Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  So Barrett was a revolutionary, now. And the goal of the underground had subtly capitalized itself into The Revolution. The Revolution was coming any day now, any month, any year…All it took was further planning, and then The Word would be given, and all over the nation the revolutionaries would rise…

  He did not question the truth of those propositions. Not yet. He did his work, and went through the round of days, and waited hopefully for the downfall of the entrenched and ever more confident syndicalists.

  The Revolution had become Barrett’s whole career. He had slipped easily and without regret out of college without finishing; the college had been syndicalist-dominated, anyway, and the daily dollop of propaganda offended him. Then he had come to Pleyel, and Pleyel had given him a job. Officially, Pleyel ran an employment agency; at least, that was the cover story. In a small office far downtown in Manhattan he screened applicants for the underground while managing also to operate legitimately part of the time. Janet was his secretary; Hawksbill dropped in now and then to program the agency’s computer; Barrett was taken on as assistant manager. His salary was small, but it allowed him to keep eating regularly and to pay the rent on the cramped apartment he shared with Janet. Thirty hours a week he dealt with innocent-seeming activities of the employment agency, freeing Pleyel for more delicate work in other quarters.

  Barrett actually enjoyed the cover job. It gave him a chance to deal with people, and he liked that. All sorts of unemployed New Yorkers drifted through the office, some of them radicals in search of an underground, others merely hunting for jobs, and Barrett did what he could for them. They didn’t realize that he was barely out of his teens, and some of them came to look upon him as a source of all their guidance and direction. That made him a little uncomfortable, but he helped them where he could.

  The work of the underground went on steadily during those years.

  That phrase, Barrett knew, was a high-order abstraction nearly empty of content: “the work of the underground.” What did it amount to, this work? Endless planning for an often-postponed day of uprising. Transcontinental telephone calls conducted entirely in oblique jargon that decoded out into subversive scheming. The surreptitious publication of antisyndicalist propaganda. The daring distribution of undoctored history books. The organization of protest meetings. An infinite series of small actions, amounting in the long run to very little indeed. But Barrett, in the full flush of his youthful enthusiasm, was willing to be patient. One day all the scattered threads would come together, he told himself. One day The Revolution would arrive.

  On behalf of the movement he traveled all over the country. The economy had revived under the syndicalists, and the airports once again were busy places; Barrett got to know them well. He spent most of the summer of 1991 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working with a group of revolutionaries who in the old order of things would have been called extremist right-wingers. Barrett found most of their philosophy unpalatable, but they hated the syndicalists as much as he did, and in their separate ways he and the New Mexico group shared a love for the Revolution of 1776 and all the symbolism that went with it. He came close to being arrested a few times that summer.

  In the winter of 1991–92 he commuted weekly to Oregon to coordinate an outfit in Spokane that was setting up a northwest propaganda office. The two-hour trip became wearily familiar after a while, but Barrett kept to his routine, dutifully huddling with the Spokane people on Wednesday nights, then hustling back to New York. The following spring he worked mostly in New Orleans, and that summer he was in St. Louis. Pleyel kept moving the pawns about. The theory was that you had to stay at least three jumps ahead of the police agents.

  Actually, there were few arrests of any importance. The syndicalists had ceased to take the underground seriously, and they picked up a leader every now and then purely to maintain form. Generally, the revolutionaries were regarded as harmless cranks and were allowed to go through the motions of conspiracy, so long as they didn’t venture into sabotage or assassination. Who could object to syndicalist rule, after all? The country was thriving. Most people were working regularly again. Taxes were low. The interrupted flow of technological wonders was no longer interrupted, and each year produced its new marvel: weather conditioning, color telephone picture transmission, tridim video, organ transplants, instafax newspapers, and more. Why gripe? Had things ever been any better under the old system? There was even talk of the restoration of the two-party system by the year 2000. Free elections had come back into vogue in 1990, though of course the Council of Syndics exercised a right of veto over the choice of candidates. No one talked any more of the “stopgap” nature of the Constitution of 1985, because that constitution looked like it was on its way to becoming a permanent feature, but in small ways the government was amending the constitution to bring it more in line with past national traditions.

  Thus the revolutionaries were thwarted at the root. Jack Bernstein’s gloomy prediction was coming true: the syndicalists were turning into the familiar, beloved, traditional incumbent government, and the vast center of the nation had come to accept them as though they had always been there. There were fewer and fewer malcontents. Who wanted to join an underground movement when, if everybody was patient, the present government would transform itself into an even more benevolent institution? Only the embittered, the incurably angry, the dedicated destroyers, cared to involve themselves in revolutionary activities. By late 1993, it looked as though the underground and not the syndicalist government would wither away as America’s basic conservatism reasserted itself even in these transformed conditions.

  But the last month of 1993 brought a transfer of power within the government. Chancellor Arnold, who had ruled the country for all eight years under the new constitution, died of a sudden aortal aneurysm. He had been only forty-nine years old, and there was talk that he had been murdered; but in any event Arnold was gone, and after a brief internal crisis the Syndics thrust forward one of their number as the new Chancellor. Thomas Dantell of Ohio took command, and there was a general tightening of security up and down the line. Dantell’s responsibility as a Syndic had been to run the national police: and now, with the top cop in office, the genial tolerance of the underground movements abruptly ended. There were arrests.

  “We may have to disband for a while,” Pleyel said dismally in the snowy spring of ’94. “They’re coming too close. We’ve had seven critical arrests so far, and they’re moving toward our leadership cadre now.”

  “If we disband,” said Barrett, “we’ll never get the movement organized again.”

  “Better to lay low now and come out of hiding in six months or a year,” Pleyel argued, “than to have everyone go to jail on twenty-year sedition terms.”

  They fought the matter out in a formal session of the underground. Pleyel lost. He took his defeat mildly, and pledged to keep working until the police dragged him away. But the episode demonstrated how Barrett was moving toward an ever more important position in the group. Pleyel was still the leader, but he seemed too remote, too unworldly. In matters of real crisis everyone turned to Barrett.

  Barrett was twenty-six years old, now, and he towered over the others literally and figuratively. Enormous, powerful, tireless, he drew on hidden reserves of strength that gave him legendary stamina. If necessary, he used that strength in the most direct way: he had broken up one nasty street incident singlehanded, when a dozen young toughs attacked three girls distributing revolutionary leaflets. Barrett had happened along to find the leaflets fluttering through the air and the girls on the verge of suffering a nonideological rape, and he had scattered live bodies in all directions, like Samson among the Philistines. But under ordinary circumstances he tried to restrain himself.

  His relationship with Janet had lasted nearly a decade; he had lived with her for seven years. Neither of them had ever considered legalizing the arrangement, but in most ways it amounted to a marriage. They reserved the right to have separate adventures, and oc
casionally they did. Janet had set the trend in that, but Barrett had taken advantage of his freedom when the opportunity presented itself. Yet generally they felt themselves bound by a tie deeper than the government’s marriage certificate alone could create. So it hurt him deeply when she was arrested one scorching day in the summer of ’94.

  He was in Boston that day, checking into reports that a Cambridge cell had been infiltrated by government informers. Late in the afternoon he headed for the tube station to return to New York. The telephone he carried behind his left ear bleeped its signal, and Jack Bernstein’s thin voice said, “Where are you now, Jim?”

  “On my way home. I’m about to take a tube. What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t take the Forty-second Street tube. Make sure you get off in White Plains. I’ll meet you there.”

  “What’s wrong, Jack? What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “It’s best if I don’t,” Bernstein said. “I’ll see you in an hour or two.”

  The contact broke. As he boarded the tube, Barrett tried to reach Bernstein in New York, but got no answer. He called Pleyel, and the line was silent. He dialed his home number, and Janet did not answer. Frightened now, Barrett gave up. He might be making trouble for himself or the others by putting through this call. He tried to wait for the time to elapse, as the tube rammed him at two hundred miles an hour down the Boston-New York corridor. It was very much like Bernstein to call him and bait him this way, sadistically hinting at a dire emergency and then clamming up on the details. Jack always seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in inflicting little tortures of that sort. And he did not grow mellower as he grew older.

  Barrett left the tube as instructed at the suburban station. He stood at the exit lip for a long moment, staring warily in all directions and reflecting, not for the first time, that a man his size was really too conspicuous to be a successful revolutionary. Then Bernstein appeared and tapped his elbow and said, “Follow me. I’ve got a car in the lot out back. Don’t say anything until we get there.”

  They walked grimly to the car. Bernstein thumbed the door panel and opened it on the driver’s side, letting Barrett wait a moment before his door was opened too. The car was a rental job, green and black, low-slung, somehow sinister. Barrett got in and turned toward the pale, slight figure beside him, feeling as always a kind of revulsion for Bernstein’s scarred cheeks, his bushy united eyebrows, his cold, mocking expression. But for Jack Bernstein, Barrett might never have joined the underground in the first place, yet it seemed incomprehensible to him that he could have chosen such a person as his most intimate boyhood friend. Now their relationship was purely business: they were professional revolutionaries, working together for the common cause, but they were not friends at all.

  “Well?” Barrett blurted.

  Bernstein smiled a death’s-head smile. “They got Janet this afternoon.”

  “Who got her? What are you talking about?”

  “The polizei. Your apartment was raided at three o’clock. Janet was there, and Nick Morris. They were planning the Canada operation. Suddenly the door opens and four of the boys in green rush in. They accuse Janet and Nick of subversive activities and start searching the place.”

  Barrett closed his eyes. “There’s nothing in the place that could upset anyone. We’ve been very careful that way.”

  “Nevertheless, the police didn’t know that until they had searched the place.” Bernstein steered the car out onto the highway bound for Manhattan and locked it into the electronic control system. As the master computer took over, Bernstein released the steering knobs, took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, and lit one without offering any to Barrett. He crossed his legs and turned cozily to Barrett, saying, “They also searched Janet and Nick very thoroughly while on the premises. Nick told me about it. They made Janet strip completely, and then they went over her from top to bottom. You know that business out in Chicago last month, the girl with the suicide bomb in her vagina? Well, they made sure Janet wasn’t about to blow herself up. The way they do it, they put her ankles into interrogation loops and spread eagle her on the floor, and then—”

  “I know how they do it,” Barrett said tightly. “You don’t need to draw a picture for me.” He struggled to stay cool. It was a powerful temptation to seize Bernstein and bat his head against the windshield a few times. The little louse is telling me this deliberately to torture me, Barrett thought. He said, “Skip the atrocities and tell me what else happened.”

  “They finished with Janet and stripped Nick and examined him too. That was Nick’s thrill for the year, I guess, watching them work Janet over, and then putting on a display himself.” Barrett’s scowl deepened; Nick Morris was a maidenly little fellow of doubtful heterosexuality for whom this had surely been a scarifying ordeal, and Bernstein’s pleasure was all too close to the surface. “Then they took Janet and Nick down to Foley Square for close interrogation. About four-thirty they let Nick go. He called me and I called you.”

  “And Janet?”

  “They kept her.”

  “They’ve got no more evidence on her than they had on Nick. So why didn’t they let her go too?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Bernstein. “Nevertheless, they kept her.”

  Barrett knotted his hands together to keep them from shaking. “Where’s Pleyel?”

  “He’s in Baltimore. I called him and told him to stay there until the heat was off.”

  “But you invited me to come back.”

  “Someone’s got to be in charge,” Bernstein said. “It isn’t going to be me, so it’s got to be you. Don’t worry, you aren’t in any real danger. I’ve got a contact in an important place, and he checked the data sheets and said that the only pickup order was for Janet. Just to make sure, I staked Bill Klein out at your apartment, and he says they haven’t come back looking for you in the past two hours. So the coast is clear.”

  “But Janet’s in jail!”

  “It happens,” Bernstein said. “It’s the risk we run.”

  The little man’s dry silent laughter was all too audible. For months, now, Bernstein had seemed to be withdrawing from the movement, skipping meetings, regretfully declining out-of-town assignments. He had seemed aloof, alienated, scarcely interested in the underground. Barrett hadn’t spoken to him in three weeks. But suddenly he was back in circulation, hooked into the movement’s communication nexus. Why? So he could cackle with glee at Janet’s arrest?

  The car plunged into Manhattan at a hundred twenty miles an hour. Bernstein resumed manual control once they were past 125th Street, and took the car down the East River Tunnel, emerging at the vehicular overpass on Fourteenth Street. A few minutes later they were at the building where Barrett and Janet had lived. Bernstein called upstairs to the man he had left on watch there.

  “The coast is clear,” he told Barrett after a moment.

  They went upstairs. The apartment had been left just as it had been after the police visit, and it was a somber sight. They had been very thorough. Every drawer had been opened, every book taken down from the shelves, every tape given a quick scan. Of course, they had found nothing, since Barrett was inflexible about keeping revolutionary propaganda out of his apartment, but in the course of the ransacking they had managed to get their grimy hands on every piece of property in the place. Janet’s underclothes lay fanned out in pathetic array; Barrett glowered when he saw Bernstein staring wolfishly at the flimsy garments. The visitors had been neither gentle nor careful with the contents of the apartment. Barrett wondered how much was missing, but he did not have the stomach to take an inventory now. He felt as though the interior of his body had been laid open by a surgeon’s knife, and all his organs removed, examined, and left scattered about.

  Stooping, Barrett picked up a book whose backbone had been split, carefully closed it, and set it on a shelf. Then he clamped his hand against the shelf and leaned for
ward, closing his eyes, waiting for the anger and fear to subside.

  In a moment he said, “Get hold of your contact in an important place, Jack. We’ve got to have her released.”

  “I can’t do a thing for you.”

  Barrett whirled. He seized Bernstein by the shoulders. His fingers dug in, and he felt the sharp bones beneath the scanty flesh. The blood drained from Bernstein’s face, and the stigmata of his acne glowed like beacons. Barrett shook him furiously; Bernstein’s head lolled on the thin neck.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do a thing? You can find her! You can get her out!”

  “Jim—Jim, stop—”

  “You and your contacts! Damn you, they’ve arrested Janet! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Bernstein clawed feebly at Barrett’s wrists, trying to pull them from his shoulders. Shortly Barrett grew calm and released him. Gasping, red-faced, Bernstein stepped back and adjusted his clothing. He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. He looked badly frightened; but yet his eyes glowed with sullen resentment.

  In a low voice he said, “You ape, don’t ever grab me like that again.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m under stress. Right now they might be torturing Janet—beating her—lining up for a mass rape, even—”

  “There’s nothing we can do. She’s in their hands. We have no official channel of legal protest, and no unofficial one, either. They’ll interrogate her and maybe then they’ll release her, and it’s out of our control.”