Hawksbill Station

by Robert Silverberg

  “What do you want from me, Jack?”

  “Two things. Your acceptance of the résumé I’ve just read you. And your cooperation in our attempt to gain information about the leadership of the Continental Liberation Front.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing. You also want me to call you Jacob, Jacob.”

  Bernstein did not smile. “If you cooperate, I can promise you a satisfactory end to this interrogation.”

  “And if not?”

  “We are not vindictive. But we take action to maintain the security of the citizens by removing from their environment those who threaten national stability.”

  “But you don’t kill people,” Barrett said. “Hell, you must have awfully crowded prisons by now. Unless the time-travel business is true.”

  Bernstein’s armor of self-containment seemed to be pierced for the first time.

  Barrett said, “Is it? Did Hawksbill build a machine that lets you toss prisoners back in time? Are you feeding us to the dinosaurs?”

  “I’ll give you another opportunity to answer my questions,” said Bernstein, looking nettled. “Will you tell me—”

  “You know, Jack, a funny thing’s been happening to me in this interrogation camp. When the police picked me up that day in Boston, I honestly didn’t mind. I had lost interest in The Revolution. I was as uncommitted that day as I had been when I was sixteen and you dragged me into the whole business. What it was, my faith in the revolutionary process had burned out. I had stopped believing we could ever overthrow the government, and I saw that I was just going through the motions, getting older and older, using up my life in a futile Bolshevik dream, keeping up appearances so I wouldn’t discourage the kids in the movement. I had just discovered that my whole life was empty. So what difference did it make to me if you arrested me? I was nothing. I bet that if you came and questioned me my first day in jail, I would have told you anything you wanted to know, simply because I was too bored to go on resisting. But now I’ve been in interrogation for six months, a year, I can’t tell how long, and the effect’s been quite interesting. I’m stubborn again. I came in here flaccid-willed, and you’ve built up my will until it’s stronger than ever. Isn’t that interesting, Jack? I guess it doesn’t make you look like such a hotshot interrogator, and I’m sorry about that, but I thought you’d like to know how the process has been affecting me.”

  “Are you asking to be tortured, Jim?”

  “I’m not asking anything. Just telling.”

  They took Barrett back to the tank. As before, he had no idea how long he was left in it, but it seemed longer this time than the first time, and he felt weaker when he came out. He could not be interrogated for three hours afterward, because he could not tolerate noise. Bernstein tried, but gave up and waited until his pain threshold had improved. Barrett failed to be cooperative. Bernstein was distressed.

  They inflicted a moderate amount of physical torture on Barrett next. He withstood it.

  Bernstein tried to be friendly. He offered cigarettes, had Barrett released from restraint, chatted about old times. They argued ideology from all viewpoints. They laughed together. They joked.

  “Will you help me now, Jim?” Bernstein asked. “Just answer a few questions.”

  “You don’t need the information I could give you. It’s all on file. You’re only after a symbolic capitulation. Well, I’m going to hold out forever. You might as well give up and bring me to trial.”

  “Your trial can’t begin until you’ve signed the statement,” Bernstein said.

  “In that case you’ll have to go on interrogating.”

  But in the end, boredom got the better of him. He was tired of his immersions in the tank, tired of the bright lights, the electronic probes, the subcutaneous shocks, the jabbing questions, tired of Bernstein’s haggard face peering into his own. Coming to trial seemed the only way out. Barrett signed the resume Bernstein offered him. He delivered up a list of names of Continental Liberation Front officers. The names were imaginary, and Bernstein knew it; but he was satisfied. It was the appearance of capitulation they were after.

  “You will be tried next week,” said Bernstein.

  “Congratulations,” Barrett said. “You did a masterly job of breaking my spirit. I’m utterly defeated now. My will is shattered. I’ve surrendered in all respects. You’re a credit to your profession—Jack.”

  The look that Jacob Bernstein gave him was tipped with acid.

  The trial duly took place: no jury, no attorneys, merely a government functionary sitting before a bank of computer inputs and outputs. Barrett’s confession was entered into the records. Barrett himself supplied a verbal statement. The interrogator’s report was delivered. In the course of proceedings, it was necessary for a date to be affixed to all these reports, and so Barrett learned that it was now the summer of 2008. He had been in the interrogation camp for twenty months.

  “The verdict is guilty as charged. James Edward Barrett, we sentence you to imprisonment for life, the place of your internment to be Hawksbill Station.”

  “Where?”

  No reply. They led him away.

  Hawksbill Station? What was that? Something to do with the time machine, perhaps?

  Barrett found out soon enough.

  He was brought to a vast room filled with improbable machinery. At the center of everything was a gleaming metallic plate twenty feet in diameter. Above it, descending from the distant ceiling, was a conglomeration of apparatus weighing many tons, an arrangement of colossal pistons and power cores that looked like a prehistoric monster about to strike…or perhaps like a gigantic hammer. The room was crowded with hard-eyed technicians, busy at dials and screens. No one spoke to Barrett. He was thrust up onto the huge anvil-like plate beneath the monstrous hammer. All about him, the room throbbed with activity. This was a lot of fuss, he told himself, for one weary political prisoner. Were they going to send him to Hawksbill Station now?

  There was a red glow in the room.

  But nothing happened for a long while. Barrett stood patiently, feeling faintly absurd. A voice said in the background, “How’s the calibration?”

  “Fine. We’ll toss him exactly a billion years back.”

  “Wait a second!” Barrett yelled. “A billion years—”

  They ignored him. He could not move. There was a high whining sound, a strange odor in the air. And then he felt pain, the most intense, the most dislocating pain he had ever experienced. Had the hammer descended and crushed him flat? He could not see. He was nowhere. He was—

  —falling—

  —landing—

  —sitting up, dazed, sweating, bewildered. He was in another room, with some of the same sort of equipment around him, but the faces here were not the hard faces of impersonal technicians. He recognized these faces. Members of the Continental Liberation Front…men he had not seen for years, men who had been arrested, whose whereabouts had been unknown.

  There was Norman Pleyel, with tears in his gentle eyes.

  “Jim—Jim Barrett—so they finally sent you here too, Jim! Don’t try to get up. You’re in temporal shock now, but it passes fast.”

  Barrett said hoarsely, “Is this Hawksbill Station?”

  “This is Hawksbill Station. Such that it is.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Not where, Jim. When. We’re a billion years back in time.”

  “No. No.” He shook his foggy head. So Hawksbill’s machine did work, and the rumors were true, and this was where they sent the troublesome ones. Was Janet here too? He asked. No, Pleyel said. There were only men here. Twenty or thirty prisoners, managing somehow to survive.

  Barrett was reluctant to believe any of this. But then they helped him down from the Anvil, and took him outside to show him what the world was like, and he stared in slowly spreading wonder at the curve of bare rock slanting into the gray sea, at the unmarred, uninhabited coast, and the reality of his exile sank in with a blow more painful than the one the Hammer had
dealt him.

  FOURTEEN

  In the darkness, Hahn did not notice Barrett at first. He sat up slowly, shaking off the stunning effects of a trip through time. After a few seconds he pushed himself toward the lip of the Anvil and let his legs dangle over it. He swung them to get the circulation going. He took a series of deep breaths. Finally he slipped to the floor. The glow of the field had gone out in the moment of his arrival, and so he moved warily, as though not wanting to bump into anything.

  Abruptly Barrett switched on the light and said, “What have you been up to, Hahn?”

  The younger man recoiled as though he had been jabbed in the gut. He gasped, hopped backward a few steps, and flung up both hands in a defensive gesture.

  “Answer me,” Barrett said.

  Hahn seemed to regain his equilibrium. He shot a quick glance past Barrett’s bulky form toward the hallway and said, “Let me go, will you? I can’t explain now.”

  “You’d better explain now.”

  “It’ll be easier for everyone if I don’t,” said Hahn. “Please. Let me pass.”

  Barrett continued to block the door. “I want to know where you’ve been this evening. And what you’ve been doing with the Hammer.”

  “Nothing. Just studying it a little.”

  “You weren’t in this room a minute ago. Then you appeared out of nowhere. Where did you come from, Hahn?”

  “You’re mistaken. I was standing right behind the Hammer. I didn’t—”

  “I saw you drop down on the Anvil. You took a time trip, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie to me! I don’t know how you do it, but you’ve got some way of going forward in time, isn’t that so? You’ve been spying on us, and you just went somewhere to file your report—somewhen—and now you’re back.”

  Hahn’s pale forehead was glistening. He said tautly, “I warn you, Barrett, don’t ask too many questions right now. You’ll know everything you want to know in due time. This isn’t the time. Please, now. Let me pass.”

  “I want answers first,” Barrett said.

  He realized that he was trembling. He already knew the answers, and they were answers that shook him to the core of his soul. He knew where Hahn had been.

  But Hahn had to admit it himself.

  Hahn said nothing. He took a couple of hesitant steps toward Barrett, who did not move. Hahn seemed to be gathering momentum for a sudden rush at the doorway.

  Barrett said, “You aren’t getting out of this room until you’ve told me what I want to know.”

  Hahn charged.

  Barrett planted himself squarely, crutch braced against the doorframe, his good leg flat on the floor, and waited for the younger man to reach him. He figured that he outweighed Hahn by at least eighty pounds. That might be just enough to balance the fact that he was spotting Hahn some thirty years and one leg. They came together, and Barrett drove his hands down onto Hahn’s shoulders, trying to hold him, to force him back into the room.

  Hahn gave an inch or two. He looked up at Barrett without saying a word and pushed forward again.

  “Don’t—don’t—” Barrett grunted. “I—won’t—let—you—”

  “I don’t want to do this,” Hahn said.

  He pushed again. Barrett felt himself buckling under the impact. He dug his hands as hard as he could into Hahn’s shoulders, and tried to shove the other man backward into the room. But Hahn held firm, and all of Barrett’s energy was converted into a backward thrust rebounding on himself. He lost control of his crutch. It scraped along the doorframe and slithered out from under his arm. For one agonizing moment Barrett’s full weight rested on the crushed uselessness of his left foot, and then, as though his limbs were melting away beneath him, he began to sink toward the floor. He landed with a reverberating crash.

  Quesada, Altman, and Latimer came rushing into the room. Barrett writhed in pain on the floor, digging his fingers into the thigh of his crippled leg. Hahn stood over him, looking unhappy, his hands locked together.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have tried to muscle me like that.”

  Barrett glowered at him. “You were traveling in time, weren’t you? You can answer me now!”

  “Yes,” Hahn said at last. “I went Up Front.”

  An hour later, after Quesada had pumped him with enough shots of neural depressant to keep him from jumping out of his skin with pain, Barrett got the full story. Hahn hadn’t wanted to reveal it so soon, but he had changed his mind after his little scuffle.

  It was all very simple. Time travel now worked in both directions. The glib, impressive noises about the flow of entropy had turned out to be just noises.

  “No,” Barrett said. “I discussed it with Hawksbill myself, in—let’s see—it was 1998. Hawksbill and I knew each other. I said, can people go back and forth in time, with your machine, and he said no, only back. Forward motion was impossible according to his equations.”

  “His equations were incomplete,” said Hahn. “Obviously. He never worked out the forward-motion part.”

  “How could a man like Hawksbill make a mistake?”

  “He made at least one. There’s been further research, and we know now how to move in both directions. Even Einstein had to be amended later on. Why not Hawksbill?”

  Barrett shook his head. Well, why not Hawksbill, he asked himself? But he had taken it as an article of faith that Hawksbill’s work had been perfect, that he was condemned to live out his days here at the dawn of time.

  “How long has this two-way thing been known?” Barrett asked.

  “At least five years,” Hahn said. “We aren’t sure yet exactly when the breakthrough came. After we’re finished going through all the secret records of the former government—”

  “The former government?”

  Hahn nodded. “The revolution came in January. Of ’29. It wasn’t really a violent one, either. The syndicalists just mildewed from within, and when they got the first push they fell over. There was a revolutionary government waiting in the wings to take over and restore the old constitutional guarantees.”

  “Was it mildew?” Barrett asked, coloring. “Or termites? Keep your metaphors straight.”

  Hahn glanced away. “Anyway, the old government fell. We’ve got a provisional liberal regime in office now, and there’s going to be an open election in six months or so. Don’t ask me much about the philosophy of the new administration. I’m not a political theorist. I’m not even an economist. You guessed as much.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “A policeman,” Hahn said. “Part of the commission that’s investigating the prison system of the former government. Including this prison.”

  Barrett said, “What’s happening to the prisoners Up Front? The politicals.”

  “They’re being freed. We review their cases and generally let them go fast.”

  Barrett nodded. “And the syndicalists? What’s becoming of them? I wonder if you could tell me about one in particular, an interrogator, name of Jacob Bernstein. Maybe you know of him.”

  “Bernstein? Sure. One of the Council of Syndics, he was. Head of interrogation.”

  “Was?”

  “Committed suicide,” said Hahn. “A lot of the Syndics did that when the regime fell apart. Bernstein was the first”

  “It figures,” Barrett said, feeling oddly moved, somehow.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “There was a girl,” Barrett said. “Long ago—she disappeared—they arrested her in 1994, and no one ever could find out what happened to her. I wonder if—if—”

  Hahn shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “That was thirty-five years ago. We didn’t find any prisoners who had been in jail more than six or seven years. The hard core opposition all got sent to Hawksbill Station, and the others—well, if she was a special friend of yours, it’s not likely that she’s going to turn up.”

  “No,” Barrett said. “You’re right. She�
�s been dead a long time, probably. But I couldn’t help asking—just in case—”

  He looked at Quesada, then at Hahn. Thoughts were streaming turbulently through him, and he could not remember when he had last been so overwhelmed by events. He had to work hard to keep from breaking into the shakes again. His voice quavered a little as he said to Hahn, “You came back to observe Hawksbill Station, right, to see how we were getting along? And you went Up Front tonight to tell them what you saw here. You must think we’re a pretty sad bunch, eh?”

  “You’ve all been under extraordinary stress here,” Hahn said. “Considering the circumstances of your imprisonment—to be sent to this remote era—”

  Quesada broke in. “If there’s a liberal government in power, now, and it’s possible to travel both ways in time, then am I right in assuming that the Hawksbill prisoners are going to be sent back Up Front?”

  “Of course,” said Hahn. “It’ll be done as soon as possible, as soon as we can take care of the logistics end. That’s been the whole purpose of my reconnaissance mission. To find out if you people were still alive, first—we didn’t even know if anyone had ever survived being sent back in time. And then to see what shape you’re in, how badly in need of treatment you are. You’ll be given every available benefit of modern therapy, naturally. No expense spared to—”

  Barrett scarcely paid attention to Hahn’s words. He had been fearing something like this all night, ever since Altman had told him that Hahn was monkeying with the Hammer. But he had never fully allowed himself to believe that it could really be possible.

  He saw his kingdom crumbling, now.

  He saw himself returned to a world he could not begin to comprehend—a lame Rip van Winkle, coming back after twenty years.

  And he saw himself being taken from a place that had become his home.

  Barrett said tiredly, “You know, some of the men aren’t going to be able to adapt to the shock of freedom. It might just kill them to be dumped into the real world again. We’ve got a lot of advanced psychos here. You’ve seen them. You saw what Valdosto did this afternoon.”