Hawksbill Station

“2029.”

“You feel pretty sick?”

“I feel awful. I don’t even believe this is happening to me. There’s no such place as Hawksbill Station, is there?”

“I’m afraid there is,” Barrett said. “At least, for most of us. A few of the boys think it’s all an illusion induced by drugs. But I have my doubts of that. If it’s an illusion, it’s a damned good one. Look.”

He put one arm around Hahn’s shoulders and guided him through the press of prisoners, out of the Hammer chamber and toward the nearby infirmary. Although Hahn looked thin, even fragile, Barrett was surprised to feel the rippling muscles in those shoulders. He suspected that this man was a lot less helpless and ineffectual than he seemed to be right now. He had to be, in order to merit banishment to Hawksbill Station.

They passed the door of the building. “Look out there,” Barrett commanded.

Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs and looked again.

“A late Cambrian landscape,” said Barrett quietly. “This would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front is Appalachia. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we’ve got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there’s Cascadia; that’s going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday. Don’t hold your breath. I hope you like seafood.”

Hahn stared, and Barrett, standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land-dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.

Shaking his head, Hahn moved away from the door.

Barrett led him down the corridor and into the small, brightly lit room that served as the infirmary. Doc Quesada was waiting. Quesada wasn’t really a doctor, but he had been a medical technician once, and that was good enough. He was a compact, swarthy man with a look of complete self-assurance. He hadn’t lost too many patients, all things considered. Barrett had watched him removing appendices with total aplomb. In his white smock, Quesada looked sufficiently medical to fit his role.

Barrett said, “Doc, this is Lew Hahn. He’s in temporal shock. Fix him up.”

Quesada nudged the newcomer onto a webfoam cradle and unzipped his blue jersey. Then he reached for his medical kit. Hawksbill Station was well equipped for most medical emergencies, now. The people Up Front had no wish to be inhumane, and they sent back all sorts of useful things, like anesthetics and surgical clamps and medicines and dermal probes. Barrett could remember a time at the beginning when there had been nothing much here but the empty huts, and a man who hurt himself was in real trouble.

“He’s had a drink already,” said Barrett.

“I see that,” Quesada murmured. He scratched at his short-cropped, bristly moustache. The little diagnostat in the cradle had gone rapidly to work, flashing information about Harm’s blood pressure, potassium count, dilation index, and much else. Quesada seemed to comprehend the barrage of facts. After a moment he said to Hahn, “You aren’t really sick, are you? Just shaken up a little. I don’t blame you. Here—I’ll give you a quick jolt to calm your nerves, and you’ll be all right. As all right as any of us ever are.”

He put a tube to Hahn’s carotid and thumbed the snout. The subsonic whirred, and a tranquilizing compound slid into the man’s bloodstream. Hahn shivered.

Quesada said, “Let him rest for five minutes. Then he’ll be over the hump.”

They left Hahn in his cradle and went out of the infirmary. In the hall, Barrett looked down at the little medic and said, “What’s the report on Valdosto?”

Valdosto had gone into psychotic collapse several weeks before. Quesada was keeping him drugged and trying to bring him slowly back to the reality of Hawksbill Station. Shrugging, he replied, “The status is quo. I let him out from under the dream-juice this morning, and he was the same as he’s been.”

“You don’t think he’ll come out of it?”

“I doubt it. He’s cracked for keeps. They could paste him together Up Front, but—”

“Yeah,” Barrett said. If he could get Up Front at all, Valdosto wouldn’t have cracked. “Keep him happy, then. If he can’t be sane, he can at least be comfortable. What about Altman? Still got the shakes?”

“He’s building a woman.”

“That’s what Charley Norton told me. What’s he using? A rag, a bone—”

“I gave him surplus chemicals. Chosen for their color, mainly. He’s got some foul green copper compounds and a little bit of ethyl alcohol and six or seven other things, and he collected some soil and threw in a lot of dead shellfish, and he’s sculpting it all into what he claims is female shape and waiting for lightning to strike it.”

“In other words, he’s gone crazy,” Barrett said.

“I think that’s a safe assumption. But he’s not molesting his friends any more, anyway. You didn’t think his; homosexual phase would last much longer, as I recall.”

“No, but I didn’t think he’d go off the deep end. If a man needs sex and he can find some consenting playmates here, that’s quite all right with me. But when he starts putting a woman together out of some dirt and rotten brachiopod meat it means we’ve lost him.”

Quesada’s dark eyes flickered. “We’re all going to go that way sooner or later, Jim.”

“I haven’t. You haven’t.”

“Give us time. I’ve only been here eleven years.”

“Altman’s been here only eight. Valdosto even less.”

“Some shells crack faster than. others,” said Quesada. “Here’s our new friend.”

Hahn had come out of the infirmary to join them. He still looked pale, but the fright was gone from his eyes. He was beginning to adjust to the unthinkable.

He said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Is there a lot of mental illness here?”

“Some of the men haven’t been able to find anything meaningful to do here,” Barrett said. “It eats them away. Quesada here has his medical work. I’ve got administrative duties. A couple of the fellows are studying the sea life. We’ve got a newspaper to keep some busy. But there are always those who just let themselves slide into despair, and they crack up. I’d say we have thirty or forty certifiable maniacs here at the moment, out of a hundred and forty residents.”

“That’s not so bad,” Hahn said. “Considering the inherent instability of the men who get sent here and the unusual conditions of life here.”

Barrett laughed. “Hey, you’re suddenly pretty articulate, aren’t you? What was in the stuff Doc Quesada jolted you with?”

“I didn’t mean to sound superior,” Hahn said quickly. “Maybe that came out a little too smug. I mean—”

“Forget it. What did you do Up Front, anyway?”

“I was sort of an economist.”

“Just what we need,” said Quesada. “He can help us solve our balance-of-payments problem.”

Barrett said, “If you were an economist, you’ll have plenty to discuss here. This place is full of economic theorists who’ll want to bounce their ideas off you. Some of them are almost sane, too. Come with me and I’ll show you where you’re going to stay.”