What the hell was this?
It sounded like the report of a parole commissioner! But there was no parole from Hawksbill Station. That final insane sentence let all the viability of what had gone before bleed away. No matter that Hahn’s insight into the Station was keen and deeply penetrating. A man who could write, “I recommend prompt termination of the Hawksbill Station penal colony,” was a man who was insane.
Hahn was pretending to be composing a report to the government Up Front, obviously. In brisk and capable prose he had dissected the Station and provided a full analysis. But a wall a billion years thick made the filing of that report an impossibility. So Hahn was suffering from delusions, just like Altman and Valdosto and the others. In his fevered mind he believed he could send messages to those Up Front, pompous documents delineating the flaws and foibles of his fellow prisoners.
That raised a chilling prospect. Hahn might be crazy, but he hadn’t been in the Station long enough to have gone crazy there. He must have brought his insanity with him from Up Front.
What if they had stopped using Hawksbill Station as a camp for political prisoners, Barrett asked himself, and were starting to use it as an insane asylum?
It was a somber thing to consider: a cascade of psychos descending on them. Human debris of all sorts would rain from the Hammer. Men who had gone honorably buggy under the stress of long confinement would have to make room at the Station for ordinary Bedlamites.
Barrett shivered. He folded up Hahn’s papers and handed them back to Latimer, who was sitting a few yards away, watching him intently.
“What did you think of that?” Latimer asked.
“I think it’s hard to evaluate at one reading.” He rubbed his hand over his face, pressing heavily against it. “But possibly friend Hahn is emotionally disturbed in some way. I don’t think this is the work of a healthy man.”
“You think he’s a spy from Up Front?”
“No,” said Barrett. “I don’t. But I think he thinks he’s a spy from Up Front. That’s what I find so disturbing about this stuff.”
“What are you going to do to him?” Altman wanted to know.
Gently Barrett said, “For the moment, just watch and wait.” He folded the thin, crinkling sheaf of papers and pressed it into Latimer’s hands. “Put this stuff back exactly where you got it, Don. And don’t give Hahn the faintest inkling that you’ve read it or removed it.”
“Right.”
“And come to me the moment you think there’s something I ought to know about him,” Barrett said. “He may be a very sick boy. He may need all the help we can give.”
ELEVEN
Barrett didn’t have any steady women after Janet was arrested. He lived alone, although there was plenty of transient company in his bed. Somehow he regarded himself as guilty for Janet’s disappearance, and he didn’t want to bring the same fate on some other girl.
It was phony guilt, he knew. Janet had been in the underground before he’d ever heard of it, and doubtless the police had been watching her for a long time. When they had picked her up, it had probably been because they regarded her as dangerous in her own right, not because they were trying to reach through to Barrett. But he couldn’t help that feeling of responsibility, that sense that he’d jeopardize the freedom of any other girl who moved in with him.
He had no difficulty finding companions, though. He was the virtual leader of the New York group, now, and that invested him with a kind of charismatic appeal that seemed irresistible to girls. Pleyel, ever more ascetic and saintly, had retired to the role of a pure theoretician. Barrett handled the day-by-day routine of the organization. Barrett dispatched the couriers, coordinated the activities of the adjoining areas, and planned the coups. And, like a lightning rod drawing energy, he became the focus for the yearnings of a bunch of kids of all sexes. To them, he was a famed hero of revolt, an Old Revolutionary. He was becoming a legend. He was almost thirty years old.
So the girls trooped through the little apartment. Sometimes he’d let one live with him for as much as two weeks at a time. Then he’d suggest that it was time for her to move on.
“Why are you throwing me out?” she’d ask, in effect. “Don’t you like me? Don’t I make you happy, Jim?”
And he would reply, essentially, “You’re wonderful, doll. But one of these days the police are going to come for you, if you stay here. It’s happened before. They’ll take you away and you’ll never be seen again.”
“I’m small fry. Why should they want me?”
“To harass me,” Barrett would explain. “So you’d better go. Please. For your own safety.”
Eventually he would get them to leave. And then would come a week or two of monastic solitude, which was good for his soul, but as the laundry began to pile up and the linens started to need changing he’d realize that the monastic life has its disadvantages, and some other thrilled young revolutionary in her late teens would move into his apartment and dedicate herself to his earthly needs for a while. Barrett had trouble keeping his memories of them distinct from one another. Generally they were leggy kids, dressed in whatever was the current nonconformist fashion, and most of them had plain faces and good bodies. The Revolution tended to attract the sort of girl who couldn’t wait to get her clothes off, so that she could prove that her breasts and thighs and buttocks made up for the deficiencies of her face.
There was always plenty of new young blood coming along, now. The police-state psychology introduced by Chancellor Dan-tell had seen to that. He ran a tight ship of state, but every time his minions came around to knock on a door at midnight, new revolutionaries were created. Jack Bernstein’s fears that the underground would shrivel into impotence as a result of the government’s wise benevolence had not quite come to pass. The government was not altogether infallible, and could not entirely resist being totalitarian; and so the resistance movement survived in a straggling way, and grew slightly from year to year. Chancellor Arnold’s government had been shrewder. But Chancellor Arnold was dead.
Among the new people who came into the movement during those tougher years in the late 1990’s was Bruce Valdosto. He showed up in New York City one day in the early part of 1997, knowing no one, full of unfocused hatreds and seething angers. He was from Los Angeles. His father had run a tavern there, and, when goaded too far by a government tax collector, had spit in the collector’s face and hurled him out into the street. (The syndicalist government, notoriously puritan, was almost as tough with the makers and vendors of alcoholic drinks as it was with artists and writers.) Later that day, the tax collector had returned with six of his colleagues, and they had methodically beaten the elder Valdosto to death. His son, unable to halt the slaughter, had been arrested for interference with the functions of government officers, and was released only after a month of high-grade interrogation, the translation of which was torture. Then Valdosto set out on the confused transcontinental hegira that brought him to Jim Barrett’s apartment in lower Manhattan.
He was little more than seventeen years old. Barrett didn’t know that. To him, Valdosto was a short, swarthy man of about his own age, with immense shoulders and a powerful torso and strangely malproportioned little legs. He had thick tangled hair and the burning, ferocious eyes of a born terrorist, but nothing about his looks or his words or his actions betrayed his youthfulness. Barrett never did find out whether Valdosto had simply been born that way or had undergone accelerated aging in the crucible of the Los Angeles interrogation tank.
“When does The Revolution start?” Valdosto wanted to know. “When does the killing begin?”
“There won’t be any killing,” Barrett told him. “The coup will be bloodless when it comes.”
“Impossible! We’ve got to remove the head of the enemy. Whack, like killing a snake.”
Barrett showed him the flow charts of The Revolution: the scheme whereby the Chancellor and the Council of Syndics would be taken into custody, the junior officers of the army would proclai
m martial law, and a reconstituted Supreme Court would announce the restoration of the overthrown 1789 Constitution. Valdosto peered at the charts, picked his nose, scratched his hairy chest, clenched his fists, and grunted, “Nah. It’ll never come off. You can’t hope to take over a country by arresting maybe two dozen key men.”
“It happened in 1984,” Barrett pointed out.
“That was different. The government was in ruins anyway. Christ, there wasn’t even any President that year, huh? But now we got a government of real pros. The head of the snake is bigger than you think, Barrett. You’ve got to reach behind the Syndics. Down to the bureaucrats. The little Führers, the two-bit tyrants who love their jobs so much they’ll do anything to keep them. The sort of guys who killed my father. They’ve got to go.”
“There are thousands of them,” Barrett said, alarmed. “Are you saying we should execute the entire civil service?”
“Not all. But most. Clean out the tainted ones. Start with a fresh slate.”
The most frightening thing about Valdosto, Barrett thought, was not that he was fond of spouting bombastic, vehemently violent ideas, but that he sincerely believed in them and was fully ready to carry them out. Within an hour after meeting Valdosto for the first time, Barrett was convinced that he must have committed at least a dozen murders already. Later, Barrett found out that Valdosto was only a kid dreaming of avenging his father, but he never lost the uncomfortable feeling that Val was wholly lacking in the usual scruples. He could remember nineteen-year-old Jack Bernstein insisting, nearly a decade earlier, that the best way to overthrow the government was through a judicious campaign of assassination. And Pleyel, mild as ever, remarking, “Assassination isn’t a valid method of political discourse.” So far as Barrett knew, Bernstein’s bloodlust had never passed the theoretical stage; but here was young Valdosto, offering himself as the Angel of Death to fulfill Jack’s dreams of revolution. A good thing that Bernstein wasn’t very deeply involved in underground activities any more, Barrett told himself. With the right encouragement, Valdosto could become a one-man terror squad.
Instead he became Barrett’s roommate. The arrangement was an accidental one. Valdosto needed a place to stay on his first night in the city, and Barrett offered him a couch. Since Val had no money, he was in no position to find himself an apartment, and even after he had gone onto the payroll of what they now were calling the Continental Liberation Front, he continued to live with Barrett. Barrett didn’t mind. After the third week he said, “Forget about looking for a place of your own. You might as well just go on living here.”
They got along beautifully, despite the gulf in age and temperament. Barrett found that Valdosto had a rejuvenating effect on him. Though he was just coming up on thirty himself, Barrett felt older than that—ancient, sometimes. He had been active in the underground for nearly half his life, so that The Revolution had become a pure abstraction to him, a matter of unending meetings and secret messages and leaflets. A doctor healing one runny nose after another does not find it easy to think of himself as working step by step toward a world in which disease is extinct; and Barrett, immersed in the trifling rituals of the revolutionary bureaucracy, all too often lost sight of the main goal, or forgot that there was any such goal. He was beginning to slide into the rarefied realm inhabited by Pleyel and the other original agitators—a realm in which all fervor is dead and idealism is transmuted into ideology. Valdosto rescued him from that.
To Val there was nothing abstract about The Revolution. For him The Revolution was a matter of splitting skulls and twisting necks and bombing offices. He regarded the faceless officials of the government as his special enemies, knew their names, dreamed of the punishments he would inflict on each one of them. His intensity was contagious. Barrett, while drawing back from Valdosto’s lust for destructiveness, began to remember that there was a central purpose fundamental to his network of daily routines. Valdosto revived in him the revolutionary dreams that were so difficult to sustain, week in and week out, across years and decades.
And when he was not brooding of bloodshed, Valdosto was a lively, uproarious companion. He took some getting accustomed to, of course. He lacked almost all inhibitions, and liked to wander about the apartment naked, even when there were visitors; the first time he emerged that way he seemed like an impossibly grotesque anthropoid apparition, his barrel-thick body densely matted with coarse black hair, his legs so dwarfed that it could not have been too difficult for him to press his knuckles against the floor. And a few days later, when he had a girl in his room, the two of them emerged in a helter-skelter scramble, both of them bare, Val chasing her about the livingroom while Barrett, Pleyel, and two others looked on in astonishment. The panicky girl, all white thighs and jiggling breasts, finally found herself trapped in a corner, and Val hauled her off in triumph for the consummation.
“He’s the primordial kind,” Barrett explained in embarrassment.
Soon Valdosto abandoned his more flagrantly bizarre antics, but there was never any predicting what he might do next. He appeared to be sublimating his terrorist urges in erotic gymnastics, and sometimes took his women on two and three at a time, tossing the castoffs to Barrett. It was a wild few months at the outset for Barrett, but in time he adjusted to the fact that the place was likely to be stacked with sprawling exhausted naked females at any given time, and he joined the fun with unfeigned enthusiasm, telling himself that a revolutionary’s life didn’t necessarily have to be a dour one.
Barrett’s apartment once again became a social center for the underground group, as it had been in the days when Janet had been living with him. The climate of fear had been eased again, and there was no need for exaggerated caution; although Barrett knew he was under surveillance, he did not hesitate to allow others to visit him.
Hawksbill came a few times. Barrett met him quite incidentally, on one of his rare ventures into nonrevolutionary social circles. Columbia University had been reopened after a three-year forced suspension of classes, and Barrett found himself journeying to Morningside Heights on a frosty spring evening in ’98 to attend a party given by a man he knew vaguely, a professor of applied information technology named Golkin. Through the thick haze of smoke he spied Edmond Hawksbill across the room, and their eyes met, and they exchanged remote nods, and Barrett debated going over to say hello to him, and Hawksbill seemed to be debating the same thing, and after a moment Barrett thought, what the hell, I will, and he started to shoulder his way through the crowd.
They met in the middle. Barrett had not seen the mathematician for nearly two years, and he was startled by the change in his appearance. Hawksbill had never been a handsome man, but now it looked as though he had undergone some kind of glandular collapse, and the effects were unsettling to behold. He was completely bald. His cheeks, which had always had a grubby, unshaven look, were strangely pink. His lips and nose had thickened; his eyes were lost in orbits of flesh; his belly was enormous, and his entire frame seemed to have been embedded in new layers of fat. They shook hands briefly; his touch was moist, his fingers were soft and limp. Hawksbill, Barrett remembered, was only nine years his senior, and so not yet forty years old. He looked like a man at the edge of the grave.
“What are you doing here?” they both said at once.
Barrett laughed and outlined his tenuous friendship with Golkin, their host. Hawksbill explained that he had recently been co-opted for Columbia’s faculty of advanced mathematics.
“I thought you hated teaching,” Barrett said.
“I do. I’m not. I’ve been given a research appointment. Government work.”
“Classified?”
“Is there any other kind?” Hawksbill asked, smiling faintly.
The sight of him made Barrett’s flesh crawl. Behind the thick glasses, Hawksbill’s eyes looked cold and alien; some effect of myopia robbed his gaze of all humanity, and staring into those eyes was like trading glances with a being from another world. Chilled, Barrett said, “I didn
’t realize you were taking the governmental shilling. Perhaps I shouldn’t be talking to you, then. I might be compromising you.”
“You mean, you’re still plugging away at The Revolution?” Hawksbill asked.
“Still plugging away, yes.”
The mathematician favored him with a fluid smile. “I would think a man of your intelligence would have seen through that bunch of bores and misfits by now.”
“I’m not as bright as you think I am, Ed,” Barrett said quietly. “I don’t even have a college degree, remember? I’m stupid enough to think that there’s a meaning in what we’re working toward. You once thought so yourself.”
“I still do.”
“You oppose the government and yet you work for the government?” Barrett asked.
Hawksbill jiggled the ice cubes in his drink. “Is that so hard for you to accept? The government and I have arranged a marriage of convenience. They know that I’m polluted with a revolutionary background, of course. And I know that they’re a bunch of fascist bastards. However, I’m conducting certain research which is simply impossible for me to perform without financial assistance amounting to millions of dollars a year, and that obliges me to seek government grants. And the government is interested enough in my project, and aware enough of my special gifts, so that they’re willing to back me without worrying about my ideology. I loathe them, they mistrust me, and we come to an arm’s-length working agreement.”
“Orwell called that doublethink.”
“Oh no,” Hawksbill said. “It’s Realpolitik, it’s cynicism, but it isn’t doublethink. Neither party is operating under any kind of illusion about the other. We’re using each other, my friend. I need their money, they need my brains. But I continue to abominate the philosophy of this government, and they know it.”
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