Hawksbill Station

V

Rudiger’s catch was spread out in front of the main building the next morning when Barrett came up for breakfast. He had had a good night’s fishing, obviously. He usually did. Rudiger went out three or four nights a week, in a little dinghy that he had cobbled together a few years ago from salvage materials, and he took with him a team of friends whom he had trained in the deft use of the trawling nets.

It was an irony that Rudiger, the anarchist, the man who believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions, should be so good at leading a team of fishermen. Rudiger didn’t care for teamwork in the abstract. But it was hard to manipulate the nets alone, he had discovered. Hawksbill Station had many little ironies of that sort. Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.

The prize of the catch was a cephalopod about a dozen feet long—a rigid conical tube out of which some limp squidlike tentacles dangled. Plenty of meat on that one, Barrett thought. Dozens of trilobites were arrayed around it, ranging in size from the inch-long kind to the three-footers with their baroquely involuted exoskeletons. Rudiger fished both for food and for science; evidently these trilobites were discards, species that he already had studied, or he wouldn’t have left them here to go into the food hoppers. His hut was stacked ceiling-high with trilobites. It kept him sane to collect and analyze them.

Near the heap of trilobites were some clusters of hinged brachiopods, looking like scallops that had gone awry, and a pile of snails. The warm, shallow waters just off the coastal shelf teemed with life, in striking contrast to the barren land. Rudiger had also brought in a mound of shiny black seaweed. Barrett hoped someone would gather all this stuff up and get it into their heat-sink cooler before it spoiled. The bacteria of decay worked a lot slower here than they did Up Front, but a few hours in the mild air would do Rudiger’s haul no good.

Today Barrett planned to recruit some men for the annual Inland Sea expedition. Traditionally, he led that trek himself, but his injury made it impossible for him even to consider going any more. Each year, a dozen or so able-bodied men went out on a wide-ranging reconnaissance that took them in a big circle, looping northwestward until they reached the sea, then coming around to the south and back to the Station. One purpose of the trip was to gather any temporal garbage that might have materialized in the vicinity of the Station during the past year. There was no way of knowing how wide a margin of error had been allowed during the early attempts to set up the Station, and the scattershot technique of hurling material into the past had been pretty unreliable. New stuff was turning up all the time that had been aimed for Minus One Billion, Two Thousand Oh Five A. D., but which didn’t get there until a few decades later. Hawksbill Station needed all the spare equipment it could get, and Barrett didn’t miss a chance to round up any of the debris.

There was another reason for the Inland Sea expeditions, though. They served as a focus for the year, an annual ritual, something to peg a custom to. It was a rite of spring here.

The dozen strongest men, going on foot to the distant rock-rimmed shores of the tepid sea that drowned the middle of North America, were performing the closest thing Hawksbill Station had to a religious function. The trip meant more to Barrett himself than he had ever suspected, also. He realized that now, when he was unable to go. He had led every such expedition for twenty years.

But last year he had gone scrabbling over boulders loosened by the waves, venturing into risky territory for no rational reason, and his aging muscles had betrayed him. Often at night he woke sweating to escape from the dream in which he relived that ugly moment: slipping and sliding, clawing at the rocks, a mass of stone dislodged from somewhere and came crashing down with an agonizing impact on his foot, pinning him, crushing him. He could not forget the sound of grinding bones. Nor was he likely to lose the memory of the homeward march across hundreds of miles of bare rock, his bulky body slung between the bowed forms of his companions.

He had thought he would lose the foot, but Quesada had spared him from the amputation. He simply could not touch the foot to the ground and put weight on it now, or ever again. It might have been simpler to have the dead appendage sliced off. Quesada vetoed that, though. “Who knows,” he had said, “some day they might send us a transplant kit. I can’t rebuild a leg that’s been amputated.” So Barrett had kept his crushed foot. But he had never been quite the same since, and now someone else would have to lead the march.

Who would it be, he asked himself?

Quesada was the likeliest. Next to Barrett, he was the strongest man here, in all the ways that it was important to be strong. But Quesada couldn’t be spared at the Station. It might be handy to have a medic along on the trip, but it was vital to have one here. After some reflection Barrett put down Charley Norton as the leader. He added Ken Belardi—someone for Norton to talk to. Rudiger? A tower of strength last year after Barrett had been injured;; Barrett didn’t particularly want to let Rudiger leave the Station so long though. He needed able men for the expedition, true, but he didn’t want to strip the home base down to invalids, crackpots, and psychotics. Rudiger stayed. Two of his fellow fishermen went on the list. So did Sid Hutchett and Arny Jean-Claude.

Barrett thought about putting Don Latimer in the group. Latimer was coming to be something of a borderline mental case, but he was rational enough except when he lapsed into his psionic meditations, and he’d pulled his own weight on the expedition. On the other hand, Latimer was Lew Hahn’s roommate, and Barrett wanted Latimer around to observe Hahn at close range. He toyed with the idea of sending both of them out, but nixed it. Hahn was still an unknown quantity. It was too risky to let him go with the Inland Sea party this year. Probably he’d be in next spring’s group, though.

Finally Barrett had his dozen men chosen. He chalked their names on the slate in front of the mess hall and; found Charley Norton at breakfast to tell him he was in charge.

It felt strange to know that he’d have to stay home while the others went. It was an admission that he was beginning to abdicate after running this place so long. A crippled old man was what he was, whether he liked to admit it to himself or not, and that was something he’d have to come to terms with soon.

In the afternoon, the men of the Inland Sea expedition gathered to select their gear and plan their route. Barrett kept away from the meeting. This was Charley Norton’s show, now. He’d made eight or ten trips, and he knew what to do.

But some masochistic compulsion in Barrett drove him to take a trek of his own. If he couldn’t see the western waters this year, the least he could do was pay a visit to the Atlantic, in his own backyard. Barrett stopped off in the infirmary and, finding Quesada elsewhere, helped himself to a tube of neural depressant. He scrambled along the eastern trail until he was a few hundred yards from the main building, dropped his trousers, and quickly gave each thigh a jolt of the drug, first the good leg, then the gimpy one. That would numb the muscles just enough so that he’d be able to take an extended hike without feeling the fire of the fatigue in his protesting joints. He’d pay for it, he knew, eight hours from now, when the depressant wore off and the full impact of his exertion hit him like a million daggers. But he was willing to accept that price.

The road to the sea was a long, lonely one. Hawksbill Station was perched on the eastern rim of the land, more than eight hundred feet above sea level. During the first half dozen years, the men of the Station had reached the ocean by a suicidal route across sheer rock faces, but Barrett had incited a ten-year project to carve a path. Now wide steps descended to the sea. Chopping them out of the rock had kept a lot of men busy for a long time, too busy to worry or to slip into insanity. Barrett regretted that he couldn’t conceive some comparable works project to occupy them nowadays.

The steps formed a succession of shallow platforms that switch backed to the edge of the water. Even for a healthy man it was still a strenuous walk. For Barrett in his present condition it was an ordeal. It took him two hours to descend a distance that normally could be traversed in a quarter of that time. When he reached the bottom, he sank down exhaustedly on a flat rock licked by the waves, and dropped his crutch. The ringers of his left hand were cramped and gnarled from gripping the crutch, and his entire body was bathed in sweat.

The water looked gray and somehow oily. Barrett could not explain the prevailing colorlessness of the late Cambrian world, with its somber sky and somber land and somber sea, but his heart quietly ached for a glimpse of green vegetation again. He missed chlorophyll. The dark wavelets lapped against his rock, pushing a mass of floating black seaweed back and forth. The sea stretched to infinity. He didn’t have the faintest idea how much of Europe, if any, was above water in this epoch.

At the best of times most of the planet was submerged; here, only a few hundred million years after the white-hot rocks of the land had pushed into view, it was likely that all that was above water on Earth was a strip of territory here and there. Had the Himalayas been born yet? The Rockies? The Andes? He knew the approximate outlines of late Cambrian North America, but the rest was a mystery.

As he watched, a big trilobite unexpectedly came scuttering up out of the water. It was the spike-tailed kind, about a yard long, with an eggplant-purple shell and a bristling arrangement of slender spines along the margins. There seemed to be a lot of legs underneath. The trilobite crawled up on the shore—no sand, no beach, just a shelf of rock—and advanced until it was eight or ten feet from the waves.

Good for you, Barrett thought. Maybe you’re the first one who ever came out on land to see what it was like. The pioneer. The trailblazer.

It occurred to him that this adventurous trilobite might well be the ancestor of all the land-dwelling creatures of the eons to come. It was biological nonsense, but Barrett’s weary mind conjured a picture of an evolutionary procession, with fish and amphibians and reptiles and mammals and man all stemming in unbroken sequence from this grotesque armored thing that moved in uncertain circles near his feet.

And if I were to step on you, he thought?

A quick motion—the sound of crunching chitin—the wild scrabbling of a host of little legs—

And the whole chain of life snapped in its first link. Evolution undone. With the descent of that heavy foot all the future would change, and there would never have been any Hawksbill Station, no human race, no James Edward Barrett. In an instant he would have both revenge on those who had condemned him to live out his days in this place and release from his sentence.

He did nothing. The trilobite completed its slow perambulation of the shoreline rocks and scuttered back into the sea unharmed.

The soft voice of Don Latimer said, “I saw you sitting down here, Jim. Do you mind if I join you?”

Barrett swung around, momentarily surprised. Latimer had come down from his hilltop hut so quietly that Barrett hadn’t heard a thing. He recovered and grinned and beckoned Latimer to an adjoining rock.

“You fishing?” Latimer asked.

“Just sitting. An old man sunning himself.”

“You took a hike like that just to sun yourself?” Latimer laughed. “Come off it. You’re trying to get away from it all, and you probably wish I hadn’t disturbed you.”

“That’s not so. Stay here. How’s your new roommate getting along?”

“It’s been strange,” said Latimer. “That’s one reason I came down here to talk to you.” He leaned forward and peered searchingly into Barrett’s eyes. “Jim, tell me: do you think I’m a madman?”

“Why should I?”

“The ESPing business. My attempt to break through to another realm of consciousness. I know you’re tough-minded and skeptical. You probably think it’s all a lot of nonsense.”

Barrett shrugged and said, “If you want the blunt truth, I do. I don’t have the remotest belief that you’re going to get us anywhere, Don. I think it’s a complete waste of time and energy for you to sit there for hours harnessing your psionic powers, or whatever it is you do. But no, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re entitled to your obsession and that you’re going about a basically futile thing in a reasonably level-headed way. Fair enough?”

“More than fair. I don’t ask you to put any credence in my research, but I don’t want you to think I’m a total lunatic for trying it. It’s important that you regard me as sane, or else what I want to tell you about Hahn won’t be valid to you.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“It’s this,” said Latimer. “On the basis of one evening’s acquaintance, I’ve formed an opinion about Hahn. It’s the kind of an opinion that might be formed by a garden variety paranoid, and if you think I’m nuts you’re likely to discount my idea.”

“I don’t think you’re nuts. What’s your idea?”

“That he’s been. spying on us.”

Barrett had to work hard to keep from emitting the guffaw that would shatter Latimer’s fragile self-esteem. “Spying?” he said casually. “You can’t mean that. How can anyone spy here? I mean, how can he report his find-”

“I don’t know,” Latimer said. “But he asked me a million questions last night. About you, about Quesada, about some of the sick men. He wanted to know everything.”

“The normal curiosity of a new man.”

“Jim, he was taking notes. I saw him after he thought I was asleep. He sat up for two hours writing it all down in a little book.”

“Maybe he’s going to write a novel about us.”

“I’m serious,” Latimer said. “Questions—notes. And he’s shifty. Try to get him to talk about himself!”

“I did. I didn’t learn much.”

“Do you know why he’s been sent here?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” said Latimer. “Political crimes, he said, but he was vague as hell. He hardly seemed to know what the present government was up to, let alone what his own opinions were toward it. I don’t detect any passionate philosophical convictions in Mr. Hahn. And you know as well as I do that Hawksbill Station is the refuse heap for revolutionaries and agitators and subversives and all sorts of similar trash, but that we’ve never had any other kind of prisoner here.”

Barrett said coolly, “I agree that Hahn’s a puzzle. But who could he be spying for? He’s got no way to file a report, if he’s a government agent. He’s stranded here for keeps, like us.”

“Maybe he was sent to keep an eye on us—to make sure we aren’t cooking up some way to escape. Maybe he’s a volunteer who willingly gave up his twenty-first-century life so he could come among us and thwart anything we might be hatching. Perhaps they’re afraid we’ve invented forward time-travel. Or that we’ve become a threat to the sequence of the time-lines. Anything. So Hahn comes among us to snoop around and block any dangers before they arrive.”

Barrett felt a twinge of alarm. He saw how close to paranoia Latimer was hewing, now. In half a dozen sentences he had journeyed from the rational expression of some justifiable suspicions to the fretful fear that the men from Up Front were going to take steps to choke off the escape route that he was so close to perfecting.

He kept his voice level as he told Latimer, “I don’t think you need to worry, Don. Hahn’s an odd one, but he’s not here to make trouble for us. The fellows Up Front have already made all the trouble for us they ever will.”

“Would you keep an eye on him anyway?”

“You know I will. And don’t hesitate to let me know if Hahn does anything else out of the ordinary. You’re in a better spot to notice than anyone else.”

“I’ll be watching,” Latimer said. “We can’t tolerate any spies from Up Front among us.” He got to his feet and gave Barrett a pleasant smile. “I’ll let you get back to your sunning now, Jim.”

Latimer went up the path. After a long while Barrett seized his crutch and levered himself to his feet. He stood staring down at the surf, dipping the tip of his crutch into the water to send a couple of little crawling things scurrying away. At length he turned and began the long, slow climb back to the Station.