The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2: To the Dark Star: 1962-69

by Robert Silverberg

  Barrett realized that he had just committed one of the most heinous crimes possible at Hawksbill Station: he had started to run off at the mouth. There hadn’t been any call for his little outburst. What made it more troublesome was the fact that he was the one who had permitted himself such a luxury. He was supposed to be the strong one of this place, the stabilizer, the man of absolute integrity and principle and sanity on whom the others could lean. And suddenly he had lost control. It was a bad sign. His dead foot was throbbing again; possibly that was the reason.

  In a tight voice he said, “Let’s go. Maybe the new man is here already.”

  They stepped outside. The rain was beginning to let up; the storm was moving out to sea. In the east over what would one day be the Atlantic, the sky was still clotted with gray mist, but to the west a different grayness was emerging, the shade of normal gray that meant dry weather. Before he had come out here, Barrett had expected to find the sky practically black, because there’d be fewer dust particles to bounce the light around and turn things blue. But the sky seemed to be a weary beige. So much for advance theories.

  Through the thinning rain they walked toward the main building. Norton accommodated himself to Barrett’s limping pace, and Barrett, wielding his crutch furiously, did his damndest not to let his infirmity slow them up. He nearly lost his footing twice and fought hard not to let Norton see.

  Hawksbill Station spread out before them.

  It covered about five hundred acres. In the center of everything was the main building, an ample dome that contained most of their equipment and supplies. At widely spaced intervals, rising from the rock shield like grotesque giant green mushrooms, were the plastic blisters of the individual dwellings. Some, like Barrett’s, were shielded by tin sheeting salvaged from shipments from Up Front. Others stood unprotected, just as they had come from the mouth of the extruder.

  The huts numbered about eighty. At that moment, there were 140 inmates in Hawksbill Station, pretty close to the all-time high. Up Front hadn’t sent back any hut-building materials for a long time, and so all the newer arrivals had to double up with bunkmates. Barrett and all those whose exile had begun before 2014 had the privilege of private dwellings, if they wanted them. (Some did not wish to live alone; Barrett, to preserve his own authority, felt that he was required to.) As new exiles arrived, they bunked in with those who currently lived alone, in reverse order of seniority. Most of the 2015 exiles had been forced to take roommates now. Another dozen deportees and the 2014 group would be doubling up. Of course, there were deaths all up and down the line, and there were plenty who were eager to have company in their huts.

  Barrett felt, though, that a man who has been sentenced to life imprisonment ought to have the privilege of privacy, if he desires it. One of his biggest problems here was keeping people from cracking up because there was too little privacy. Propinquity could be intolerable in a place like this.

  Norton pointed toward the big, shiny-skinned, green dome of the main building. “There’s Altman going in now. And Rudiger. And Hutchett. Something’s happening!”

  Barrett stepped up his pace. Some of the men entering the building saw his bulky figure coming over the rise in the rock, and waved to him. Barrett lifted a massive hand in reply. He felt mounting excitement. It was a big event at the Station whenever a new man arrived. Nobody had come for six months, now. That was the longest gap he could remember. It had started to seem as though no one would ever come again.

  That would be a catastrophe.

  New men were all that stood between the older inmates and insanity. New men brought news from the future, news from the world that was eternally left behind. They contributed new personalities to a group that always was in danger of going stale.

  And, Barrett knew, some men—he was not one—lived in the deluded hope that the next arrival might just be a woman.

  That was why they flocked to the main building when the Hammer began to glow. Barrett hobbled down the path. The rain died away just as he reached the entrance.

  Within, sixty or seventy Station residents crowded the chamber of the Hammer—just about every man in the place who was able in body and mind, and still alert enough to show curiosity about a newcomer. They shouted their greetings to Barrett. He nodded, smiled, deflected their questions with amiable gestures.

  “Who’s it going to be this time, Jim?”

  “Maybe a girl, huh? Around nineteen years old, blonde, built like—”

  “I hope he can play stochastic chess, anyway.”

  “Look at the glow! It’s deepening!”

  Barrett, like the others, stared at the Hammer. The complex, involuted collection of unfathomable instruments burned a bright cherry red, betokening the surge of who knew how many kilowatts being pumped in at the far end of the line.

  The glow was beginning to spread to the Anvil now, that broad aluminum bedplate on which all shipments from the future were dropped. In another moment—

  “Condition Crimson!” somebody yelled. “Here he comes!”

  Two

  Two billion years up the time-line, power was flooding into the real Hammer of which this was only the partial replica. A man—or something else, perhaps a shipment of supplies—stood in the center of the real Anvil, waiting for the Hawksbill Field to unfold him and kick him back to the early Paleozoic. The effect of time-travel was very much like being hit with a gigantic hammer and driven clear through the walls of the continuum: hence the governing metaphors for the parts of the machine.

  Setting up Hawksbill Station had been a long, slow job. The Hammer had knocked a pathway and had sent back the nucleus of the receiving station first. Since there was no receiving station on hand to receive the receiving station, a certain amount of waste had occurred. It wasn’t necessary to have a Hammer and Anvil on the receiving end, except as a fine control to prevent temporal spread; without the equipment, the field wandered a little, and it was possible to scatter consecutive shipments over a span of twenty or thirty years. There was plenty of such temporal garbage all around Hawksbill Station: stuff that had been intended for the original installation, but which because of tuning imprecisions in the pre-Hammer days had landed a couple of decades (and a couple of hundred miles) away from the intended site.

  Despite such difficulties, they had finally sent through enough components to the master temporal site to allow for the construction of a receiving station. Then the first prisoners had gone through; they were technicians who knew how to put the Hammer and Anvil together. Of course, it was their privilege to refuse to cooperate. But it was to their own advantage to assemble the receiving station, thus making it possible for them to be sure of getting further supplies from Up Front. They had done the job. After that, outfitting Hawksbill Station had been easy.

  Now the Hammer glowed, meaning that they had activated the Hawksbill Field on the sending end, somewhere up around 2028 or 2030 A.D. All the sending was done there. All the receiving was done here. It didn’t work the other way. Nobody really knew why, although there was a lot of superficially profound talk about the rules of entropy.

  There was a whining, hissing sound as the edges of the Hawksbill Field began to ionize the atmosphere in the room. Then came the expected thunderclap of implosion, caused by an imperfect overlapping of the quantity of air that was subtracted from this era and the quantity of air that was being thrust into it. And then, abruptly, a man dropped out of the Hammer and lay, stunned and limp, on the gleaming Anvil.

  He looked young, which surprised Barrett considerably. He seemed to be well under thirty. Generally, only middle-aged men were sent to Hawksbill Station. Incorrigibles, who had to be separated from humanity for the general good. The youngest man in the place now had been close to forty when he arrived. The sight of this lean, cleancut boy drew a hiss of anguish from a couple of the men in the room, and Barrett understood the constellation of emotions that pained them.

  The new man sat up. He stirred like a child coming out of a lo
ng, deep sleep. He looked around.

  His face was very pale. His thin lips seemed bloodless. His blue eyes blinked rapidly. His jaws worked as though he wanted to say something, but could not find the words.

  There were no harmful physiological effects to time-travel, but it could be a jolt to the consciousness. The last moments before the Hammer descended were very much like the final moments beneath the guillotine, since exile to Hawksbill Station was tantamount to a sentence of death. The departing prisoner took his last look at the world of rocket transport and artificial organs, at the world in which he had lived and loved and agitated for a political cause, and then he was rammed into an inconceivably remote past on a one-way journey. It was a gloomy business, and it was not very surprising that the newcomers arrived in a state of emotional shock.

  Barrett elbowed his way through the crowd. Automatically the others made way for him. He reached the lip of the Anvil and leaned over it, extending a hand to the new man. His broad smile was met by a look of blank bewilderment.

  “I’m Jim Barrett. Welcome to Hawksbill Station. Here—get off that thing before a load of groceries lands on top of you.” Wincing a little as he shifted his weight, Barrett pulled the new man down from the Anvil. It was altogether likely for the idiots Up Front to shoot another shipment along a minute after sending a man.

  Barrett beckoned to Mel Rudiger, and the plump anarchist handed the new man an alcohol capsule. He took it and pressed it to his arm without a word. Charley Norton offered him a candy bar. The man shook it off. He looked groggy. A real case of temporal shock, Barrett thought, possibly the worst he had ever seen. The newcomer hadn’t even spoken yet. Could the effect really be that extreme?

  Barrett said, “We’ll go to the infirmary and check you out. Then I’ll assign you your quarters. There’s time for you to find your way around and meet everybody later on. What’s your name?”

  “Hahn. Lew Hahn.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Hahn,” the man repeated, still only barely audible.

  “When are you from, Lew?”

  “2029.”

  “You feel pretty sick?”

  “I feel awful. I don’t even believe this is happening to me. There’s no such place as Hawksbill Station, is there?”

  “I’m afraid there is,” Barrett said.

  “At least, for most of us. A few of the boys think it’s all an illusion induced by drugs. But I have my doubts of that. If it’s an illusion, it’s a damned good one. Look.”

  He put one arm around Hahn’s shoulders and guided him through the press of prisoners, out of the Hammer chamber and toward the nearby infirmary. Although Hahn looked thin, even fragile, Barrett was surprised to feel the rippling muscles in those shoulders. He suspected that this man was a lot less helpless and ineffectual than he seemed to be right now. He had to be: he had earned banishment to Hawksbill Station.

  They passed the door of the building. “Look out there,” Barrett commanded.

  Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs and looked again.

  “A Late Cambrian landscape,” said Barrett quietly. “This would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front of you is what they call Appalachian Geosyncline. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we’ve got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there’s the Cordilleran Geosyncline, that’s going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday. Don’t hold your breath. I hope you like seafood.”

  Hahn stared, and Barrett, standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you had lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land-dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.

  Shaking his head, Hahn moved away from the door. Barrett led him down the corridor and into the small, brightly lit room that served as the infirmary. Doc Quesada was waiting. Quesada wasn’t really a doctor, but he had been a medical technician once, and that was good enough. He was a compact, swarthy man with a look of complete self-assurance. He hadn’t lost too many patients, all things considered. Barrett had watched him removing appendices with total aplomb. In his white smock, Quesada looked sufficiently medical to fit the role.

  Barrett said, “Doc, this is Lew Hahn. He’s in temporal shock. Fix him up.”

  Quesada nudged the newcomer onto a webfoam cradle and unzipped his blue jersey. Then he reached for his medical kit. Hawksbill Station was well equipped for most medical emergencies, now. The people Up Front had no wish to be inhumane, and they sent back all sorts of useful things, like anesthetics and surgical clamps and medicines and dermal probes. Barrett could remember a time at the beginning when there had been nothing much here but the empty huts, and a man who hurt himself was in real trouble.

  “He’s had a drink already,” said Barrett.

  “I see that,” Quesada murmured. He scratched at his short-cropped, bristly mustache. The little diagnostat in the cradle had gone rapidly to work, flashing information about Hahn’s blood pressure, potassium count, dilation index, and much else. Quesada seemed to comprehend the barrage of facts. After a moment he said to Hahn, “You aren’t really sick, are you? Just shaken up a little. I don’t blame you. Here—I’ll give you a quick jolt to calm your nerves, and you’ll be all right. As all right as any of us ever are.”

  He put a tube to Hahn’s carotid and thumbed the snout. The subsonic whirred, and a tranquilizing compound slid into the man’s bloodstream. Hahn shivered.

  Quesada said, “Let him rest for five minutes. Then he’ll be over the hump.”

  They left Hahn in his cradle and went out of the infirmary. In the hall, Barrett looked down at the little medic and said, “What’s the report on Valdosto?”

  Valdosto had gone into psychotic collapse several weeks before. Quesada was keeping him drugged and trying to bring him slowly back to the reality of Hawksbill Station. Shrugging, he replied, “The status is quo. I let him out from under the dream-juice this morning, and he was the same as he’s been.”

  “You don’t think he’ll come out of it?”

  “I doubt it. He’s cracked for keeps. They could paste him together Up Front, but—”

  “Yeah,” Barrett said. If he could get Up Front at all, Valdosto wouldn’t have cracked. “Keep him happy, then. If he can’t be sane, he can at least be comfortable. What about Altman? Still got the shakes?”

  “He’s building a woman.”

  “That’s what Charley Norton told me. What’s he using? A rag, a bone—”

  “I gave him surplus chemicals. Chosen for their color, mainly. He’s got some foul green copper compounds and a little bit of ethyl alcohol and six or seven other things, and he collected some soil and threw in a lot of dead shellfish, and he’s sculpting it all into what he claims is female shape and waiting for lightning to strike it.”

  “In other words, he’s gone crazy,” Barrett said.

  “I think that’s a safe assumption. But he’s not molesting his friends any more, anyway. You didn’t think his homosexual phase would last much longer, as I recall.”

  “No, but I didn’t think he’d go off the deep end. If a man needs sex and he can find some consenting playmates here, that’s quite all right with me. But when he starts putting a woman together out of some dirt and rotten brachiopod meat it means we’ve lost him. It’s too bad.”

  Quesada’s dark eyes flickered. “We’re all going to go tha
t way sooner or later, Jim.”

  “I haven’t. You haven’t.”

  “Give us time. I’ve only been here eleven years.”

  “Altman’s been here only eight. Valdosto even less.”

  “Some shells crack faster than others,” said Quesada. “Here’s our new friend.”

  Hahn had come out of the infirmary to join them. He still looked pale, but the fright was gone from his eyes. He was beginning to adjust to the unthinkable.

  He said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Is there a lot of mental illness here?”

  “Some of the men haven’t been able to find anything meaningful to do here,” Barrett said. “It eats them away. Quesada here has his medical work. I’ve got administrative duties. A couple of the fellows are studying the sea life. We’ve got a newspaper to keep some busy. But there are always those who just let themselves slide into despair, and they crack up. I’d say we have thirty or forty certifiable maniacs here at the moment, out of 140 residents.”

  “That’s not so bad,” Hahn said. “Considering the inherent instability of the men who get sent here and the unusual conditions of life here.”

  Barrett laughed. “Hey, you’re suddenly pretty articulate, aren’t you? What was in the stuff Doc Quesada jolted you with?”

  “I didn’t mean to sound superior,” Hahn said quickly. “Maybe that came out a little too smug. I mean—”

  “Forget it. What did you do Up Front, anyway?”

  “I was sort of an economist.”

  “Just what we need,” said Quesada. “He can help us solve our balance-of-payments problem.”

  Barrett said, “If you were an economist, you’ll have plenty to discuss here. This place is full of economic theorists who’ll want to bounce their ideas off you. Some of them are almost sane, too. Come with me and I’ll show you where you’re going to stay.”

  Three

  The path from the main building to the hut of Donald Latimer was mainly downhill, for which Barrett was grateful even though he knew that he’d have to negotiate the uphill return in a little while. Latimer’s hut was on the eastern side of the Station, looking out over the ocean. They walked slowly toward it. Hahn was solicitous of Barrett’s game leg, and Barrett was irritated by the exaggerated care the younger man took to keep pace with him.