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

by Robert Silverberg

  It occurred to him that this adventurous trilobite might well be the ancestor of all the land-dwelling creatures of the eons to come. It was biological nonsense, but Barrett’s weary mind conjured a picture of an evolutionary procession, with fish and amphibians and reptiles and mammals and man all stemming in unbroken sequence from this grotesque armored thing that moved in uncertain circles near his feet.

  And if I were to step on you, he thought?

  A quick motion—the sound of crunching chitin—the wild scrabbling of a host of little legs—

  And the whole chain of life snapped in its first link. Evolution undone. No land creatures ever developed. With the descent of that heavy foot all the future would change and there would never have been any Hawksbill Station, no human race, no James Edward Barrett. In an instant he would have both revenge on those who had condemned him to live out his days in this place and release from his sentence.

  He did nothing. The trilobite completed its slow perambulation of the shoreline rocks and scattered back into the sea unharmed.

  The soft voice of Don Latimer said, “I saw you sitting down here, Jim. Do you mind if I join you?”

  Barrett swung around, momentarily surprised. Latimer had come down from his hilltop but so quietly that Barrett hadn’t heard a thing. He recovered and grinned and beckoned Latimer to an adjoining rock.

  “You fishing?” Latimer asked.

  “Just sitting. An old man sunning himself.”

  “You took a hike like that just to sun yourself?” Latimer laughed. “Come off it. You’re trying to get away from it all, and you probably wish I hadn’t disturbed you.”

  “That’s not so. Stay here. How’s your new roommate getting along?”

  “It’s been strange,” said Latimer. “That’s one reason I came down here to talk to you.” He leaned forward and peered searchingly into Barrett’s eyes. “Jim, tell me: do you think I’m a madman?”

  “Why should I?”

  “The esping business. My attempt to break through to another realm of consciousness. I know you’re tough-minded and skeptical. You probably think it’s all a lot of nonsense.”

  Barrett shrugged and said, “If you want the blunt truth, I do. I don’t have the remotest belief that you’re going to get us anywhere, Don. I think it’s a complete waste of time and energy for you to sit there for hours harnessing your psionic powers, or whatever it is you do. But no, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re entitled to your obsession and that you’re going about a basically futile thing in a reasonably level-headed way. Fair enough?”

  “More than fair. I don’t ask you to put any credence in my research, but I don’t want you to think I’m a total lunatic for trying it. It’s important that you regard me as sane, or else what I want to tell you about Hahn won’t be valid to you.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “It’s this,” said Latimer. “On the basis of one evening’s acquaintance, I’ve formed an opinion about Hahn. It’s the kind of an opinion that might be formed by a garden variety paranoid, and if you think I’m nuts you’re likely to discount my idea.”

  “I don’t think you’re nuts. What’s your idea?”

  “That he’s spying on us.”

  Barrett had to work hard to keep from emitting the guffaw that would shatter Latimer’s fragile self-esteem. “Spying?” he said casually. “You can’t mean that. How can anyone spy here? I mean, how can he report his findings?”

  “I don’t know,” Latimer said. “But he asked me a million questions last night. About you, about Quesada, about some of the sick men. He wanted to know everything.”

  “The normal curiosity of a new man.”

  “Jim, he was taking notes. I saw him after he thought I was asleep. He sat up for two hours writing it all down in a little book.”

  Barrett frowned. “Maybe he’s going to write a novel about us.”

  “I’m serious,” Latimer said. “Questions—notes. And he’s shifty. Try to get him to talk about himself!”

  “I did. I didn’t learn much.”

  “Do you know why he’s been sent here?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I,” said Latimer. “Political crimes, he said, but he was vague as hell. He hardly seemed to know what the present government was up to, let alone what his own opinions were toward it. I don’t detect any passionate philosophical convictions in Mr. Hahn. And you know as well as I do that Hawksbill Station is the refuse heap for revolutionaries and agitators and subversives and all sorts of similar trash, but that we’ve never had any other kind of prisoner here.”

  Barrett said coolly, “I agree that Hahn’s a puzzle. But who could he be spying for? He’s got no way to file a report, if he’s a government agent. He’s stranded here for keeps, like us.”

  “Maybe he was sent to keep an eye on us—to make sure we aren’t cooking up some way to escape. Maybe he’s a volunteer who willingly gave up his twenty-first-century life so he could come among us and thwart anything we might be hatching. Perhaps they’re afraid we’ve invented forward time-travel. Or that we’ve become a threat to the sequence of the time-lines. Anything. So Hahn comes among us to snoop around and block any dangers before they arrive.”

  Barrett felt a twinge of alarm. He saw how close to paranoia Latimer was hewing, now. In half a dozen sentences he had journeyed from the rational expression of some justifiable suspicions to the fretful fear that the men from Up Front were going to take steps to choke off the escape route that he was so close to perfecting.

  He kept his voice level as he told Latimer, “I don’t think you need to worry, Don. Hahn’s an odd one, but he’s not here to make trouble for us. The fellows Up Front have already made all the trouble for us they ever will.”

  “Would you keep an eye on him, anyway?”

  “You know I will. And don’t hesitate to let me know if Hahn does anything else out of the ordinary. You’re in a better spot to notice than anyone else.”

  “I’ll be watching,” Latimer said. “We can’t tolerate any spies from Up Front among us.” He got to his feet and gave Barrett a pleasant smile. “I’ll let you get back to your sunning now, Jim.”

  Latimer went up the path. Barrett eyed him until he was close to the top, only a faint dot against the stony backdrop. After a long while Barrett seized his crutch and levered himself to his feet. He stood staring down at the surf, dipping the tip of his crutch into the water to send a couple of little crawling things scurrying away. At length he turned and began the long, slow climb back to the Station.

  Six

  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, 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 around, a man who could weave a tissue of dialectic from the least promising material. If anyone could find out the depth of Hahn’s Marxist commitment, if any, it was Norton.

  But Norton was leading the expedition, so Barrett had to do the interrogating himself. His Marxism was a trifle rusty, and he couldn’t thread his 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 picked a rainy evening when Hahn seemed to be in a fairly outgoing mood. There had been an hour’s entertainment that night, an ingenious computer-composed film that Sid Hutchett had programmed last week. Up Front had been kind enough to ship back a modest computer, and Hutchett had rigged it to do animations by specifying line widths and lengths, shades of gray, and progression of raster units. It was a simple but remarkably clever business, and it brightened a dull night.

  Afterward, sensing that Hahn was relaxed enough to lower his guard a bit, Barrett said, “Hutchett’s a rare one. Did you meet him before he went on the trip?”

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

  “That’s the one. A clever boy. He was the top computer man for the Continental Liberation Front until they caught him in ’19. He programmed that fake broadcast in which Chancellor Dantell denounced his own regime. Remember?”

  “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,” said Hahn. “I guess I wasn’t very politically sophisticated.”

  “Too busy studying economics, I guess.”

  Hahn grinned. “That’s right. 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. You know 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. One of the newer groups?”

  “Less than five years old. It started in California.”

  “What’s its program?”

  “Oh, the usual,” Hahn said. “Free elections, representative government, an opening of the security files, restoration of 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 laissez-faire?” Barrett suggested.

  “Something like that.”

  “But that system was tried and failed, wasn’t it? It had its day. It led inevitably to total socialism, which produced the compensating backlash of syndicalist capitalism, and then we got 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 clock back to 1955, say, there couldn’t be much to its ideas.”

  Hahn looked bored. “You’ve got to understand I wasn’t in the top ideological councils.”

  “Just an economist?”

  “That’s it. I drew up plans for the conversion to our system.”

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

  “Well, in a sense.”

  “And avoiding 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 to bring that pile of dirt to life. So if you don’t mind—”

  Hahn beat a hasty retreat, without looking back.

  Barrett was more perplexed than ever. Hahn hadn’t been “arguing” anything. He had been carrying on a lame and feeble 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 it, which was odd for a self-professed economist. He didn’t have a shred of an idea of what his own political party stood for. He had so little revolutionary background that he was unaware even of Hutchett’s astonishing hoax of eleven years back.

  He seemed phony from top to bottom.

  How was it possible that this kid had been deemed worthy of exile to Hawksbill Station, anyhow? Only the top firebrands went there. Sentencing a man to Hawksbill was like sentencing him to death, and it wasn’t done lightly. Barrett couldn’t imagine why Hahn was here. He seemed genuinely distressed at being exiled, and evidently he had left a beloved wife behind, but nothing else rang true about the man.

  Was he—as Latimer 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 make trouble again. But what was Hahn doing here, then?

  He would bear further watching, Barrett thought.

  Barrett took care of some of the watching himself. But he had plenty of assistance. Latimer. Altman. Six or seven others. Latimer had recruited most of the ambulatory psycho cases, the ones who were superficially functional but full of all kinds of fears and credulities.

  They were keeping an eye on the new man.

  On the fifth day after his arrival, Hahn went out fishing in Rudiger’s crew. Barrett stood for a long time on the edge of the geosyncline, watching the little boat bobbing in the surging Atlantic. Rudiger never went far from shore—eight hundred, a thousand yards out—but the water was rough even there. The waves came rolling in with X thousand miles of gathered impact behind them. A continental shelf sloped off at a wide angle, so that even at a substantial distance off shore the water wasn’t very deep. Rudiger had taken soundings up to a mile out, and had reported depths no greater than 160 feet. Nobody had gone past a mile.

  It wasn’t that they were afraid of falling off the side of the world if they went too far east. It was simply that a mile was a long distance 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 did he know that? There could be another Station somewhere else in this very year, and they’d never know about it. A camp of women, say, living on the far side of the ocean, or even across the Inland Sea.

  It wasn’t very likely, he knew. With the entire past to pick from, the edgy men Up Front wouldn’t take any chance that the two groups of exiles might get together and spawn a tribe of little subversives. They’d take every precaution to put an impenetrable barrier of epochs between them. Yet Barrett thought he could make it sound convincing to the other men. With a little effort he could get them to believe in the existence of several simultaneous Hawksbill Stations scattered on this level of time.

  Which could be our salvation, he thought.

  The instances of degenerative psychosis were beginning to snowball, now. Too many men had been here too long, and one crackup was starting to feed the next, in this blank lifeless world where humans were never meant to live. The men needed projects to keep them going. They were starting to slip off into harebrained projects, like Altman’s Frankenstein girlfriend and Latimer’s psi pursuit.

  Suppose, Barrett thought, I could get them steamed up about reaching the other continents?

  A round-the-world expedition. Maybe they could build some kind of big ship. That would keep a lot of men busy for a long time. And they’d need navigational equipment—compasses, sextants, chronometers, whatnot. Somebody would have to design an improvised radio, too. It was the kind of project that might take thirty or forty years. A focus for our energies, Barrett thought. Of course, I won’t live to see the ship set sail. But even so, it’s a way of staving off collapse. We’ve built our staircase to the sea. Now we need something bigger to do. Idle hands make for idle minds…sick minds…

  He liked the idea he had hatched. For several weeks now Barrett had been worrying about the deteriorating state of affairs in the Station, and looking for some way to cope with it. Now he thought he had his way.

  Turning, he saw Latimer and Altman standing behind him.

  “How long have you been there?” he asked.

  “Two minutes,” said Latimer. “We brought you something to look at.”

  Altman nodded vigorously. “You ought to read it. We brought it for you to read.”

  “What is it?”

  Latimer handed over a folded sheaf of papers. “I found this tucked away in Hahn’s bunk after he
went out with Rudiger. I know I’m not supposed to be invading his privacy, but I had to have a look at what he’s been writing. There it is. He’s a spy, all right.”

  Barrett glanced at the papers in his hand. “I’ll read it a little later. What is it about?”

  “It’s a description of the Station, and a profile of most of the men in it,” said Latimer. He smiled frostily. “Hahn’s private opinion of me is that I’ve gone mad. His private opinion of you is a little more flattering, but not much.”

  Altman said, “He’s also been hanging around the Hammer.”

  “What?”

  “I saw him going there late last night. He went into the building. I followed him. He was looking at the Hammer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that right away?” Barrett snapped.

  “I wasn’t sure it was important,” Altman said. “I had to talk it over with Don first. And I couldn’t do that until Hahn had gone out fishing.”

  Sweat burst out on Barrett’s face. “Listen, Ned, if you ever catch Hahn going near the time-travel equipment again, you let me know in a hurry. Without consulting Don or anyone else. Clear?”

  “Clear,” said Altman. He giggled. “You know what I think? They’ve decided to exterminate us Up Front. Hahn’s been sent here to check us out as a suicide volunteer. Then they’re going to send a bomb through the Hammer and blow the Station up. We ought to wreck the Hammer and Anvil before they get a chance.”

  “But why would they send a suicide volunteer?” Latimer asked. “Unless they’ve got some way to rescue their spy—”

  “In any case we shouldn’t take any chance,” Altman argued. “Wreck the Hammer. Make it impossible for them to bomb us from Up Front.”

  “That might be a good idea. But—”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Barrett growled. “Let me look at these papers.”

  He walked a few steps away from them and sat down on a shelf of rock. He began to read.

  Seven