlash of total capitalism, followed by collapse and the birth of syndicalist capitalism. Which gave us a government that pretended to be libertarian while actually stifling all individual liberties in the name of freedom. So if your group simply wanted to turn the economic clock back to 1955, say, there couldn’t be much substance to its ideas.”

  Hahn looked bored at the string of dry abstractions. “You’ve got to understand that I wasn’t in the top ideological councils,” he said.

  “Just an economist?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What were your particular party responsibilities?”

  “I drew up plans for the ultimate conversion to our system.”

  “Basing your procedures on the modified liberalism of Ricardo?”

  “Well, in a sense.”

  “And avoiding, I hope, the tendency to fascism that was found in the thinking of Keynes?”

  “You could say so,” Hahn said. He stood up, flashing a quick, vague smile. “Look, Jim, I’d love to argue this further with you some other time, but I’ve really got to go now. Ned Altman talked me into coming around and helping him do a lightning-dance in the hopes of bringing that pile of dirt of his to life. So if you don’t mind—”

  Hahn beat a hasty retreat.

  Barrett was more perplexed than ever. Hahn hadn’t been “arguing” anything. What he had been doing was carrying on a lame and feeble and evasive conversation, letting himself be pushed hither and thither by Barrett’s questions. And he had spouted a lot of nonsense. He didn’t seem to know Keynes from Ricardo, nor to care about the difference between them, which was an odd attitude for a self-professed economist to have. He didn’t appear to have a shred of an idea what his own political party stood for. He hadn’t protested while Barrett had uttered a lot of deliberately inane doctrinaire talk. He had so little revolutionary background that he was unaware even of Hutchett’s astonishing hoax of eleven years ago.

  He seemed phony from top to bottom.

  How was it possible that this thirtyish kid had been deemed worthy of exile to Hawksbill Station, anyhow? Only the top firebrands and most effective opponents of the government were sent to the Station. Sentencing a man to Hawksbill was very much like sentencing him to death, and it wasn’t a step that was taken lightly by a government that was now so very concerned with appearing benevolent, respectable, and tolerant.

  Barrett couldn’t imagine why Hahn was here at all. He seemed genuinely distressed at having been exiled, and evidently he had left a beloved young wife behind, but nothing else rang true about the man.

  Was he—as Don Latimer had suggested—some kind of spy?

  Barrett rejected the idea out of hand. He didn’t want Latimer’s paranoia infecting him. The government wasn’t likely to send anyone on a one-way trip to the Late Cambrian just to spy on a bunch of aging revolutionaries who could never possibly make trouble again. But what was Hahn doing here, then?

  He would bear further watching, Barrett decided.

  Barrett took care of some of the watching himself. But he saw to it that he had plenty of assistance. If nothing else, the Hahn-watching project could serve as a kind of therapy for the ambulatory psycho cases, the ones who were superficially functional but were full of all kinds of fears and credulities. They could harness those fears and credulities and play detective, which would give them an enhanced sense of their own value, and also perhaps help Barrett come to understand the meaning of Hahn’s presence at the station.

  The next day, at lunch, Barrett called Don Latimer aside.

  “I had a little talk with your friend Hahn last night,” Barrett said. “The things he said sounded mighty peculiar to me, you know?”

  Latimer brightened. “Peculiar? How?”

  “I checked him out on economics and political theory. Either he doesn’t know a thing about either, or else he thinks I’m such a damned fool that he doesn’t need to bother making sense when he talks to me. Either way it’s strange.”

  “I told you he was a fishy one!”

  “Well, now I believe you,” Barrett said.

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  “Nothing yet. Just keep tabs on him and try to find out why he’s here.”

  “And if he’s a spy from the government?”

  Barrett shook his head. “We’ll take whatever action is necessary to protect ourselves, Don. But the important thing is not to act hastily. It may very well be that we’re misjudging Hahn, and I don’t want to do anything that would make it awkward to go on living with him here. In a group like this we’ve got to avoid tensions in advance, or else we’re likely to split apart altogether. So we’ll go easy on Hahn. But we won’t lay off him. I want you to report to me regularly, Don. Watch him carefully. Pretend to be asleep and see what he does. If possible, sneak a look at those notes he’s been taking, but if you do, do it subtly and without arousing his suspicion.”

  Latimer glowed with pride. “You can count on me, Jim.”

  “Another thing. Get help. Organize a little team of Hahn-watchers. Ned Altman seems to be getting along well with Hahn; put him to work too. Get a few of the other boys—some of the sicker ones, who need responsibilities. You know the ones. I’m putting you in charge of this project. Recruit your men and give them their assignments. Gather your information and transmit it to me. All right?”

  “Will do,” Latimer said.

  And so they kept an eye on the new man.

  The day after that was the fifth day after Hahn’s arrival. Mel Rudiger needed two new men for his fishing crew, to make up for the pair who had gone on the Inland Sea tr
ek. “Take Hahn,” Barrett suggested. Rudiger spoke to Hahn, who seemed delighted by the offer. “I don’t know much about fishing with nets,” he said, “but I’d love to go.”

  “I’ll teach you what you need to know,” Rudiger said. “In half an hour you’ll be a master fisherman. You’ve got to remember, we’re not actually dealing with fish out here. What we’re netting are a bunch of dumb invertebrates, and it doesn’t take much to fool them. Come along and I’ll show you.”

  Barrett stood for a long time on the edge of the world, watching the little boat bobbing in the surging Atlantic. For the next couple of hours Hahn would be away from Hawksbill Station, with no chance of getting back until Rudiger was ready to come back. Which gave Latimer a perfect chance to scout through Hahn’s notebook. Barrett didn’t precisely suggest to Latimer that he ought to infringe on his bunkmate’s privacy in this way, but he did let Latimer know that Hahn would be out at sea for a while. He could count on Latimer to draw the right conclusion.

  Rudiger never went far from shore—eight hundred, a thousand yards out—but the water was rough enough there. The waves came rolling in with X thousand miles of gathered impact behind them, and they hit hard even where outlying fangs of rock served as breakwaters. A continental shelf sloped off at a wide angle from the land, so that even at a substantial distance offshore the water wasn’t exceptionally deep. Rudiger had taken soundings up to a mile out, and had reported depths no greater than a hundred sixty feet. Nobody had gone past a mile out to sea.

  It wasn’t that they were afraid of falling off the side of the world if they should go too far east. What motivated their caution was simply that a mile was a long distance for aging men to row in an open boat, using stubby oars made from old packing cases. Up Front hadn’t thought to spare an outboard motor for them.

  Looking toward the horizon, Barrett had an odd thought. He had been told that the women’s equivalent of Hawksbill Station was safely segregated out of reach, a couple of hundred million years up the time-line. But how could he be sure that was true? The government Up Front didn’t issue press releases on its timeline prison camps, and, anyway, it was foolhardy to believe anything that came, however indirectly, from a government source. In Barrett’s day, the public had not even known of the existence of Hawksbill Station. He had found out about it only during the course of his own interrogation, when as part of the process of breaking his will they had let him know where he was likely to be sent. Later, some details had leaked—probably not by chance. The nation discovered that incorrigible politicals were sent off to the beginning of time, yes, and subsequently it was made clear that the men went to one era and the women to another, but Barrett had no real reason to believe it was true.