Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  He was puzzled by this Hahn. The man was full of seeming contradictions. Such as showing up here with the worst case of temporal shock on arrival Barrett had ever seen, then snapping out of it with remarkable quickness. Or looking frail and shy, but hiding solid muscles inside his tunic. Giving an outer appearance of general incompetence, but speaking with calm control. Barrett wondered what it was this sleek young man had done to earn him the trip to Hawksbill Station. But there was time for such inquiries later. All the time in the world.

  Hahn swept his hand across the horizon and said, “Is everything like this? Just rock and ocean?”

  “That’s all. Land life hasn’t evolved yet. Won’t for quite a while. Everything’s wonderfully simple here, isn’t it? No clutter. No urban sprawl. No traffic jams. There’s some moss moving up onto the land, but not much.”

  “And in the sea? Dinosaurs swimming around?”

  Barrett shook his head. “There won’t be any vertebrates for thirty, forty million years. They’ll be arriving in the Ordovician, and we’re in the Cambrian. We don’t even have fish yet, let alone reptiles out there. All we can offer is that which creepeth. Some shellfish, some big ugly fellows that look like squids, and trilobites. We’ve got seven hundred billion different species of trilobites, more or less. And we’ve got a man named Mel Rudiger—he’s the one who gave you the drink when you got here—who’s making a collection of them. Rudiger’s writing the world’s definitive text on trilobites. His masterpiece.”

  “But nobody will ever have a chance to read it in—in the future.”

  “Up Front, we say.”

  “Up Front.”

  “That’s the pity of it,” said Barrett. “All that brilliant work, and it’s wasted, because nobody else here gives a damn about the life and hard times of the trilobite, and nobody Up Front will ever know about it. We told Rudiger to inscribe his book on imperishable plates of gold and hope that it’s found by paleontologists later on. But he says the odds are against it. A billion years of geology will chew his plates to hell before they can be found. And if they ever did turn up, they’d probably be used to start a new religion, or something.”

  Hahn sniffed. “Why does the air smell so strange?”

  “It’s a different mix,” Barrett said. “We’ve analyzed it. More nitrogen, a little less oxygen, hardly any carbon dioxide at all. But that isn’t really why it smells odd to you. The thing is, it’s pure air, unpolluted by the exhalations of life. Nobody’s been respiring into it except us lads, and there aren’t enough of us to matter.”

  Smiling, Hahn said, “I feel a little cheated that it’s so empty. I expected lush jungles of weird plants, and pterodactyls swooping through the air, and maybe a tyrannosaur crashing into a fence around the Station.”

  “No jungles. No pterodactyls. No tyrannosaurs. No fences. You didn’t do your homework.”

  “Sorry.”

  “This is the Late Cambrian. Sea life exclusively.”

  “It was very kind of them to pick such a peaceful era for their dumping ground for political prisoners,” Hahn said. “I was afraid it would be all teeth and claws.”

  Barrett spat. “Kind, hell! They were looking for an era where we couldn’t do any harm to their environment. That meant they had to toss us back before the evolution of mammals, just in case we’d accidentally get hold of the ancestor of all humanity and snuff him out. And while they were at it, they decided to stash us so far in the past that we’d be beyond all land life, on the theory that maybe even if we slaughtered a baby dinosaur it might affect the entire course of the future. Their world.”

  “They don’t mind if we catch a few trilobites?”

  “Evidently they think it’s safe,” Barrett said. “It looks as though they were right. Hawksbill Station has been here for twenty-five years, and it doesn’t seem as though we’ve tampered with future history in any measurable way. There’s still a continuity, despite our presence here. Of course, they’re careful not to send us any women.”

  “Why is that?”

  “So we don’t start reproducing and perpetuating ourselves. Wouldn’t that mess up the time-lines! Say, a successful human outpost planted here in one billion B.C., that’s had all that time to evolve and mutate and grow?”

  “A separate evolutionary line.”

  “You bet,” Barrett said. “By the time the twenty-first century came around, our descendants would be in charge, whatever kind of creatures they’d be by then, and the other kind of human being would probably be in penal servitude, and there’d be more paradoxes created than you could shake a trilobite at. So they don’t send the women here.”

  “But they send women back in time.”

  “Oh, yes,” Barrett said. “There’s a prison camp for women, too, but it’s a few hundred million years up the time-line in the Late Silurian, and never the twain shall meet. That’s why Ned Altman is trying to build a woman for himself out of dust and garbage.”

  “God made Adam out of less.”

  “Ned Altman isn’t God,” Barrett pointed out. “That’s the root of his whole problem. Look, here’s the hut where you’re going to stay, Hahn. I’m rooming you with Don Latimer. He’s a very sensitive, interesting, pleasant person. He used to be a physicist before he got into politics, and he’s been here about a dozen years, and I might as well warn you that he’s developed a strong and somewhat cockeyed mystic streak lately. The fellow he was rooming with killed himself last year, and since then Don’s been trying to find some way out of the Station through the application of extrasensory powers.”

  “Is he serious?”

  “I’m afraid he is. And we try to take him seriously, too. We all humor each other’s quirks at Hawksbill Station; it’s the only way we avoid an epidemic of mass psychosis. Latimer will probably try to get you to collaborate with him on his psi project. If you don’t like living with him, I can arrange a transfer for you. But I want to see how he reacts to someone who’s new at the Station. I’d like you to give bunking with him a chance.”

  “Maybe I’ll even help him find that psionic gateway he’s looking for.”

  “If you do, take me along,” said Barrett. They both laughed. Then Barrett rapped at Latimer’s door. There was no answer, and after a moment he pushed the door open. Hawksbill Station got along without locks.

  Latimer sat in the middle of the bare rock floor, cross-legged, meditating. He was a slender, gentle-faced man with parchment-like skin and a somber, downturned mouth, and he was just beginning to look old. Right now he seemed at least a million miles away, ignoring them completely. Hahn shrugged. Barrett put a finger to his lips. They waited in silence for a few minutes, and then Latimer showed signs of coming up from his trance.

  He got to his feet in a single flowing motion, without using his hands. In a low, courteous voice he said to Hahn, “Have you just arrived?”

  “Within the last hour. I’m Lew Hahn.”

  “Donald Latimer.” He did not offer to shake hands. “I regret that I have to make your acquaintance in these surroundings. But perhaps we won’t have to tolerate this illegal condition of imprisonment much longer.”

  Barrett said, “Don, Lew is going to bunk with you. I think you’ll get along well. He was an economist in 2029 until they gave him the Hammer.”

  Animation came into Latimer’s eyes. “Where did you live?” he asked.

  “San Francisco.”

  The glow faded as if doused. Latimer said, “Were you ever in Toronto?”

  “Toronto? No,” Hahn said.

  “I’m from there. I had a daughter—she’d be twenty-three years old now, Nella Latimer—I wondered if you knew her—perhaps you knew her—”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  Latimer sighed. “It wasn’t very likely that you did. But I’d love to know what kind of a woman she became. She was a little girl when I last saw her. She was—let’s see—she was ten, going on eleven. Now I suppose she’s married. I might have grandchildren. Or perhaps they’ve sent
her to the other Station. She might have come to be politically active, and—” Latimer paused. “Nella Latimer—you’re sure that you didn’t know her?”

  Barrett left them together, Hahn looking concerned and sympathetic, Latimer trusting, open, hopeful. It seemed as though they’d get along pretty well. Barrett told Latimer to bring the new man up to the main building at dinnertime to be introduced around, and went out. A chilly drizzle had begun to fall again. Barrett made his way slowly, painfully up the hill, grunting faintly every time he put his weight on the crutch.

  It had been sad to see the light flicker from Latimer’s eyes when Hahn said he didn’t know his daughter. Most of the time, men at Hawksbill Station tried not to speak about their families. They preferred—wisely—to keep those tormenting memories well repressed. To think about loved ones was to feel the ache of amputation, desperate and incurable. But the arrival of newcomers generally stirred old ties. There was never any news of relatives, and no way ever to obtain any, because it was impossible for the men of the Station to communicate with anyone Up Front. Nothing could be sent forward in time so much as a thousandth of a second.

  No way to ask for the photo of a loved one, no way to request specific medicines or equipment, no way to obtain a certain book or a coveted tape. In a mindless, impersonal way, the authorities Up Front sent periodic shipments to the Station of things that might be useful to the inmates—reading matter, medical supplies, technical equipment, food. But always it was a random scoop, unpredictable, bizarre. Occasionally they were startling in their generosity, as when they sent a case of Burgundy, or a box of sensory spools, or a recharger for the power pack. Such gifts usually meant that they were having a brief thaw in the world situation. A relaxation of tension customarily produced a short-lived desire to be kind to the boys in Hawksbill Station.

  But they had a strict policy about sending information about relatives. Or about sending contemporary newspapers and magazines. Fine wine, yes; a tridim of a daughter who would never be embraced again, no.

  For all Up Front knew, there was no one alive in Hawksbill Station. A plague could have killed everyone in the place off ten years ago—but they had no way of telling that. They couldn’t even be sure that any of the exiles had survived the trip to the past. All they had determined from Hawksbill’s experiments was that a pastward trip of less than three years was not likely to be fatal; it had been impractical to extend the duration experiments past that point. What would a billion years across time do? Not even Edmond Hawksbill had known that for certain.

  So they went on sending shipments back to the prisoners in the blind assumption that there were prisoners alive to receive them. The government whirred and clicked with predictable continuity, looking after those whom it had condemned to eternal separation from the State. The government, whatever else it might be, was not malicious. Barrett had learned long ago that there were other kinds of totalitarianism besides bloody repressive tyranny.

  Barrett paused at the top of the hill to catch his breath. Naturally, the alien air no longer smelled strange to him. He filled his lungs with it until he was a little dizzied by it. Once again the rain ceased. Through the grayness came thin shafts of sunshine, making the naked rocks sparkle and glow. Barrett closed his eyes a moment and leaned on his crutch, and saw as though on an inner screen in his mind the creatures with many legs climbing up out of the sea, and the broad mossy carpets spreading, and the flowerless plants uncoiling and extending their scaly grayish branches, and the dull hides of eerie flat-snouted amphibians glistening on the shores, and the tropic heat of the coal-forming epoch descending like a glove to smother the world.

  All that lay far in the future.

  Dinosaurs.

  Little chittering mammals.

  Pithecanthropus hunting with hand-axes in the forests of Java.

  Sargon and Hannibal and Attila, and Orville Wright, and Thomas Edison, and Edmond Hawksbill. And finally a benign government that would find the thoughts of certain men so intolerable that the only safe place to which those men could be banished was deemed to be a rock at the beginning of time.

  The government was too civilized to put men to death for subversive activities, and too cowardly to let them remain alive and at large. The compromise was the living death of Hawksbill Station. A billion years of impassable time was suitable insulation even for the most nihilistic ideas.

  Grimacing a little, Barrett struggled the rest of the way back to his hut. He had long since come to accept the fact of his exile, but accepting his ruined foot was another matter entirely. He had always been strong physically. He had feared old age because it might mean a withering of his strength; but now the age of sixty had come upon him, and the years had not sapped him as much as he feared they might, although they had certainly sapped him; but he would still have had most of his strength, except for this absurd accident that might have happened to him at any age. The idle wish to find a way to regain the freedom of his own time no longer possessed him; but Barrett wished with all his soul that the blank-faced authorities Up Front would send back a kit that would allow him to rebuild his foot.

  He entered his hut and flung his crutch aside, sinking down instantly on his cot. There had been no cots when Barrett had come to Hawksbill Station. You slept on the floor, then, and the floor was solid rock. If you felt ambitious, you went out and scrabbled together some soil, looking in the crevices and creases of the rock shield, collecting the fledgling earth a handful at a time, and you made yourself an inch-deep bed of soil to lie on. Things were a little better here now.

  Barrett had been sent to the Station in its fourth year of operation, when there had been only a dozen buildings, and little in the way of creature comforts. That had been A.D. 2008, Up Front time. The Station had been a raw, miserable place, then, but the steady accretion of shipments from Up Front had made it a relatively tolerable place to live.

  Of the fifty or so exiles who had preceded Barrett to Hawksbill, none remained alive. He had held highest seniority in the camp for almost ten years, since the death of white-bearded old Pleyel, whom Barrett had regarded as a saint. Time here moved at a one-to-one correlation with time Up Front; the Hammer was locked on this single point of time, forever moving forward in perfect step, so that Lew Hahn, arriving here today more than twenty years after Barrett had come, had departed from Up Front at a spot on the calendar exactly twenty years and some months along from the date of Barrett’s expulsion. Hahn came from 2029—a whole generation past the world Barrett had left. Barrett had not had the heart to begin pumping Hahn for news of that generation so soon. He would learn all he needed to know in time, and small cheer it would be, anyway.

  Barrett reached for a book. But the fatigue of hobbling around the Station had taken more out of him than he realized. He looked at the page for a moment. Then he put it away and closed his eyes.

  Faces swam behind his lids. Bernstein. Pleyel. Hawksbill. Janet. Bernstein. Bernstein. Bernstein.

  He dozed.

  FOUR

  Jimmy Barrett was sixteen years old, and Jack Bernstein was saying to him, “How can you be so big and strong and ugly and not care a damn about what’s happening to the weak people of this world?”

  “Who says I don’t care a damn?”

  “It doesn’t even need saying. It’s obvious. Where’s your commitment? What are you doing to keep civilization from falling apart?”

  “It isn’t—”

  “It is,” Bernstein said scornfully. “You big lummox, you don’t even read the papers, do you? Do you realize that there’s a constitutional crisis in this country, and that unless people like you and me start taking action, there’s going to be a dictatorship here in the United States before this time next year?”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Barrett said. “As usual.”

  “See? You don’t give a damn!”

  Barrett was exasperated, but that was nothing new. Jack Bernstein had been exasperating him ever since they had met, four years
back in 1980. They had both been twelve years old then. Barrett was already close to six feet tall, husky and powerful; Jack was skinny and waxen-looking, undersized for his age, even smaller when he stood beside Barrett. Something had drawn the two of them together: the attraction of opposites, perhaps. Barrett valued and respected the smaller boy’s quick, nimble mind, and he suspected that Jack had sought him out as a protector. Jack needed protection. He was the sort of fellow you wanted to hit for no particular reason at all, even when he hadn’t said anything, and when he finally did open his mouth you wanted to hit him even harder.

  Now they were sixteen, and Barrett had reached what he hoped was his full growth, six feet five, well over two hundred pounds, and he had to shave every day and his voice was deep and black. Jack Bernstein still looked as though he were on the wrong side of puberty. He was five feet five, five seven at best, with no shoulders at all, arms and legs so thin Barrett thought he could snap them with one hand, a high reedy voice, a sharp, aggressive nose. His face was scarred by some skin disease, and his thick, tangled eyebrows made a solid line across his forehead, visible half a block away. Jack had grown more waspish, more excitable in adolescence. There were times when Barrett could hardly stand him at all. This was one of them.

  “What do you want from me?” Barrett asked.

  “Will you come to one of our meetings?”

  “I don’t want to get into anything subversive.”

  “Subversive!” Bernstein shot back at him. “A label. A stinking semantic tag. Anyone who wants to patch the world up a little, he’s a subversive in your book, right, Jimmy?”

  “Well—”

  “Take Christ. Would you call him a subversive?”