Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  So they were all gone, those revolutionaries of ’84, dead or missing or on the other side. He alone was left, and now he was about to be dead or missing too. Strangely, he had few regrets. He was willing to let others carry on the dreary task of preparing for The Revolution.

  The Revolution that would never come, he thought bitterly. The Revolution had been lost before it ever began. Jack Bernstein’s words drifted across time to him out of 1987: “We’re going to lose unless we grab the kids growing up! The syndicalists are getting them, and educating them to think that syndicalism is true and good and beautiful, and the longer that goes on, the longer it’s going to go on. It’s self-perpetuating. Anybody who wants the old constitution back, or who wants the new constitution amended, is going to look like a dangerous fire-breathing radical, and the syndicalists will be the nice, safe, conservative boys we’ve always had and always want. At which point everything is over and done with.” Yes. Jack had been right. The Front had grabbed some of the kids growing up, but not enough. Despite an ever more sophisticated propaganda campaign, despite a cunning interleaving of revolutionary agitation with popular entertainment, despite the financial support of hundreds of thousands of Americans and the creative support of some of the nation’s finest minds, they had achieved nothing. They had been unable to move that vast placid mass of citizens, the ones who were satisfied with the government, whatever sort of government it might happen to be, the ones who feared rocking the boat more than they feared being devoured by the boat.

  They might as well arrest me, then, Barrett told himself. I’m used up. I’ve got nothing left to offer the Front. I’ve admitted inward defeat, and if I stick around, I’ll poison all the younger ones with my pessimism.

  It was true. He had ceased to be a revolutionary agitator years ago. He was nothing but a bureaucrat of revolution now, a shuffler of papers, a representative of entrenched interests. If The Revolution actually broke out, now, would he rejoice or would he be terrified of it? He had grown accustomed to living on the brink of revolution. He was comfortable there. His commitment to change had eroded.

  “You’re very quiet,” said the agent at his left.

  “Should I be screaming and sobbing?”

  “We expected more trouble with you,” said the agent at his right. “A top leader like you—”

  “You don’t know me very well,” Barrett said. “I’m past the stage of caring what you do with me.”

  “Oh, really? That’s not the profile we’ve got on you. You’re a dedicated revolutionary from way back, Barrett. You’re a dangerous radical. We’ve been watching you.”

  “Why did you wait so long to arrest me, then?”

  “We don’t believe in picking up everybody right away. We have a long-range program of arrest. Everything’s programmed for impact. We get one leader this year, one the next, one five years afterward—”

  “Sure,” Barrett said. “You can afford to wait, because we don’t represent any real threat anyway. We’re just a bunch of frauds.”

  “You sound almost serious,” said the agent at his left.

  Barrett laughed.

  “You’re a funny one,” said the agent at his right. “We’ve never had one quite like you before. You don’t even look like an agitator. You could almost be a lawyer, or something. Something respectable.”

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right man, then?” Barrett asked.

  The two agents eyed each other. The man on Barrett’s right stopped the car and deactivated the restraining field in which Barrett was caged. He seized Barrett’s right hand and pushed it against the data plate on the dashboard. He punched for computer time. A moment passed while the central computer checked Barrett’s fingerprints against its master files.

  “You’re Barrett, all right,” the agent said in obvious relief.

  “I never denied it, did I? I just asked you if you were sure.”

  “Well, now we’re even surer.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re a funny one, Barrett.”

  They took him to the airport. A small government plane was waiting there. The flight lasted two hours, which would have been enough to take him nearly across the continent, but Barrett had no assurance that he had gone any such distance. They could have been flying in circles over Boston all that time; the government, he knew, did things like that. When the plane landed, nightfall had come. He did not catch more than a glimpse of the airport, for a sealed transport capsule was pushed up against the plane and he was hustled into it. That single glimpse was not enough to tell Barrett where he might be.

  But he did not need to be told his destination. He ended his journey in one of the government’s interrogation camps. A blank, smooth black metal door closed behind him. Within, all was sleek, brightly lit, antiseptic. It might have been a hospital. Corridors receded in many directions; recessed lighting gave a pleasant greenish-yellow glow.

  They fed him. They gave him a seamless uniform made of some imperishable-looking fabric.

  They put him in a cell.

  Barrett was surprised and vaguely pleased to discover that he had not landed in a maximum-security block. His cell was a comfortable room, about ten by fourteen, with a bunk, a toilet, an ultrasonic bath, and a video eye behind a nearly invisible barrier in the ceiling. There was a grillwork in the cell door through which he could carry on conversations with the prisoners in the facing cells. He did not recognize their names; some of them belonged to underground groups he had never heard of, and he thought he had heard of them all. Probably at least a few of his neighbors here were government spies, but Barrett did not mind that, since he expected it.

  “How often do the interrogators come?” Barrett asked.

  “They don’t,” said the stocky, bearded man across the way. His name was Fulks. “I’ve been here a month and I haven’t been interrogated yet.”

  “They don’t come here to interrogate,” said the man next to Fulks. “They take you away and question you somewhere else. Then you never come back here. They’re in no hurry, either. I’ve been here a month and a half.”

  A week passed, and no one took official notice of Barrett. He was fed regularly, allowed to requisition certain reading matter, and taken from his cell every third day for exercise in the courtyard. But there was no indication that he was going to be interrogated or placed on trial or even indicted. Under the law of preventive detention, he could be held indefinitely without an arraignment, if he were deemed dangerous to the continuity of the state.

  Some of the prisoners were led away. They did not return. New prisoners arrived each day.

  A good deal of the talk was about the time-travel program. “They’re doing the experiments,” reported a thin, tough-faced newcomer named Anderson. “They got a process, it lets them send back rabbits and monkeys a couple of years in time. They got it almost perfect now. And then they’re going to start sending prisoners back. They’ll send us a million years back and let us get eaten by dinosaurs.”

  It sounded unlikely to Barrett, even though he had discussed just this project with its inventor six years before. Well, Hawksbill was dead now, and his work was the property of those who had footed the bill for it, and God help us all if these wild stories are true. A million years into the past? The government piously declared that it had renounced capital punishment; but perhaps it could stick a man into Hawksbill’s machine, ship him off to who knew where or when, and maintain a clear conscience.

  Barrett thought he had been in custody for four weeks when they took him from his cell and transferred him to the interrogation department. He was not sure, because he had been having some difficulty keeping an accurate count of the passing days, but he thought it was about four weeks. He had never known twenty-eight days to pass so slowly. He would not have been amazed at all to learn that he had been in his cell four years before they came for him.

  A snub-nosed little electric runabout took him through endless mazes and delivered him to a cheerful office, wher
e he went through an elaborate registration process. When the routines were completed, two monitors escorted him to a small, austere room containing a desk, a couch, and a chair.

  “Lie down,” one monitor said. Barrett obeyed. He was aware of a restraining shield taking form about him. He studied the ceiling. It was gray and perfectly smooth, as though the entire room had been squirted from a nozzle as a single bubble. They let him examine the perfection of the ceiling for several hours, and then, just as he was beginning to get hungry, a section of the wall slid away long enough to admit the lean figure of Jack Bernstein.

  “I knew it would be you, Jack,” Barrett said calmly.

  “Please call me Jacob.”

  “You never let anyone call you Jacob when we were kids,” Barrett said. “You insisted your name was Jack, right on your birth certificate. Remember when a bunch of our classmates got bothered with you and chased you halfway across the schoolyard, yelling, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob? I had to save you then. That was, how long, Jack, twenty-five years ago? Two thirds of our lives ago, Jack.”

  “Jacob.”

  “Do you mind if I go on calling you Jack? I can’t break the habit after all this time.”

  “You’d be wiser to call me Jacob,” Bernstein said. “I have great power over your future.”

  “I’ve got no future. I’m a prisoner for keeps.”

  “That isn’t necessarily so.”

  “Don’t tease me, Jack. The only power you have is to decide, maybe, whether I’ll get tortured or just left to rot in boredom. And, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I’m beyond your reach, Jack. There’s nothing you can do to me that matters.”

  “Nevertheless,” Bernstein said, “it might prove to your advantage to cooperate with me, in the small things as well as in the big ones. Regardless of how desperate you think your present situation is, you’re still alive, and you might conceivably discover that we mean you no harm. But it all depends on your attitude. I find that it pleases me to be called Jacob these days, and it shouldn’t be that difficult for you to adapt.”

  “As long as you wanted to change your name, Jack,” said Barrett amiably, “why didn’t you make it Judas?”

  Bernstein did not reply at once. He crossed the room and stood beside the couch on which Barrett lay, and stared down at him in an impersonal, abstracted manner. His face, thought Barrett, looks calm and relaxed for the first time I can recall. But he’s lost more weight. His cheekbones are like knives. He can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. And his eyes are so bright…so bright…

  Bernstein said, “You were always such a big fool, Jim.”

  “Yes. I didn’t have the sense to be radical when you were joining the underground. Then I didn’t have the sense to jump to the other side when the jumping was good.”

  “And now you don’t have the sense to accommodate yourself to your interrogator.”

  “I’m not much on selling out, Jack. Jacob.”

  “To save yourself?”

  “Suppose I’m not interested in saving myself?”

  “The Revolution needs you, doesn’t it?” Bernstein asked. “It’s your duty to get out of our clutches and continue your sacred task of working toward the overthrow of the government.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t, Jack. I’m tired of being a revolutionary. I think I’d just like to lie here and rest for the next forty or fifty years. As prisons go, this one’s pretty comfortable.”

  “I can arrange your release,” Bernstein said. “But only if you cooperate.”

  Barrett smiled. “All right, Jacob. Tell me what you want to know, and I’ll see if I can’t give you the answers you want.”

  “I have no questions now.”

  “None?”

  “None.”

  “That’s a lousy way to interrogate a man, no?”

  “You’re still full of resistance, Jim. I’ll come back another time, and we’ll talk again.”

  Bernstein went out. They left Barrett alone for a couple of hours, until he thought he would split apart in boredom, and then they brought him a meal. He expected Bernstein to return after dinner. But, in fact, Barrett did not see the interrogator again for quite some time.

  They put him in an interrogation tank late that evening.

  The theory, and it was a reasonable one, held that total sensory deprivation lessens a man’s individuality, and hence reduces his tendency toward stubbornness. Plug his ears, cap his eyes, put him in a warm nutrient bath, pipe food and air to him along plastic conduits, let him float in idleness, in womblike ease, day after day, until the spirit decays and the ego corrodes. Barrett entered the tank. He could not hear. He could not see. Before long, he could not sleep.

  As he lay in his tank he dictated his autobiography to himself, a document several volumes long. He invented mathematical games of great intricacy. He recited the names of the states of the old United States of America, and tried to recall the names of their capitals. He re-enacted scenes that had been climactic in his life, altering the script here and there.

  Then it became too much trouble even to think, and he merely drifted on the amniotic tide. He came to believe that he was dead, and that this was the afterlife, eternal relaxation. Soon his mind twitched into renewed activity, and he waited eagerly to be taken from the tank and questioned, and then he waited desperately, and then he waited furiously, and then he ceased to wait at all.

  After what could have been eight hundred years, they took him from the interrogation tank.

  “How do you feel?” a guard asked. His voice was like a shriek. Barrett clapped his hands to his ears and dropped to the floor. They picked him up.

  “You get used to the sound of voices again eventually,” the guard said.

  “Stop it,” Barrett whispered. “Stop talking!”

  He could not abide even the sound of his own voice. His heartbeat was merciless thunder in his ears. His breathing made a ferocious rustling sound, like the tearing down of forests by gusts of wind. His eyes were numbed by the flood of visual impressions. He shivered. He quaked.

  Jacob Bernstein came to him an hour after he had been brought from the tank.

  “Feel rested?” Bernstein asked. “Relaxed, happy, cooperative?”

  “How long was I in there?”

  “I’m not prepared to tell you that.”

  “A week? A month? A year? What’s today’s date?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Jim.”

  “Please stop talking. Your voice hurts my ears.”

  Bernstein smiled. “You’ll adjust. I hope you’ve been reviewing your memory while you’ve rested, Jim. Answer some questions, now. The names of people in your group, to begin with. Not everybody—just those in positions of responsibility.”

  “You know all the names,” Barrett murmured.

  “I want to hear them from you.”

  “What for?”

  “Perhaps we took you from the tank too soon.”

  “So put me back,” Barrett said.

  “Don’t be stubborn. List some names for me.”

  “It hurts my ears when I talk.”

  Bernstein folded his arms. “Let the names go, for now. I have here a statement describing the extent of your counterrevolutionary activities.”

  “Counterrevolutionary?”

  “Yes. In opposition to the continuing work of the founders of the Revolution of 1984.”

  “I haven’t heard us described as counterrevolutionaries in a long time, Jack.”

  “Jacob.”

  “Jacob.”

  “Thank you. I’ll read the statement. You may amend it if you find it incorrect in any details. Then you’ll sign it, please.” He opened a lengthy document and read a concise, dry account of Barrett’s career in the underground, substantially accurate, covering everything from that first meeting in 1984 to date. When he finished he said, “Any criticisms or suggestions?”

  “No.”

  “Sign it, then.” />
  “My muscular coordination is lousy right now. I can’t hold a pen. I guess I was in your tank too long.”

  “Dictate a verbal adherence to the statements of the confession, then. We’ll take a voiceprint, and it’ll serve as admissible evidence.”

  “No.”

  “You deny that this is an accurate summary of your career?”

  “I take the Fifth Amendment.”

  “There is no such concept as the Fifth Amendment,” Bernstein said. “Will you admit that you’ve worked for the conscious overthrow of the present legally constituted government of this nation?”

  “Doesn’t it make you sick to hear words like that coming out of your mouth, Jack?”

  “I warn you not to launch a personal attack on my integrity,” said Bernstein quietly. “You can’t possibly understand the motivations that caused me to transfer my allegiance from the underground to the government, and I’m not about to discuss them with you. This is your interrogation, not mine.”

  “I hope your turn comes soon.”

  “I doubt that it will.”

  Barrett said, “When we were sixteen, you spoke of this government as wolves eating the world. You warned me that unless I woke up, I’d be one more slave in a world full of slaves. And I said I’d rather be a live slave than a dead subversive, remember, and you took me apart for saying something like that. Now here you are on the team of the wolves. You’re a live slave and I’m going to be a dead subversive.”

  “This government has renounced capital punishment,” said Bernstein. “I regard myself as neither a wolf nor a slave. And by your own words you’ve just demonstrated the fallacy of trying to uphold your opinions-aged-sixteen into adulthood.”