Time Travel Omnibus, page 585
“Hahn. Lew Hahn.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Hahn,” the man repeated, still only barely audible.
“When are you from, Lew?”
“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 damned good. 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: he had earned banishment to Hawksbill Station.
They passed the open 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 view would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front of you is what they call Appalachia. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, running from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic Ocean. A little way to the west we’ve got a thing called the Appalachian Geosyncline, which is a trough five hundred miles wide full of water. Somewhere about two thousand miles to the west there’s another trough that they call the Cordilleran Geosyncline. It’s full of water too, and at this particular stage of geological history the patch of land between the geosynclines is below sea level, so where Appalachia ends we’ve got the Inland Sea, currently, running way out to the west. On the far side of the Inland Sea is a narrow north-south land mass called Cascadia that’s going to be California and Oregon and Washington someday. Don’t hold your breath till it happens. I hope you like seafood, Lew.”
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 had 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 appendixes with total aplomb. In his white smock, Quesada looked sufficiently medical to fit the 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 mustache. The little diagnostat in the cradle had gone rapidly to work, flashing information about Hahn’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,” Quesada said.
“That’s what Charley Norton told me. What’s he using? A rag, a bone—”
“I gave him some 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. It’s too bad.”
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 140 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 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.”
III
The patio from the main building to the hut of Donald Latimer was mainly downhill, for which Barrett was grateful even though he knew that he’d have to negotiate the uphill return in a little while. Latimer’s hut was on the eastern side of the Station, looking out over the ocean. They walked slowly toward it. Hahn was solicitous of Barrett’s game leg, and Barrett was irritated by the exaggerated care the younger man took to keep pace with him.
He was puzzled by this Hahn. The man was full of seeming contradictions—showing up here with the worst case of arrival shock Barrett had ever seen, then snapping out of it with remarkable quickness; looking frail and shy, but hiding solid muscles inside his jersey; giving an outer appearance of incompetence, but speaking with calm control. Barrett wondered what this young man had done to earn him the trip to Hawksbill Station, but there was time for such inquiries later. All the time in the world.
Hahn said, “Is everything like this? Just rock and ocean?”
“That’s all. Land life hasn’t evolved yet. Everything’s wonderfully simple, isn’t it? No clutter. No urban sprawl. There’s some moss moving onto land, but not much.”
“And in the sea? Swimming dinosaurs?”
Barrett shook his head. “There won’t be any vertebrates for millions of years. We don’t even have fish yet, let alone reptiles out there. All we can offer is that which creepeth. Some shellfish, some big fellows that look like squids, and trilobites. Seven hundred billion different species of trilobites. We’ve got a man named Rudiger—he’s the one who gave you the drink—who’s making a collection of them. He’s writing the world’s definitive text on trilobites.”
“But nobody will ever read it in—in the future.”
“Up Front, we say.”
“Up Front.”
“That’s the pity of it,” said Barrett. “We told Rudiger to inscribe his book on imperishable plates of gold and hope that it’s found by paleontologists. But he says the odds are against it. A billion years of geology will chew his plates to hell before they can be found.”
Hahn sniffed. “Why does the air smell so strange?”
“It’s a different mix,” Barrett said. “We’ve analyzed it. More nitrogen, a little less oxygen, hardly any C02 at all. But that isn’t really why it smells odd to you. The thing is, it’s pure air, unpolluted by the exhalations of life. Nobody’s been respiring into it but us lads, and there aren’t enough of us to matter.”
Smiling, Hahn said, “I feel a little cheated that it’s so empty. I ex-pected lush jungles of weird plants, and pterodactyls swooping through the air, and maybe a tyrannosaur crashing into a fence around the Station.”
“No jungles. No pterodactyls. No tyrannosaurs. No fences. You didn’t do your homework.”
“Sorry.”
“This is the Late Cambrian. Sea life exclusively.”
“It was very kind of them to pick such a peaceful era as the dumping ground for political prisoners,” Hahn said. “I was afraid it would be all teeth and claws.”
“Kind, hell! They were looking for an era where we couldn’t do any harm. That meant tossing us back before the evolution of mammals, just in case we’d accidentally get hold of the ancestor of all humanity and snuff him out. And while they were at it, they decided to stash us so far in the past that we’d be beyond all land life, on the theory that maybe even if we slaughtered a baby dinosaur it might affect the entire course of the future.”
“They don’t mind if we catch a few trilobites?”
“Evidently they think it’s safe,” Barrett said. “It looks as though they were right. Hawksbill Station has been here for twenty-five years, and it doesn’t seem as though we’ve tampered with future history in any measurable way. Of course, they’re careful not to send us any women.”
“Why is that?”
“So we don’t start reproducing and perpetuating ourselves. Wouldn’t that mess up the time-lines? A successful human outpost in One Billion B.C., that’s had all that time to evolve and mutate and grow? By the time the twenty-first century came around, our descendants would be in charge and the other kind of human being would probably be in penal servitude, and there’d be more paradoxes created than you could shake a trilobite at. So they don’t send the women here. There’s a prison camp for women, too, but it’s a few hundred million years up the time line in the Late Silurian, and never the twain shall meet. That’s why Ned Altman’s trying to build a woman out of dust and garbage.”
“God made Adam out of less.”
“Altman isn’t God,” Barrett said. “That’s the root of his whole problem. Look, here’s the hut where you’re going to stay. I’m rooming you with Don Latimer. He’s a very sensitive, interesting, pleasant person. He used to be a physicist before he got into politics, and he’s been here about a dozen years, and I might as well warn you that he’s developed a strong and somewhat cockeyed mystic streak lately. The fellow he was rooming with killed himself last year, and since then he’s been trying to find some way out of here through extrasensory powers.”
“Is he serious?”
“I’m afraid he is. And we try to take him seriously. We all humor each other at Hawksbill Station; it’s the only way we avoid a mass psychosis. Latimer will probably try to get you to collaborate with him on his project. If you don’t like living with him, I can arrange a transfer for you. But I want to see how he reacts to someone new at the Station. I’d like you to give him a chance.”
“Maybe I’ll even help him find his psionic gateway.”
“If you do, take me along,” said Barrett. They both laughed. Then he rapped at Latimer’s door. There was no answer, and after a moment Barrett pushed the door open. Hawksbill Station had no locks.
Latimer sat in the middle of the bare rock floor, cross-legged, meditating. He was a slender, gentle-faced man just beginning to look old. Right now he seemed a million miles away, ignoring them completely. Hahn shrugged. Barrett put a finger to his lips. They waited in silence for a few minutes, and then Latimer showed signs of coming up from his trance.
He got to his feet in a single flowing motion, without using his hands. In a low, courteous voice he said to Hahn, “Have you just arrived?”
“Within the last hour. I’m Lew Hahn.”
“Donald Latimer. I regret that I have to make your acquaintance in these surroundings. But maybe we won’t have to tolerate this illegal imprisonment much longer.”
Barrett said, “Don, Lew is going to bunk with you. I think you’ll get along well. He was an economist in 2029 until they gave him the Hammer.”
“Where did you live?” Latimer asked, animation coming into his eyes.
“San Francisco.”
The glow faded. Latimer said, “Were you ever in Toronto? I’m from there. I had a daughter—she’d be twenty-three now, Nella Latimer—I wondered if you knew her.”
“No. I’m, sorry.”
“It wasn’t very likely. But I’d love to know what kind of a woman she became. She was a little girl when I last saw her. Now I guess she’s married. Or perhaps they’ve sent her to the other Station. Nella Latimer—you’re sure you didn’t know her?”
Barrett left them together. It looked as though they’d get along. He told Latimer to bring Hahn up to the main building at dinner for introductions, and went out. A chilly drizzle had begun again. Barrett made his way slowly, painfully up the hill. It had been sad to see the light flicker from Latimer’s eyes when Hahn said he didn’t know his daughter. Most of the time, men at Hawksbill Station tried not to speak about their families, preferring to keep those tormenting memories well repressed. But the arrival of newcomers generally stirred old ties. There was never any news of relatives, and no way to obtain any, because it was impossible for the Station to communicate with anyone Up Front. No way to ask for the photo of a loved one, no way to request specific medicines, no way to obtain a certain book or a coveted tape. In a mindless, impersonal way, Up Front sent periodic shipments to the Station of things thought useful—reading matter, medical supplies, technical equipment, food. Occasionally they were startling in their generosity, as when they sent a case of Burgundy, or a box of sensory spools, or a recharger for the power pack. Such gifts usually meant a brief thaw in the world situation, which customarily produced a short-lived desire to be kind to the boys in Hawksbill Station. But they had a policy about sending information about relatives. Or about contemporary newspapers. Fine wine, yes; a tridim of a daughter who would never be seen again, no.
For all Up Front knew, there was no one alive in Hawksbill Station. A plague could have killed every one off ten years ago, but there was no way of telling. That was why the shipments still came back. The government whirred and clicked with predictable continuity. The government, whatever else it might be, was not malicious. There were other kinds of totalitarianism beside bloody repressive tyranny.
Pausing at the top of the hill, Barrett caught his breath. Naturally, the alien air no longer smelled strange to him. He filled his lungs with it. Once again the rain ceased. Through the grayness came the sunshine, making the naked rocks sparkle. Barrett closed his eyes a moment and leaned on his crutch, and saw as though on an inner screen the creatures with many legs climbing up out of the sea, and the mossy carpets spreading, and the flowerless plants uncoiling and spreading their scaly branches, and the dull hides of eerie amphibians glistening on the shores, and the tropic heat of the coal-forming epoch descending like a glove over the world.
All that lay far in the future. Dinosaurs. Little chittering mammals. Pithecanthropus in the forests of Java. Sargon and Hannibal and Attila, and Orville Wright, and Thomas Edison, and Edmond Hawksbill. And finally a benign government that would find the thoughts of some men so intolerable that the only safe place to which they could be banished was a rock at the beginning of time. The government was too civilized to put men to death for subversive activities, and too cowardly to let them remain alive. The compromise was the living death of Hawksbill Station. A billion years of impassable time was suitable insulation even for the most nihilistic idea.
