Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  “In that case,” said Barrett, “you could still be working with us, without jeopardizing your research grant.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then why have you stayed away? We need your gifts, Ed. We have no one whose mind can juggle fifty factors at once, as you do so easily. We’ve missed you. Can I lure you back to our group?”

  “No,” Hawksbill said. “Let’s sweeten our drinks and I’ll explain why.”

  “Good enough.”

  They went through the ritual of refilling. Hawksbill took a long, deep gulp. Some driblets of liquor appeared at the edge of his mouth and trickled down his fleshy chin, disappearing into the stained folds of his collar. Barrett looked away, taking a deep pull of his own drink.

  Then Hawksbill said, “I haven’t withdrawn from your group out of fear of arrest. Nor is it that I’ve lost my disdain for the syndicalists, or that I’ve sold out to them. No. I left, if you must know, out of boredom and contempt. I decided that the Continental Liberation Front wasn’t worthy of my energy.”

  “That’s blunt enough,” Barrett agreed.

  “Do you know why? It’s because the leadership of the movement fell into the hands of genial delayers like yourself. Where is The Revolution? It’s 1998, Jim. The syndicalists have been in power fourteen years, nearly. There’s been not one visible attempt to push them aside.”

  “Revolutions aren’t planned in a week, Ed.”

  “But fourteen years? Fourteen years? Perhaps if Jack Bernstein had been running things, we’d have had some action. But Jack got bitter and drifted away. Very well: Edmond Hawksbill has but one life to live, and he wants to spend it validly. I got tired of serious economic debates and procedural parliamentarianism. I became more involved in my own research. I withdrew.”

  “I’m sorry we bored you so, Ed.”

  “I’m sorry too. For a while, I thought the country stood a chance of getting its freedom back. Then I realized it was hopeless.”

  “Would you come to visit me anyway? Maybe you can help us get moving again,” Barrett said. “We’ve got young people joining us all the time. There’s a chap named Valdosto out of California with enough fervor for ten of us. And others. If you came, and lent your prestige—”

  Hawksbill was skeptical. He could barely conceal his total scorn for the Continental Liberation Front. But yet he could not deny that he still supported the ideals for which the Front stood, and so Barrett maneuvered him into coming around. Hawksbill came to the apartment the next week. There were a dozen people there, most of them girls. They sat at Hawksbill’s feet, eying him adoringly while he gripped his glass and exuded perspiration and weary sarcasm. He was, Barrett thought, like a great white slug in the armchair, damp, epicene, repulsive. But his appeal to these girls was frankly sexual. Barrett noticed that Hawksbill took good care to fend off their advances before they went too far. Hawksbill enjoyed being the focus of their desires—that was, Barrett suspected, why he came around so frequently—but he showed no interest in capitalizing on his opportunities.

  Hawksbill consumed a good deal of Barrett’s filtered rum, and offered a great many opinions on why the Continental Liberation Front was doomed to fail. Tact had never been Hawksbill’s strong point, and he was often savagely incisive in his analysis of the underground’s shortcomings. For a while Barrett thought it might be a mistake to expose the neophyte revolutionaries to him, since his raw pessimism might tend to dismay or permanently discourage them. But Barrett discovered that none of Hawksbill’s young admirers took his dire accusations seriously. They worshiped the mathematician for his brilliance as a mathematician, but they assumed that his pessimism was simply part of his general eccentricity, along with his sloppiness and his fat and his flaccidity. So it was worth the risk of keeping Hawksbill around, spinning out his long streams of unresonant declamations, in the hope of seducing him somehow back into the movement.

  In an unguarded moment when he was brimming with filtered rum, Hawksbill allowed Barrett to question him about the secret research he was doing on behalf of the government.

  “I’m building a time transport,” Hawksbill said.

  “Still? I thought you’d given that up a long time ago.”

  “Why should I? The initial equations of 1983 are valid, Jim. My work’s been assailed for a whole generation and no weak spot has developed. So it’s merely a matter of translating theory into practice.”

  “You always used to look down your nose on experimental work. You were the pure theoretician.”

  “I change,” Hawksbill said. “I’ve carried the theory as far as it needs to go.” He leaned forward and ponderously clasped his interlaced fingers, pudgy and pink, across his gut. “Time reversal is an accomplished fact on the subatomic level, Jim. The Russians showed the way toward that at least forty years ago. My equations confirmed their wild guesses. In laboratory work it’s been possible to reverse the time-path of an electron and send it back close to a full second.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s old stuff. When we flip the electron around, it alters its charge and becomes a positron. That would be all right, except that it tends to seek out an electron moving forward up its track, and they annihilate each other.”

  “Causing an atomic explosion?” Barrett asked.

  “Hardly.” Hawksbill smiled. “There’s a release of energy, but it’s only a gamma ray. Well, at least we’ve succeeded in prolonging the lifetime of our backward-traveling positron by a factor of about a billion, but that still comes only to something short of one second. However, if we can send a single electron back in time for a single second, we know that there are no theoretical objections to sending an elephant back a trillion years. There are merely technical difficulties. We must learn to increase the transmission mass. We must get around the reversal of charge, or we’ll simply be shipping antimatter bombs into our own past and wrecking our laboratories. We must find out, too, what it does to a living thing to have its charge reversed. But these are trivialities. Five, ten, twenty years and we’ll solve them. The theory is what counts. And the theory is sound.” Hawksbill burped grandly. “My glass is empty again, Jim.”

  Barrett filled it. “Why does the government want to sponsor your time-machine research?”

  “Who knows? What concerns me is the mere fact that they authorize my expenditures. Mine not to reason why. I do my work and hope for the best.”

  “Incredible,” Barrett said softly.

  “A time machine? Not really. Not if you’ve studied my equations.”

  “I don’t mean the time machine is incredible, Ed. Not if you say you can build it. What’s incredible to me is that you’re willing to let the government get hold of it. Don’t you see what power this gives them? To go back and forth through time as they please, snuffing out the grandparents of people who trouble them? To edit the past, to—”

  “Oh,” said Hawksbill, “no one will be able to go back and forth through time. The equations deal only with going back in time. I haven’t considered forward movement at all. I don’t believe it would be possible, anyway. Entropy is entropy, and it can’t be reversed, not in the sense I employ. The journey through time will be one way only, just as it is for all us poor mortals today. A different direction, is all.”

  To Barrett, much of what Hawksbill said about the time machine was incomprehensible, and the rest was infuriating in its smugness. But he emerged with the uncomfortable feeling that the mathematician was close to succeeding, and that, in another few years, a process for reversing the flow of time would be perfected and in the hands of the government. Well, he thought, the world had survived Albert Einstein. It had survived J. Robert Oppenheimer. It would survive Edmond Hawksbill, too, somehow.

  He wanted to know more about Hawksbill’s research. But just then Jack Bernstein arrived, and Hawksbill, belatedly remembering that he was under a security blanket, abruptly changed the subject.

  Bernstein, like Hawksbill, had wandered far from the underground
movement in recent years. To all intents and purposes, he had dropped out after the wave of arrests in the summer of ’94. During the four years that followed, Barrett had seen him perhaps a dozen times. Their meetings were cold and remote. It had come to seem to Barrett that he had dreamed those afternoons when he and Jack had been fifteen, and had furiously debated every topic of any intellectual interest in Jack’s small, book-crammed bedroom. Their long walks together in the snow—their collaborations on class assignments—their early days together in the underground—had any of that really happened? The past, for Barrett, was breaking off and sloughing away like dead skin, and his boyhood friendship with Jack Bernstein had been the first to go.

  Bernstein was hard and cold, now, a compact, spare little man who might well have been carved from stone. He had never married. Since leaving the underground, he had gone into the practice of law; he had an apartment somewhere far uptown, and spent much of his time traveling on business. Barrett did not understand why Bernstein had begun dropping in on him again. Not out of sentiment, surely. Nor did he show any interest in the Continental Liberation Front’s spasmodic activities. Perhaps it was the figure of Hawksbill that drew him, Barrett thought. It was hard to view anyone as frosty and self-contained as Jack as a hero worshiper, but maybe he had never shaken off his adolescent admiration for Hawksbill.

  He came, he sat, he drank, occasionally he talked. He spoke as if every word cost him a pound of flesh. His lips seemed to close like clippers between each syllable. His eyes, small and red-rimmed, flickered with what might have been suppressed pain. Bernstein made Barrett acutely uncomfortable. He had always thought of Jack as a man ridden by demons, but now the demons appeared too close to the surface, too capable of bursting forth to seize innocent bystanders.

  And Barrett felt the tingle of Jack’s unvoiced mockery. As an ex-revolutionary, Bernstein seemed to share Hawksbill’s idea that the Front was futile and its members self-deceivers. Without doing more than smiling secretively, Bernstein seemed to be passing judgment on the group to which he had devoted so many years of his own life. Only once did he let his contempt show, though. Pleyel entered the room, a dreamy figure in a flowing white beard, lost in calculations of the coming millennium. He nodded to Bernstein as if he had forgotten who he was. “Good evening, Comrade,” Bernstein said. “How goes The Revolution?”

  “Our plans are maturing,” said Pleyel mildly.

  “Yes. Yes. It’s a fine strategy, Comrade. Wait patiently until the syndicalists die out unto the tenth generation. Then strike, strike like hawks!”

  Pleyel looked puzzled. He smiled and turned away to confer with Valdosto, obviously unwounded by Bernstein’s bitter sarcasm. Barrett was annoyed. “If you’re looking for a target, Jack, aim at me instead.”

  Bernstein laughed harshly. “You’re too big, Jim. I couldn’t possibly miss, so where’s the sport? Besides, it’s cruel to shoot at sitting ducks.”

  That night—late in November 1998—was the last time Bernstein came to Barrett’s apartment. Hawksbill paid only one more visit himself, three months later. Barrett asked him, “Have you heard anything from Jack?”

  “Jacob, he calls himself now. Jacob Bernstein.”

  “He always used to hate that name. He kept it a secret.”

  Hawksbill blinked amiably. “That’s his problem. When I met him and called him Jack, he instructed me that his name was Jacob. He was quite sharp about it.”

  “I haven’t seen him since that night in November. What’s he been up to?”

  “You mean you haven’t heard?”

  “No,” Barrett said. “Something I should know?”

  “I suppose,” Hawksbill said, and snickered. “Jacob has a new job, and he’s not likely to be paying social calls on leaders of the Front any more. Professional calls, maybe. But not social ones.”

  “What kind of new job?” said Barrett tightly.

  Hawksbill seemed to enjoy saying it. “He’s an interrogator, now. For the government police. It’s a job that fits his personality quite well, wouldn’t you say? He should make an outstanding success of it.”

  TWELVE

  The fishing expedition returned to the Station early in the afternoon. Barrett saw that Rudiger’s dinghy was overflowing with the haul, and Hahn, coming ashore with his arms full of gaffed trilobites, looked sunburned and pleased with his outing.

  Barrett went over to inspect the catch. Rudiger was in an effusive mood, and held up a bright red crustacean that might have been the great-great-grandfather of all boiled lobsters, except that it had no front claws, and sprouted a wicked-looking triple spike where a tail should have been. It was about two feet long, and ugly.

  “A new species!” Rudiger crowed. “There’s nothing like it in any museum. God, I wish I could put it where it would be found. Some mountaintop, maybe.”

  “If it could be found, it would have been found,” Barrett reminded him. “The odds are a twentieth-century paleontologist would have dug it out and put it on display, and you’d have known all about it. So forget it, Mel.”

  Hahn said, “I’ve been wondering about that point. Just how is it that nobody Up Front ever dug up the fossil remains of Hawksbill Station? Aren’t they worried that one of the early fossil-hunters will find it in the Cambrian strata and raise a fuss? Say, one of the nineteenth-century dinosaur diggers? That would be something, if he turned up huts and human bones and tools in a stratum older than the dinosaurs.”

  Barrett shook his head. “For one thing, no paleontologist from the beginning of the science to the founding of the Station in 2005 ever did dig up Hawksbill. That’s a matter of record—it hadn’t happened, so there was nothing to worry about. And if the Station came to light after 2005, why, everyone would know what it was. No paradox there.”

  “Besides,” said Rudiger sadly, “in another billion years this whole strip of rock will be on the floor of the Atlantic, with a couple of miles of sediment sitting on top of it. There’s not a chance we’ll be found. Or that anyone Up Front will ever see this guy I caught today. Not that I give a damn. I’ve seen him. I’ll dissect him. Their loss.”

  “But you regret the fact that science will never know of this species,” Hahn said. “Twenty-first-century science.”

  “Sure I do. But is it my fault? Science does know of this species. Me. I’m science. I’m the leading paleontologist of this epoch. Can I help it if I can’t publish my discoveries in the professional journals?” He scowled and walked away, carrying the big red crustacean.

  Hahn and Barrett looked at each other. They smiled, in a natural mutual response to Rudiger’s grumbled outburst. Then Barrett’s smile faded.

  …termites…one good push…therapy…

  “Something wrong?” Hahn asked.

  “Why?”

  “You looked so bleak, all of a sudden.”

  “My foot gave me a twinge,” Barrett said. “It does that, you know. Here. I’ll lend you a hand carrying those things. We’ll have fresh trilobite cocktail tonight.”

  They started up the steps toward the Station itself. Suddenly there came a wild shout from up above, Quesada’s voice: “Catch him! He’s heading for you! Catch him!”

  Jerking his head upward in alarm, Barrett saw Bruce Valdosto plunging down the steps along the face of the cliff, stark naked and trailing the shreds of the webfoam cradle in which he had been gently imprisoned. Perhaps a hundred feet farther up the cliff stood Quesada, blood streaming from his nose, looking dazed and battered.

  Valdosto was a shattering sight as he stormed toward them. He had never been an agile man, because of his legs, but now, after weeks under sedation, he could scarcely stand upright at all. He lurched along, stumbling and dropping, scrambling to his feet and hurtling another few steps before he fell again. His hairy body glistened with sweat, and his eyes were wild; his lips were drawn back in a rigid grin. He seemed like some animal that had thrown its leash and was rushing pell-mell toward freedom and destruction together.

 
Barrett and Hahn had barely enough time to set down their load of trilobites when Valdosto was upon them. Hahn said, “Put your shoulder against mine and well block him.” Barrett nodded; but he could not move fast enough, and Hahn seized him by the arm and pulled him into position. Barrett braced himself against his crutch.

  Valdosto hit them like a plummeting stone.

  Half running, half falling, he rushed down the steps and threw himself into the air when he was still ten feet above them. “Val!” Barrett gasped, and reached for him, but then Valdosto struck him, between chest and waist. Barrett absorbed the full momentum. His crutch was driven deep into his armpit, and he pivoted on his knees, twisting his good leg and sending a blazing message of pain the full length of his body. To avoid a dislocated shoulder he let go of the crutch, and as it fell backward he felt himself falling, and caught it again before he toppled. The net effect of his change of position was to slew him around sideways, creating a gap between Hahn and himself. Valdosto shot through that gap like a bounding ball. He eluded Hahn’s clutching grasp and sped down the steps.

  “Val, come back!” Barrett boomed. “Val!”

  But he could do no more than shout. He watched helplessly as Valdosto reached the edge of the sea and, now slipping, now diving, launched himself into the water. His arms beat wildly in a madman’s crawl. His dark head bobbed for a moment; then a towering wave fell on him and swept him under. When Barrett saw him again, he was fifty yards out to sea.

  By then Hahn had reached Rudiger’s beached dinghy and was pulling it free of its moorings. He waded out and began to row desperately. But the tide was in, and the tide was merciless; the waves flipped the boat about like a twig. For every yard Hahn rowed away from shore, he was hurled half a yard back. All the while Valdosto grew more distant, lashing the waves with his splayed hands, rising briefly above the surface, then vanishing again to reappear long moments later.

  Barrett, stunned, stood frozen and aching at the place on the steps where Valdosto had burst past him. Quesada had joined him, now.