Hawksbill Station

I

Barrett was the uncrowned king of Hawksbill Station. He had been there the longest; he had suffered the most; he had the deepest inner resources.

Before his accident, he had been able to whip any man in the place. Now he was a cripple, but he still had that aura of power. When there were problems at the Station, they were brought to Barrett. That was axiomatic. He was the king.

He ruled over quite a kingdom, too. In effect it was the whole world, pole to pole, meridian to meridian. For what it was worth. It wasn’t worth very much.

Now it was raining again. Barrett shrugged himself to his feet in the quick, easy gesture that cost him an infinite amount of carefully concealed agony and shuffled to the door of his hut. Rain made him impatient; the pounding of those great greasy drops against the corrugated tin roof was enough even to drive a Jim Barrett loony. He nudged the door open. Standing in the doorway, Barrett looked out over his kingdom.

Barren rock, nearly to the horizon. A shield of raw dolomite going on and on. Raindrops danced and bounced on that continental slab of rock. No trees. No grass. Behind Barrett’s hut lay the sea, gray and vast. The sky was gray too, even when it wasn’t raining.

He hobbled out into the rain. Manipulating his crutch was getting to be simple for him now. He leaned comfortably, letting his crushed left foot dangle. A rockslide had pinned him last year during a trip to the edge of the Inland Sea. Back home, Barrett would have been fitted with prosthetics: a new ankle, a new instep, refurbished ligaments and tendons. But home was a billion years away; and home there’s no returning.

The rain hit him hard. Barrett was a big man, six and a half feet tall, with hooded dark eyes, a jutting nose, a chin that was a monarch among chins. He had weighed two hundred fifty pounds in his prime, in the good old agitating days when he had carried banners and pounded out manifestos. But now he was past sixty and beginning to shrink a little, the skin getting loose around the places where the mighty muscles used to be. It was hard to keep your weight in Hawksbill Station. The food was nutritious, but it lacked intensity. A man got to miss steak. Eating brachiopod stew and trilobite hash wasn’t the same thing. Barrett was past all bitterness, though. That was another reason why the men regarded him as the leader. He didn’t scowl. He didn’t rant. He was resigned to his fate, tolerant of eternal exile, and so he could help the others get over that difficult heart-clawing period of transition.

A figure arrived, jogging through the rain: Norton. The doctrinaire Khruschevist with the Trotskyite leanings. A small, excitable man who frequently appointed himself messenger whenever there was news at the Station. He sprinted toward Barrett’s hut, slipping and sliding over the naked rocks.

Barrett held up a meaty hand.

“Whoa, Charley. Take it easy or you’ll break your neck!”

Norton halted in front of the hut. The rain had pasted the widely spaced strands of his brown hair to his skull. His eyes had the fixed, glossy look of fanaticism—or perhaps just astigmatism. He gasped for breath and staggered into the hut, shaking himself like a wet puppy. He obviously had run all the way from the main building of the Station, three hundred yards away.

“Why are you standing around in the rain?” Norton asked.

“To get wet,” said Barrett, following him. “What’s the news?”

“The Hammer’s glowing. We’re getting company.”

“How do you know it’s a live shipment?”

“It’s been glowing for half an hour. That means they’re taking precautions. They’re sending a new prisoner. Anyway, no supply shipment is due.”

Barrett nodded. “Okay. I’ll come over. If it’s a new man, we’ll bunk him in with Latimer.”

Norton managed a rasping laugh. “Maybe he’s a materialist. Latimer will drive him crazy with all that mystic nonsense. We could put him with Altman.”

“And he’ll be raped in half an hour.”

“Altman’s off that kick now,” said Norton. “He’s trying to create a real woman, not looking for second-rate substitutes.”

“Maybe our new man doesn’t have any spare ribs.”

“Very funny, Jim.” Norton did not look amused. “You know what I want the new man to be? A conservative, that’s what. A black-souled reactionary straight out of Adam Smith. God, that’s what I want.”

“Wouldn’t you be happy with a fellow Bolshevik?”

“This place is full of Bolsheviks,” said Norton. “Of all shades from pale pink to flagrant scarlet. Don’t you think I’m sick of them? Sitting around fishing for trilobites and discussing the relative merits of Kerensky and Malenkov? I need somebody to talk to, Jim. Somebody I can fight with.”

“All right,” Barrett said, slipping into his rain gear. “I’ll see what I can do about hocusing a debating partner out of the Hammer for you. A rip-roaring objectivist, okay?” He laughed. “You know something, maybe there’s been a revolution Up Front since we got our last man. Maybe the left is in and the right is out, and they’ll start shipping us nothing but reactionaries. How would you like that? Fifty or a hundred storm troopers, Charley? Plenty of material to debate economics with. And the place will fill up with more and more of them, until we’re outnumbered, and then maybe they’ll have a putsch and get rid of all the stinking leftists sent here by the old regime, and—”

Barrett stopped. Norton was staring at him in amazement, his faded eyes wide, his hand compulsively smoothing his thinning hair to hide his embarrassment.

Barrett realized that he had just committed one of the most heinous crimes possible at Hawksbill Station: he had started to run off at the mouth. There hadn’t been any call for his outburst. He was supposed to be the strong one of this place, the stabilizer, the man of absolute integrity and principle and sanity on whom the others could lean. And suddenly he had lost control. It was a bad sign. His dead foot was throbbing again; possibly that was the reason.

In a tight voice he said, “Let’s go. Maybe the new man is here already.”

They stepped outside. The rain was beginning to let up; the storm was moving out to sea. In the east over what would one day be the Atlantic, the sky was still clotted with gray mist, but to the west a different grayness was emerging, the shade of normal gray that meant dry weather. Before he had come out here, Barrett had expected to find the sky practically black, because there’d be fewer dust particles to bounce the light around and turn things blue. But the sky seemed to be weary beige. So much for theories.

Through the thinning rain they walked toward the main building. Norton accommodated himself to Barrett’s limping pace, and Barrett, wielding his crutch furiously, did his damndest not to let his infirmity slow them up. He nearly lost his footing twice and fought hard not to let Norton see.

Hawksbill Station spread out before them.

It covered about five hundred acres. In the center of everything was the main building, an ample dome that contained most of their equipment and supplies. At widely spaced intervals, rising from the rock shield like grotesque giant green mushrooms, were the plastic blisters of the individual dwellings. Some, like Barrett’s, were shielded by tin sheeting salvaged from shipments from Up Front. Others stood unprotected, just as they had come from the mouth of the extruder.

The huts numbered about eighty. At the moment, there were a hundred and forty inmates in Hawksbill Station, pretty close to the all-time high. Up Front hadn’t sent back any hut-building materials for a long time, and so all the newer arrivals had to double up with bunkmates. Barrett and all those whose exile had begun before 2014 had the privilege of private dwellings, if they wanted them. (Some did not wish to live alone; Barrett, to preserve his own authority, felt that he was required to.) As new exiles arrived, they bunked in with those who currently lived alone, in reverse order of seniority. Most of the 2015 exiles had been forced to take roommates now. Another dozen deportees and the 2014 group would be doubling up. Of course, there were deaths all up and down the line, and there were plenty who were eager to have company in their huts.

Barrett felt, though, that a man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment ought to have the privilege of privacy, if he desires it. One of his biggest problems here was keeping people from cracking up because there was too little privacy. Propinquity could be intolerable in a place like this.

Norton pointed toward the big, shiny-skinned, green dome of the main building. “There’s Altman going in now. And Rudiger. And Hutchett. Something’s happening!”

Barrett stepped up his pace. Some of the men entering the building saw his bulky figure coming over the rise in the rock and waved to him. Barrett lifted a massive hand in reply. He felt mounting excitement. It was a big event at the Station whenever a new man arrived. Nobody had come for six months, now. That was the longest gap he could remember. It had started to seem as though no one would ever come again.

That would be a catastrophe.

New men were all that stood between the older inmates and insanity. New men brought news from the future, news from the world that was eternally left behind. They contributed new personalities to a group that always was in danger of going stale.

And, Barrett knew, some men—he was not one—lived in the deluded hope that the next arrival might just turn out to be a woman.

That was why they flocked to the main building when the Hammer began to glow. Barrett hobbled down the path. The rain died away just as he reached the entrance.

Within, sixty or seventy Station residents crowded the chamber of the Hammer—just about every man in the place who was able in body and mind and still alert enough to show curiosity about a newcomer. They shouted greetings to Barrett. He nodded, smiled, deflected their questions with amiable gestures.

“Who’s it going to be this time, Jim?”

“Maybe a girl, huh? Around nineteen years old, blond, and built like—”

“I hope he can play stochastic chess, anyway.”

“Look at the glow! It’s deepening!”

Barrett, like the others, stared at the Hammer. The complex, involuted collection of unfathomable instruments burned a bright cherry red, betokening the surge of who knew how many kilowatts being pumped in at the far end of the line.

The glow was beginning to spread to the Anvil now, that broad aluminum bedplate on which all shipments from the future were dropped. In another moment—

“Condition Crimson!” somebody suddenly yelled. “Here he comes!”