Hawksbill Station

VII

Hahn had a cramped, crabbed handwriting that packed a maximum of information into a minimum of space, as though he regarded it as a mortal sin to waste paper. Fair enough. Paper was a scarce commodity here, and evidently Hahn had brought these sheets with him from Up Front. His script was clear, though. So were his opinions. Painfully so.

He had written an analysis of conditions at Hawksbill Station, setting forth in about five thousand words everything that Barrett knew was going sour there. He had neatly ticked off the men as aging revolutionaries in whom the old fervor had turned rancid. He listed the ones who were certifiably psycho, and the ones who were on the edge, and the ones who were hanging on, like Quesada and Norton and Rudiger. Barrett was interested to see that Hahn rated even those three as suffering from severe strain and likely to fly apart at any moment. To him, Quesada and Norton and Rudiger seemed just about as stable as when they had first dropped into the Anvil of Hawksbill Station, but that was possibly the distorting effect of his own blurred perceptions. To an outsider like Hahn, the view was different and perhaps more accurate.

Barrett forced himself not to skip ahead to Hahn’s evaluation of him.

He wasn’t pleased when he came to it. “Barrett,” Hahn had written, “is like a mighty beam that’s been gnawed from within by termites. He looks solid, but one good push would break him apart. A recent injury to his foot has evidently had a bad effect on him. The other men say he used to be physically vigorous and derived much of his authority from his size and strength. Now he can hardly walk. But I feel the trouble with him is inherent in the hie of Hawksbill Station and doesn’t have much to do with his lameness. He’s been cut off from normal human drives for too long. The exercise of power here has provided the illusion of stability for him, but it’s power in a vacuum, and things have happened within Barrett of which he’s totally unaware. He’s in bad need of therapy. He may be beyond help.”

Barrett read that several times. Gnawed from within by termites… one good push… things have happened within him… bad need of therapy… beyond help…

He was less angered than he thought he should have been. Hahn was entitled to his views. Barrett finally stopped rereading his profile and pushed his way to the last page of Hahn’s essay. It ended with the words, “Therefore I recommend prompt termination of the Hawksbill Station penal colony and, where possible, the therapeutic rehabilitation of its inmates.”

What the hell was this?

It sounded like the report of a parole commissioner! But there was no parole from Hawksbill Station. That final sentence let all the viability of what had gone before bleed away. Hahn was pretending to be composing a report to the government Up Front, obviously. But a wall a billion years thick made filing of that report impossible. So Hahn was suffering from delusions, just like Altman and Valdosto and the others. In his fevered mind he believed he could send messages Up Front, pompous documents delineating the flaws and foibles of his fellow prisoners.

That raised a chilling prospect. Hahn might be crazy, but he hadn’t been in the Station long enough to have gone crazy here. He must have brought his insanity with him.

What if they had stopped using Hawksbill Station as a camp for political prisoners, Barrett asked himself, and were starting to use it as an insane asylum?

A cascade of psychos descending on them. Men who had gone honorably buggy under the stress of confinement would have to make room for ordinary Bedlamites. Barrett shivered. He folded up Hahn’s papers and handed them to Latimer, who was sitting a few yards away, watching him intently.

“What did you think of that?” Latimer asked.

“I think it’s hard to evaluate. But possibly friend Hahn is emotionally disturbed. Put this stuff back exactly where you got it, Don. And don’t give Hahn the faintest inkling that you’ve read or removed it.”

“Right.”

“And come to me whenever you think there’s something I ought to know about him,” Barrett said. “He may be a very sick boy. He may need all the help we can give.”

The fishing expedition returned in early afternoon. Barrett saw that the dingy was overflowing with the haul, and Hahn, coming into the camp with his arms full of gaffed trilobites looked sunburned and pleased. Barrett came over to inspect the catch. Rudiger was in an effusive mood and held up a bright red crustacean that might have been the great-great-grandfather of all boiled lobsters, except that it had no front claws and a wicked-looking triple spike where a tail should have been. It was about two feet long, and ugly.

“A new species!” Rudiger crowed. “There’s nothing like this in any museum. I wish I could put it where it would be found. Some mountaintop, maybe.”

“If it could be found, it would have been found,” Barrett reminded him. “Some paleontologist of the twentieth century would have dug it out. So forget it, Mel.”

Hahn said, “I’ve been wondering about that. How is it nobody Up Front ever dug up the fossil remains of Hawksbill Station? Aren’t they worried that one of the early fossil-hunters will find it in the Cambrian strata and raise a fuss?”

Barrett shook his head. “For one thing, no paleontologist from the beginning of the science to the founding of the Station in 2005 ever did dig up Hawksbill. That’s a matter of record, so there was nothing to worry about. If it came to light after 2005, why, everyone would know what it was. No paradox there.”

“Besides,” said Rudiger sadly, “in another billion years this whole strip of rock will be on the floor of the Atlantic, with a couple of miles of sediment over it. There’s not a chance we’ll be found. Or that anyone Up Front will ever see this guy I caught today. Not that I give a damn. I’ve seen him. I’ll dissect him. Their loss.”

“But you regret the fact that science will never know of this species,” Hahn said.

“Sure I do. But is it my fault? Science does know of this species. Me. I’m science. I’m the leading paleontologist of this epoch. Can I help it if I can’t publish my discoveries in the professional journals?” He scowled and walked away, carrying the big red crustacean.

Hahn and Barrett looked at each other. They smiled, in a natural mutual response to Rudiger’s grumbled outburst. Then Barrett’s smile faded.

termites… one good push… therapy…

“Something wrong?” Hahn asked.

“Why?”

“You looked so bleak all of a sudden.”

“My foot gave me a twinge,” Barrett said. “It does that, you know. Here. I’ll give you a hand carrying those things. We’ll have fresh trilobite cocktail tonight.”