Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  “What happened?” Barrett asked.

  “I was giving him sedation and he went berserk. The cradle was open and he ripped his way out of it and knocked me down. And started to run. Toward the sea…he kept yelling that he was going to swim home…”

  “He will,” Barrett said.

  They watched the struggle. Hahn, exhausted, was furiously trying to row a boat too heavy for a solitary oarsman in waves too rough to conquer. Valdosto, unleashing his last energies, was beyond the inner breakers and swimming steadily for the open sea. But the sloping shelf of rock turned upward in the area just ahead of him, and white water splashed against jutting stony teeth. At high tide there were whirlpools there. Valdosto headed unerringly for the roughest stretch of water. The waves took him, tossed him high, pulled him down again. Soon he was only a line against the horizon.

  The others were coming, now, attracted by the shouts. One by one they arrayed themselves along the shore or down the stone steps. Altman, Rudiger, Latimer, Schultz, the sane and the sick, the dreamers, the old, the weary, they stood motionless as Hahn lashed the sea with his oars and Valdosto leaped through the waves. Hahn was coming in, now. He fought his way through the surf, and Rudiger and two or three of the others broke from their stasis, seizing the boat, hauling it ashore, mooring it. Hahn stumbled out, white-faced with fatigue. He dropped to his knees and retched against the rocks while the waves licked at his boots. When he was through, he got shakily to his feet and walked over to Barrett.

  “I tried,” he said. “The boat wouldn’t move. But I tried to get to him.”

  “It’s all right,” Barrett told him gently. “No one could have made it. The water was too rough.”

  “Maybe if I had tried to swim after him instead—”

  “No,” said Doc Quesada. “Valdosto was insane. And terribly strong. He’d have pulled you under if the waves didn’t get you first.”

  “Where is he?” Barrett asked. “Can anybody see him?”

  “Out by the rocks,” said Latimer. “Isn’t that him?”

  Rudiger said, “He’s gone under. He’s been under three, four minutes now. It’s better this way. For him, for us, for everybody.”

  Barrett turned away from the sea. No one approached him. They knew his relationship with Valdosto, the thirty years of it, the apartment shared, the wild nights and stormy days. Some of them had been here on the day, not so many years ago, when Valdosto had dropped onto the Anvil and Barrett, who had not seen him in more than a decade, let out a whoop of delight and pleasure. One of the last ties to a distant past had just been severed; but, Barrett told himself, Valdosto had been gone for a long time before today.

  It was growing dark. Slowly Barrett began to climb the cliff to the Station. Half an hour later Rudiger came to him.

  “The sea’s calmer now. Val’s been washed ashore.”

  “Where is he?”

  “A couple of the boys are bringing him up here for the services. Then we’ll take him out in the boat and give him the burial.”

  “All right,” Barrett said. There was only one form of burial at Hawksbill Station, and that was burial at sea. They could hardly dig graves into the living rock for their dead. So Valdosto would be interred twice. Cast up by the waves, he would have to be taken out again, properly weighted, and sent to his resting place. Ordinarily they would have held the funeral by the shore, but now, as a tacit concession to Barrett’s handicap, they were bringing Valdosto all the way up here rather than subject Barrett to another strenuous climb along the cliff steps. It seemed pointless, somehow, this dragging back and forth of lifeless flesh. It would have been better, Barrett thought, if Val had simply been swept out to sea the first time.

  Hahn and several others appeared soon afterward, carrying the body wrapped in a sheet of blue plastic.

  They laid it out on the ground in front of Barrett’s hut. It was one of his self-imposed tasks here to deliver the valedictories; it seemed to him that he had delivered fifty such speeches in the last year alone. About thirty of the men were present. The rest were beyond caring about the dead, or else cared so much that they could not attend.

  Barrett kept it simple. He spoke briefly of his friendship with Valdosto, of their days together at the turn of the century, of Valdosta’s revolutionary activities. He outlined some of Valdosta’s heroic acts. Most of them Barrett had learned about at second hand, for he himself had been a prisoner at Hawksbill during Valdosta’s years of fame. Between 2006 and 2015, Val had almost singlehandedly reduced the government to a condition of battle fatigue, bombing and mining and killing.

  “They knew who he was,” Barrett said, “but they couldn’t find him. They chased him for years, and one day they caught him, and they put him on trial—you know what sort of trial—and they sent him to us in Hawksbill Station. And for many years Val was a leader here. But he wasn’t meant to be a prisoner. He couldn’t adapt to a world where he was unable to fight against the government. And so he came apart. We had to watch it, and it was not easy for us. Or for him. May he rest in peace.”

  Barrett gestured. The pallbearers lifted the body and walked toward the east. Most of the mourners followed. Barrett did not. He stood watching until the funeral procession had begun to wind down the steps that led to the sea; then he turned and went into his hut. After a while he slept.

  A little before midnight, Barrett was awakened by the sound of hasty footsteps outside his hut. As he sat up, groping for the luminescence switch, Ned Altman came blundering through the door.

  Barrett blinked at him. “What’s the matter, Ned?”

  “It’s Hahn!” Altman rasped. “He’s fooling around with the Hammer again. We just saw him go into the building.”

  Barrett shed his drowsiness like a seal bursting out of water. Ignoring the insistent throb in his left leg, he pulled himself from his bed and grabbed some clothing. He was more apprehensive than he wanted Altman to see, and he kept his face frozen, masklike. If Hahn, fooling around with the temporal mechanism, smashed the Hammer accidentally or deliberately, they might never receive replacement equipment from Up Front. Which would mean that all future shipments of supplies—if there were to be any—would come as random shoots that might land in any old year and at great distances from the Station. What business did Hahn have with the machine, anyway?

  As Barrett pulled on his trousers, Altman said, “Latimer’s up there keeping an eye on him. He got suspicious when Hahn didn’t come back to the hut at bedtime, and he got me, and we went looking for him. And there he was, sniffing around the Hammer.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. As soon as we saw him go into the building, I came right down here to get you. That’s what I was supposed to do, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Barrett said. “Come on!”

  He stumped his way out of the hut and did his best to trot toward the main building. Pain shot like trails of hot acid up the whole lower half of his body. The crutch dug mercilessly into his left armpit as he leaned all his weight into it. His crippled foot, swinging freely, burned with a cold glow. His right leg, which had to bear most of the burden, creaked and popped. Altman ran breathlessly alongside him. The Station looked dreamlike in the salmon moonlight. It was terribly silent at this hour.

  They jogged past Quesada’s hut. Barrett considered waking the medic and taking him along. He decided against it. Whatever trouble Hahn might be up to, Barrett felt that he could handle it himself. There was some strength left in the old gnawed beam, after all.

  Latimer stood waiting for them at the entrance to the main dome. He was right at the edge of panic, or perhaps he was over the edge. He seemed to be gibbering with fear and shock. Barrett had never seen a man gibber before.

  He clamped a big paw on Latimer’s thin shoulder and said harshly, “Well, where is he? Where’s Hahn?”

  “He—disappeared.”

  “What the hell do you mean? Which way did he go?”

  Latimer moaned. His angular face was
fishbelly white. His lips trembled and flickered before words would emerge. “He got onto the Anvil,” Latimer blurted at length. “The light came on—the glow. And then Hahn disappeared!”

  Altman giggled. “Can you beat that! He disappeared! Powie, right into the machine, eh?”

  “No,” Barrett said. “It isn’t possible. The machine’s only equipped for receiving, not for transmitting. You must be mistaken, Don.”

  “I saw him go!”

  “He’s hiding somewhere in the building,” Barrett insisted doggedly. “He’s got to be. Close that door! Search the place until you find him!”

  Altman said mildly, “He probably did disappear, Jim. If Don says he disappeared—”

  “Yes,” said Latimer, equally mildly. “That’s true, you know. He climbed right on top of the Anvil. Then everything turned red in the room and he was gone.”

  Barrett clenched his fists and pressed his knuckles against his aching temples. There was a white-hot blaze just behind his forehead that almost made him forget about the pain in his foot. He saw his mistake clearly, now. He had depended for his espionage on two men who were patently and unmistakably insane, and that had been itself a not very sane thing to do. A man is known by his choice of lieutenants. Well, he had relied on Altman and Latimer, and now they were giving him precisely the sort of information that such spies could be counted on to supply.

  “You’re hallucinating,” Barrett told Latimer curtly. “Ned, go wake up Quesada and get him over here right away. You, Don, you stand here by the entrance, and if Hahn shows up I want you to sing out at the top of your lungs. I’m going to search the building for him.”

  “Wait,” Latimer said, catching Barrett’s wrist. He seemed to be making an effort to gain control of himself again. “Jim, do you remember when I asked you if you thought I was crazy? You said you didn’t. You said you trusted me.”

  “So?”

  “Well, don’t stop trusting me now. I tell you I’m not hallucinating. I saw Hahn disappear. I can’t explain it, but I’m rational enough to know what I saw.”

  Barrett stared intently at him. Sure, he thought. Take a crazy man’s word for it, when the crazy man tells you in a nice calm voice that he’s perfectly sane. Sure.

  He said in a milder tone, “All right, Don. Maybe so. I want you to stay by the door, anyway. I’ll run a quick check, just to see what’s what.”

  He went into the building, planning to make a circuit of the dome, beginning with the room where the Hammer was mounted. He entered it. Everything seemed to be in perfect order there. No Hawksbill Field glow was in evidence, nor could Barrett see any indication that anything had been disturbed.

  The receiving room had no closets or cupboards or alcoves or crannies in which Hahn could be hiding. When he had inspected the room thoroughly, Barrett moved on down the corridor, looking into the infirmary, the mess hall, the kitchen, the recreation room. He checked every likely hiding place. He looked high and he looked low.

  No Hahn. Not anywhere.

  Of course, there were plenty of places in those rooms where Hahn might have secreted himself. Maybe he was sitting in the refrigerator on top of a pile of frigid trilobites. Maybe he was under all the equipment in the recreation room. Maybe he was in the drug closet.

  But Barrett doubted that Hahn was in the building at all. Very likely he was down by the waterfront, taking a moody stroll, and hadn’t set foot in the place since evening. Very likely this entire episode had been some feverish fantasy of Latimer’s, nothing more. Knowing that Barrett was worried about Hahn’s interest in the Hammer, Latimer and Altman had nudged themselves into imagining that they saw him snooping here, and had succeeded in persuading themselves of it.

  Barrett completed the route through the building’s circling corridor and found himself back at the main entrance. Latimer still stood guard there. He had been joined by a sleepy Quesada, his face bruised and puffy from his battle with Valdosto. Altman, pale and shaky-looking, was just outside the door.

  “What’s going on?” Quesada asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Barrett said. “Don and Ned had the idea that they saw Lew Hahn fooling around with the time equipment. I’ve checked through the whole building, and he doesn’t seem to be in here, so maybe they made a little mistake. I suggest you take them both into the infirmary and give them a shot of something to settle their nerves, and then we’ll all try to get back to sleep.”

  Latimer said thinly, “I tell you, I swear I saw—”

  “Shut up!” Altman broke in. “Listen! Listen! What’s that noise?”

  Barrett listened. The sound was clear and loud: the hissing whine of ionization. It was the sound produced by a functioning Hawksbill Field. Suddenly goosepimples were breaking out on his skin.

  In a low voice he said, “The field’s on. We’re probably getting some supplies.”

  “At this hour?” said Latimer.

  “We don’t know what time it is Up Front. All of you stay here. I’ll check the Hammer.”

  “Perhaps I ought to go with you, Jim,” Quesada suggested gently.

  “Stay here!” Barrett thundered. He paused, embarrassed at his own explosive show of wrath. Nerves. Nerves. He said more quietly, “It only takes one of us to check things. You wait. I’ll be right back.”

  Without staying around to hear further dissent, Barrett pivoted and limped down the hall to the Hammer room. He shouldered the door open and looked in. There was no need for him to switch on the light. The deep red glow of the Hawksbill Field illuminated everything.

  He stationed himself just within the door. Hardly daring to breathe, he stared fixedly at the metallic bulk of the Hammer, watching the play of colors against its shafts and power rods and fuses. The glow of the Field deepened through various shades of pink toward crimson, and then spread until it enfolded the waiting Anvil beneath it. An endless moment passed.

  Then came the implosive thunderclap, and Lew Hahn dropped out of nowhere and lay for a moment in temporal shock on the broad plate of the Anvil.

  THIRTEEN

  They had arrested Barrett on a beautiful day in October 2006, when the leaves were crisp and yellowing, when the air was clear and cool, when the cloudless blue sky seemed to reflect all the glory of autumn. He was in Boston that day, as he had been on a day ten years previous when they had arrested Janet at his New York apartment. He was walking down Boylston Street on his way to an appointment when two alert-looking young men in neutral gray business suits matched their strides to his, kept pace with him for perhaps ten feet, and moved in to flank him.

  “James Edward Barrett?” the one on the left said.

  “That’s right.” Why pretend?

  “We’d like you to come with us,” said the one on the right.

  “Please don’t attempt any violence,” said his partner. “It’ll be better for all of us if you don’t. Especially for you.”

  “I won’t make trouble,” Barrett said.

  They had a car parked on the corner. Keeping close to him at every step, they walked him to the car and guided him within it. When they closed the doors, they didn’t just lock them, but sealed them with a radio block.

  “May I make a phone call?” Barrett asked.

  “Sorry. No.”

  The agent who sat at his left produced a degausser and quickly voided any recording device Barrett might be carrying. The agent at his right checked him out for communication instruments, found the telephone mounted against his ear, and deftly removed it. They locked Barrett in place with a microwave restraining field that left him enough freedom to yawn or stretch, but not enough to touch either of the agents beside him. The car moved away from the curb.

  “So this is it,” Barrett said. “I’ve been expecting it for so long that I began to believe it would never happen.”

  “It happens eventually,” said the left-hand one.

  “To all of you,” said the right-hand one. “It just takes time.”

  Time. Yes. In ’85, ’86, ’87,
the first years of the resistance movement, an adolescent Jim Barrett had lived in perpetual expectation of arrest. Arrest or worse: a laser beam whistling out of nowhere to penetrate his skull, maybe. In those years he saw the new government as omniscient and all-threatening, and saw himself in constant peril. But the arrests had been few, and in time Barrett had swung to the opposite extreme, confidently assuming that the secret police would leave him untouched. He had even convinced himself that a decision had been taken not to molest him—that he was being spared deliberately, as a symbol of the regime’s tolerance of dissent. After Chancellor Dantell had replaced Chancellor Arnold, Barrett had lost some of that naïve confidence of personal grace. But yet he had not fully come to terms with the possibility of arrest until the day they took Janet away. One does not believe one can be struck by lightning until a bolt blasts the person at one’s side. And after that one expects the heavens to open again whenever a cloud appears.

  There had been arrests all through the harsh years of the middle ’90s, but he had never even been called in for questioning. Eventually he came once again to believe that he was immune. Having lived with the possibility of arrest, on and off, for more than twenty years, Barrett simply pushed that possibility into a distant corner of his mind and forgot about it. And now they had come for him at last.

  He searched his soul for a reaction, and was puzzled at the only reaction he found: relief. The suspense was over. So was the toil. Now he could rest.

  He was thirty-eight years old. He was Supreme Commander of the Eastern Division of the Continental Liberation Front. Since boyhood he had labored to bring about the overthrow of the government, taking a million tiny steps that covered no territory whatever. Of those who had been present at his first underground meeting, that day in 1984, he alone remained. Janet was missing and presumed dead. Jack Bernstein, his mentor in revolutionary affairs, had gone over cheerfully to the enemy. Hawksbill had died, bloated and hypothyroid at forty-three, just a few years ago. His work on time travel, so they said, had been a success. He had built a workable time machine and turned it over to the government. There was a rumor that the government was conducting experiments with the machine, using political prisoners as subjects. Barrett had heard that old Norman Pleyel had been one of the subjects. They had arrested him in March of ’05, at any rate, and no one knew where he was now. Pleyel’s arrest had left Barrett in command of the sector in title as well as in fact; but he had expected to have a little more time before they picked him up too.