“Just come back in one piece, is all I ask.” Barrett picked up a water flask and cupped it in his huge hands. “Maybe we should call it off, this time. We don’t have all that many able-bodied men.”
Norton’s eyes flashed. “What are you saying, Jim? Call off the trip?”
“Why not? We know what’s between here and the sea: nothing.”
“But the salvage—”
“It can wait. We’re not running short of material right at the moment.”
“Jim, I’ve never heard you talk this way before. You’ve always been big on the trip. The highlight of the year, you said. And now—”
“I’m not going on this one, Charley.”
Norton was silent a moment, but his eyes did not leave Barrett’s. Then he said, “All right, you’re not going. I know how that must hurt you. But there are other men here. They need the trip. Just because you can’t go, you’ve got no right to say we ought to call it off as pointless. It isn’t pointless.”
“I’m sorry, Charley,” Barrett said heavily. “I didn’t mean any of that. Of course there’ll be a trip. I was just running off at the mouth again.”
“It must be tough for you, Jim.”
“It is. But not that tough. You have any ideas of the route you’ll take?”
“Northwest route out, I guess. That’s the usual distribution line for the odd-year garbage, isn’t it? And then down to the Inland Sea. We’ll follow the shoreline for, oh, a hundred miles, I guess. And come home via the lower path.”
“Good enough,” Barrett said. In the eye of his mind he saw the rippling surface of the shallow sea, stretching off to the distant western land zone. Year after year he had come to the edge of that sea and peered off toward the place where the Midwest would someday rise above the water. Each year, he had dreamed of a voyage across the continental heart to the other side. But he had never found the time to organize such a voyage. And now it was too late…too late…
We would never have found anything much over there anyway, Barrett told himself. Just more of the same. Rock, seaweed, trilobites. But it might have been worth it…to see the sun drop into the Pacific one last time…
Norton said, “I’ll get the men together after breakfast. We’ll be on our way fast.”
“Right. Good luck, Charley.”
“We’ll make out.”
Barrett clapped Norton on the shoulder, a gesture that struck him instantly as stagy and false, and went out. It was odd and more than odd to know that he’d have to stay home while the others went. It was an admission that he was beginning to abdicate after running this place so long. He was still king of Hawks-bill Station, but the throne was getting rickety beneath him. A crippled old man was what he was now, hobbling around snooping here and there. Whether he liked to admit it to himself or not, that was the story. It was something he’d have to come to terms with soon.
After breakfast, the men chosen for the Inland Sea expedition gathered to select their gear and plan the logistics of their route. Barrett carefully kept away from the meeting. This was Charley Norton’s show, now. He’d made eight or ten trips, and he would know what to do, without getting any hints from the previous management. Barrett didn’t want to interfere, to seem to be vicariously running things even now.
But some masochistic compulsion in him drove him to take a trek of his own. If he couldn’t see the western waters this year, the least he could do was pay a visit to the Atlantic, in his own back yard.
Barrett stopped off in the infirmary. Hansen, one of the orderlies, came out—a bald, cheerful man of about seventy who had been part of the California anarchist bunch. The only training Hansen had ever had was as a low-grade computer technician for a freight railroad, but he had shown some knack for medicine, and these days he was Quesada’s chief helper. He flashed his usual dazzling smile.
“Is Quesada around?” Barrett asked.
“No, sorry. Doc’s gone over to talk about the trip. He’s giving them some medical pointers. But if it’s important, I could get him for you—”
“Don’t,” Barrett said. “I just wanted to check with him on our drug inventory. It can wait. You mind if I take a quick look at the supplies?”
“Whatever you’d like.”
Hansen stepped back, ushering Barrett into the supply room. The barricade was down for the morning. Since there was no way of locking the drugstore, Barrett and Quesada had devised an intricate barricade that was guaranteed to set off a ton of noise if anyone meddled with it. Whenever the infirmary was left unattended, the barricade had to be put in place. An intruder would inevitably upset the whole thing, creating enough loud bangs and crashes to summon a warder. That was the only way they had been able to guard against unauthorized raiding of their drug supplies by moody residents. They couldn’t afford wasting their precious and irreplaceable drugs on would-be suicides, Barrett reasoned. If a man wanted to kill himself, let him jump into the sea; at least that didn’t impose a hardship on the other residents of the Station.
Barrett looked down the rows of drugs. It was an unbalanced assortment, dependent as they were on the random largesse from up Front. Right now they were heavy on tranquilizers and digestive aids, low on pain-killers and anti-infectants. Which made Barrett feel even guiltier about what he was going to do. The man who had imposed the rules on drug-stealing was now going to take advantage of his privileged position and help himself to a drug. So much for morality, he thought. But he had known men to betray much more sacred trusts, in his time. And he needed the drug, and he didn’t want to get into a lengthy fuss with Quesada over his use of it. This was simplest. Wrong, but simplest. He waited until Hansen’s back was turned. Then he slipped one hand into the cabinet and palmed a slim gray tube of neural depressant, pocketing it quickly.
“Everything seems in order,” he said to Hansen, as he left the infirmary. “Tell Quesada I’ll stop by and talk to him later.”
He was using the neural depressant more and more often nowadays to soothe his legs. Quesada didn’t like it. He said, not quite in those words, that Barrett was developing an addiction. Well, to hell with Quesada. Let Doc try to walk around these paths on a foot like this, and he’ll start reaching for the drugs too, Barrett told himself.
Scrambling along the eastern trail, Barrett halted when he was a few hundred yards from the main building. He stepped behind a low hump of rock, dropped his trousers, and quickly gave each thigh a jolt of the drug, first the good leg, then the gimpy one. That would numb the muscles just enough so that he’d be able to take an extended hike without feeling the fire of fatigue in his protesting joints. He’d pay for it, he knew, eight hours from now, when the depressant wore off and the full impact of his exertion hit him like a million daggers. But he was willing to accept that price.
The road to the sea was a long, lonely one. Hawksbill Station was perched on the eastern rim of Appalachia, more than eight hundred feet above sea level. During the first half dozen years here, the men of the Station had reached the ocean by a suicidal route across sheer rock faces. Barrett had incited a project to carve a path. It had taken ten years to do the job, but now wide, safe steps descended to the Atlantic. Chopping those steps out of the living rock had kept a lot of men busy for a long time—too busy to worry about loved ones Up Front, or to slip into the insanity that was so easily entered here. Barrett regretted that he couldn’t conceive some comparable works project to occupy the idle men nowadays.
The steps formed a succession of shallow platforms that switch-backed to the edge of the water. Even for a healthy man it was a strenuous walk. For Barrett in his present condition it was an ordeal. It took him close to two hours to descend a distance that normally could be traversed in less than a quarter of that time.
When he reached the bottom of the path, he sank down exhausted on a flat rock licked by the waves, and dropped his crutch. The fingers of his left hand were cramped and gnarled from gripping the crutch, and his entire body was bathed in sweat.
The water of the ocean looked gray and somehow oily. Barrett could not explain the prevailing colorlessness of the Late Cambrian world, with its somber sky and somber land and somber sea, but his heart quietly ached for a glimpse of green vegetation again. He missed chlorophyll. The dark wavelets lapped against his rock, pushing a mass of floating black seaweed back and forth.
The sea stretched to infinity. He didn’t have the faintest idea how much of Europe, if any, might be above water in this particular epoch. At the best of times most of the planet was submerged; here, only a few hundred million years after the white-hot rocks of the first land had pushed into view, it was likely that not much was above water on Earth except a strip of territory here and there.
Had the Himalayas been born yet? The Rockies? The Andes? Barrett knew the approximate outlines of Late Cambrian North America, but the rest was a mystery. Blanks in knowledge were not easy to fill when the only link with Up Front was by one-way transport; Hawksbill Station had to rely on the unpredictable assortment of reading matter that came back in time, and it was furiously frustrating to lack information that any college geology text could supply.
As he watched, a big trilobite unexpectedly came scuttering up out of the water. It was the spike-tailed kind, about a yard long, with a glossy eggplant-purple shell and a bristling arrangement of slender yellow spines along the margins. There seemed to be a lot of legs underneath. The trilobite crawled up on the shore—no sand, no beach, just a shelf of rock—and advanced landward until it was eight or ten feet from the waves.
Good for you, Barrett thought. Maybe you’re the first one who ever came out on land to see what it was like. The pioneer. The trail blazer.
It occurred to him that this adventurous trilobite might very well be the ancestor of all the land-dwelling creatures of the eons to come. The thought was biological nonsense, and Barrett knew it. But his weary mind conjured a picture of a long 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 right in its first link.
Evolution undone. No land creatures ever to emerge. With the brutal descent of that heavy foot all the future would instantly change, and there would never have been a human race, no Hawksbill Station, no James Edward Barrett (1968–?). In a single instant he would have both revenge on those who had condemned him to live out his days in this barren place, and release from his sentence.
He did nothing. The trilobite completed its slow perambulation of the shoreline rocks and scuttered back into the sea unharmed.
Then the soft voice of Don Latimer said, “I saw you sitting alone down here, Jim. Do you mind if I join you?”
The intrusion jolted Barrett. He swung around rapidly, sucking in his stomach in surprise. Latimer had come down from his hilltop hut so quietly that Barrett hadn’t heard him approaching. But 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 way the devil down here 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, but you were too polite to tell me to go away. I’m sorry. I’ll leave if—”
“That’s not so. Stay here. Talk to me, Don.”
“You can give it to me straight if you’d prefer to be left in peace.”
“I don’t prefer to be left in peace,” said Barrett. “And I wanted to see you, anyway. How are you getting along with your new bunkmate Hahn?”
Latimer’s high forehead corrugated into a complex frown. “It’s been strange,” he said. “That’s one reason I came down here to talk to you, when I saw you.” He leaned forward and peered searchingly into Barrett’s eyes. “Jim, tell me straight: do you think I’m a madman?”
“Why should I think that?”
“The espying business. My attempt to break through to another realm of consciousness. I know you’re tough-minded and skeptical of anything you can’t grab hold of and measure and squeeze. You probably think it’s all a lot of nonsense, this extrasensory stuff.”
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. Call me a materialist if you like, and I admit that I haven’t done much homework on the subject, but it all seems like pure black magic to me, and I’ve never known magic to work worth a damn. I think it’s a complete waste of time and energy for you to sit there for hours trying to harness your psionic powers, or whatever it is you think you’re doing. 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 levelheaded way. Fair enough?”
“More than fair. I don’t ask you to put any credence at all in the assumptions of my research—but I don’t want you to write me off as a total lunatic because I’m trying to find a psionic escape hatch from this place. It’s important that you regard me as a sane man, 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 any garden-variety paranoid, and if you think I’m nuts you’re likely to discount my ideas about Hahn. So I want to establish that you think I’m sane before I try to communicate my feelings about him.”
“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 savage guffaw that he knew would shatter Latimer’s fragile self-esteem. “Spying?” he said casually. “Don, you can’t mean that. How can anyone spy here? I mean, even if we had a spy, how could he report his findings to anyone?”
“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 like Valdosto. He wanted to know everything.”
“So? It’s the normal curiosity of a new man trying to relate to his environment.”
“Jim, he was taking notes. I saw him after he thought I was asleep. He sat up for two hours writing all my answers down in a little book.”
Barrett frowned. “Maybe Hahn’s going to write a novel about us.”
“I’m serious,” Latimer said. His hand traveled tensely to his ear. “Questions—notes. And he’s shifty. Just 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 told me, but he was vague as hell about them. 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 possibly be spying for? He’s got no way to file a report, if he’s a government agent. He’s stranded here for keeps, same as the rest of 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 life in the twenty-first century so he could come among us and thwart anything we might be hatching. The dedicated sort, a willing martyr to society. You know the type, I think.”
“Yes, but—”
Barrett felt a cold twinge of alarm. He saw how close to paranoia Latimer was hewing, now: in half a dozen quiet sentences, Latimer 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 seems like 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. Unless they’ve repealed the Hawksbill Equations, there’s no chance that we can bother anybody ever again, so why would they waste a man spying on us?”
“Would you keep an eye on him, anyway?” Latimer asked.
“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, Jim. We can’t tolerate any spies from Up Front among us.” Latimer got to his feet and gave Barrett a pleasant smile that almost seemed to cancel the paranoia. “I’ll let you get back to your sunning now,” he said.
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 a standing position. He stood staring down at the surf, dipping the tip of the 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.
EIGHT
Barrett wasn’t sure of the exact point in time when it happened, but somewhere along the way they had all stopped thinking of themselves as counterrevolutionaries, and now regarded themselves as revolutionaries in their own right. The semantic shift had occurred early in the 1990’s, happening in a gradual, processless manner. For the first few years after the upheavals of 1984–85, the syndicalists had been the revolutionaries, and rightly so, since they had overthrown an establishment more than two centuries old. Thus the conspirators of the antisyndicalist underground were of necessity counterrevolutionaries. But after a while the syndicalist revolution had institutionalized itself. It had ceased to be a revolution and had become an establishment itself.
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