HAWKSBILL STATION
                      Robert Silverberg
   Silverberg is a professional writer to his fingertips who, at the ripe old
age of thirty-three, already has a lifetime of work behind him. I
commissioned an article from him for a science fiction magazine in 1953,
his first professional sale, and I feel somewhat like the man who tapped
the bomb with the hammer to see if it was live. In 1956 Bob was
awarded a Hugo as the Most Promising New Writer of the Year, and he
grabbed it without even slowing down. He has written at least thirty SF
novels, and over five hundred stories. But for the past few years he has
worked away from science fiction, doing both fiction and nonfiction. It is
a pleasure now to welcome him home. They were right in 1956.
"Hawksbill Station" is a major story by a major writer. The promise
they awarded has certainly been fulfilled.


                                      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!"


                                     II


   A billion years up the timeline, power was flooding into the real
Hammer of which this was only the partial replica. A man—or something
else, perhaps a shipment of supplies—stood in the center of the real Anvil,
waiting for the Hawksbill Field to enfold him and kick him back to the
early Paleozoic. The effect of time-travel was very much like being hit with
a gigantic hammer and driven clear through the walls of the continuum:
hence the governing metaphors for the parts of the machine.

   Setting up Hawksbill Station had been a long, slow job. The Hammer
had knocked a pathway and had sent back the nucleus of the receiving
station, first. Since there was no receiving station on hand to receive the
receiving station, a certain amount of waste had occurred. It wasn't
necessary to have a Hammer and Anvil on the receiving end, except as a
fine control to prevent temporal spread; without the equipment, the field
wandered a little, and it was possible to scatter consecutive shipments
over a span of twenty or thirty years. There was plenty of such temporal
garbage all around Hawksbill Station, stuff that had been intended for
original installation, but which because of tuning imprecisions in the
pre-Hammer days had landed a couple of decades (and a couple of
hundred miles) away from the intended site.

   Despite such difficulties, they had finally sent through enough
components to the master temporal site to allow for the construction of a
receiving station. Then the first prisoners had gone through; they were
technicians who knew how to put the Hammer and Anvil together. They
had done the job. After that, outfitting Hawksbill Station had been easy.

   Now the Hammer glowed, meaning that they had activated the
Hawksbill Field on the sending end, somewhere up around 2028 or 2030
A. D. All the sending was done there. All the receiving was done here. It
didn't work the other way. Nobody really knew why, although there was a
lot of superficially profound talk about the rules of entropy.

  There was a whining, hissing sound as the edges of the Hawksbill Field
began to ionize the atmosphere in the room. Then came the expected
thunderclap of implosion, caused by an imperfect overlapping of the
quantity of air that was subtracted from this era and the quantity that
was being thrust into it. And then, abruptly, a man dropped out of the
Hammer and lay, stunned and limp, on the gleaming Anvil.

   He looked young, which surprised Barrett considerably. He seemed to
be well under thirty. Generally, only middle-aged men were sent to
Hawksbill Station. Incorrigibles, who had to be separated from humanity
for the general good. The youngest man in the place now had been close to
forty when he arrived. The sight of this lean, clean-cut boy drew a hiss of
anguish from a couple of the men in the room, and Barrett understood the
constellation of emotions that pained them.

   The new man sat up. He stirred like a child coming out of a long, deep
sleep. He looked around.

   His face was very pale. His thin lips seemed bloodless. His blue eyes
blinked rapidly. His jaws worked as though he wanted to say something,
but could not find the words.

  There were no harmful physiological effects to time-travel, but it could
be a jolt to the consciousness. The last moments before the Hammer
descended were very much like the final moments beneath the guillotine.
The departing prisoner took his last look at the world of rocket transport
and artificial organs, at the world in which he had lived and loved and
agitated for a political cause, and then he was rammed into the
inconceivably remote past on a one-way journey. It was a gloomy business,
and it was not very surprising that the newcomers arrived in a state of
emotional shock.

   Barrett elbowed his way through the crowd. Automatically, the others
made way for him. He reached the lip of the Anvil and leaned over it,
extending a hand to the new man. His broad smile was met by a look of
blank bewilderment.

   "I'm Jim Barrett. Welcome to Hawksbill Station. Here —get off that
thing before a load of groceries lands on top of you." Wincing a little as he
shifted his weight, Barrett pulled the new man down from the Anvil.

   Barrett beckoned to Mel Rudiger, and the plump anarchist handed the
new man an alcohol capsule. He took it and pressed it to his arm without
a word. Charley Norton offered him a candy bar. The man shook it off. He
looked groggy. A real case of temporal shock, Barrett thought, possibly the
worst he had ever seen. The newcomer hadn't even spoken yet.

  Barrett said, "We'll go to the infirmary and check you out. Then I'll
assign you your quarters. There's time for you to find your way around
and meet everybody later on. What's your name?"

  "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 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."


                                     III


   The path 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 half a billion
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 CO 2 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 expected
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 ; is 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 tar 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 timelines? 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 should 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. 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 everyone off ten years ago, but there was no way
of telling. Thai 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 besides 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.

   Barrett struggled the rest of the way back toward his hut. He had long
since come to accept his exile, but accepting his ruined foot was another
matter entirely. The idle wish to find a way to regain the freedom of his
own time no longer possessed him; but he wished with all his soul that the
blank-faced administrators Up Front would send back a kit that would
allow him to rebuild his foot.

   He entered his hut and flung his crutch aside, sulking down instantly on
his cot. There had been no cots when he had come to Hawksbill Station.
He had come here in the fourth year of the Station, when there were only a
dozen buildings and little in the way of creature comforts. It had been a
miserable place, then, but the steady accretion of shipments from Up
Front had made it relatively tolerable. Of the fifty or so prisoners who had
preceded Barrett to Hawksbill, none remained alive. He had held the
highest seniority for almost ten years. Time moved here at one-to-one
correlation with time Up Front; the Hammer was locked on this point of
time, so that Hahn, arriving here today more than twenty years after
Barrett, had departed from a year Up Front more than twenty years after
the time of Barrett's expulsion. Barrett had not had the heart to begin
pumping Hahn for news of 2029 so soon. He would learn all he needed to
know, and small cheer it would be, anyway.

   Barrett reached for a book. But the fatigue of hobbling ; around the
station had taken more out of him than he realized. He looked at the page
for a moment. Then he put it away and closed his eyes and dozed.
                                    IV


   That evening, as every evening, the men of Hawksbill Station gathered
in the main building for dinner and recreation. It was not mandatory, and
some men chose to eat alone. But tonight nearly everyone who was in full
possession of his faculties was there, because this was one of the
infrequent occasions when a newcomer had arrived to be questioned
about the world of men.

  Hahn looked uneasy about his sudden notoriety. He seemed to be
basically shy, unwilling to accept all the attention now being thrust upon
him. There he sat in the middle of the group while men twenty and thirty
years his senior crowded in on him with their questions, and it was
obvious that he wasn't enjoying the session.

   Sitting to one side, Barrett took little part in the discussion. His
curiosity about Up Front's ideological shifts had: ebbed a long time ago. It
was hard for him to realize that he had once been so passionately
concerned about concepts like syndicalism and the dictatorship of the
proletariat and the guaranteed annual wage that he had been willing to
risk imprisonment over them. His concern for humanity had not waned,
merely the degree of his involvement in the twenty-first century's political
problems. After twenty years at Hawksbill Station, Up Front had become
unreal to Jim Barrett, and his energies centered around the crises and
challenges of what he had come to think of as "his own" time—the late
Cambrian.

  So he listened, but more with an ear for what the talk revealed about
Lew Hahn than for what it revealed about current events Up Front. And
what it revealed about Lew Hahn was mainly a matter of what was not
revealed.

  Hahn didn't say much. He seemed to be feinting and evading.

  Charley Norton wanted to know, "Is there any sign of a weakening of the
phony conservatism yet? I mean, they've been promising the end of big
government for thirty years, and it gets bigger all the time."

  Hahn moved restlessly in his chair. "They still promise. As soon as
conditions become stabilized—"
  "Which is when?"

  "I don't know. I suppose they're making words."

  "What about the Martian Commune?" demanded Sid Hutchett. "Have
they been infiltrating agents onto Earth?"

  "I couldn't really say."

  "How about the Gross Global Product?" Mel Rudiger wanted to know.
"What's its curve? Still holding level, or has it started to drop?"

  Hahn tugged at his ear. "I think it's slowly edging down."

   "Where does the index stand?" Rudiger asked. "The last figures we had,
for '25, it was at 909. But in four years—"

  "It might be something like 875 now," said Hahn.

  It struck Barrett as a little odd that an economist would be so hazy
about the basic economic statistic. Of course, he didn't know how long
Hahn had been imprisoned before getting the Hammer. Maybe he simply
wasn't up on the recent figures.

   Charley Norton wanted to find out some things about the legal rights of
citizens. Hahn couldn't tell him. Rudiger asked about the impact of
weather control—whether the supposedly conservative government of
liberators was still ramming programmed weather down the mouths of
the citizens—and Hahn wasn't sure. Hahn couldn't rightly say much about
the functions of the judiciary, whether it had recovered any of the power
stripped from it by the Enabling Act of '18. He didn't have any comments
to offer on the tricky subject of population control. In fact, his
performance was striking for its lack of hard information.

  "He isn't saying much at all," Charley Norton grumbled to the silent
Barrett. "He's putting up a smokescreen. But either he's not telling what
he knows, or he doesn't know."

  "Maybe he's not very bright," Barrett suggested.

  "What did he do to get here? He must have had some kind of deep
commitment. But it doesn't show, Jim! He's an intelligent kid, but he
doesn't seem plugged in to anything that ever mattered to any of us."

  Doc Quesada offered a thought. "Suppose he isn't a political at all.
Suppose they're sending a different kind of prisoner back now. Axe
murderers, or something. A quiet kid who quietly chopped up sixteen
people one Sunday morning. Naturally he isn't interested in politics."

   Barrett shook his head. "I doubt that. I think he's just clamming up
because he's shy or ill at ease. It's his first night here, remember. He's just
been kicked out of his own world and there's no going back. He may have
left a wife and baby behind, you know. He may simply not give a damn
tonight about sitting up there and spouting the latest word on abstract
philosophical theory, when all he wants to do is go off and cry his eyes out.
I say we ought to leave him alone."

   Quesada and Norton looked convinced. They shook their heads in
agreement; but Barrett didn't voice his opinion to the room in general. He
let the quizzing of Hahn continue until it petered out of its own accord.
The men began to drift away. A couple of them went in back, to convert
Hahn's vague generalities into the lead story for the next handwritten
edition of the Hawksbill Station Times. Rudiger stood on a table and
shouted out that he was going night fishing, and four men asked to join
him. Charley Norton sought out his usual debating partner, the nihilist
Ken Belardi, and reopened, like a festering wound, their discussion of
planning versus chaos, which bored them both to the point of screaming.
The nightly games of stochastic chess began. The loners who had made
rare visits to the main building simply to see the new man went back to
their huts to do whatever they did in them alone each night.

  Hahn stood apart, fidgeting and uncertain.

  Barrett went up to him. "I guess you didn't really want to be quizzed
tonight," he said.

   "I'm sorry I couldn't have been more informative. I've been out of
circulation a while, you see."

  "But you were politically active, weren't you?"

 "Oh, yes," Hahn said. "Of course." He flicked his tongue over his lips.
What's supposed to happen now/

  "Nothing in particular. We don't have organized activities here. Doc
and I are going out on sick call. Care to join us?"

  "What does it involve?" Hahn asked.
  "Visiting some of the worst cases. It can be grim, but you'll get a
panoramic view of Hawksbill Station."

  "I'd like to go."

   Barrett gestured to Quesada, and the three of them left the building.
This was a nightly ritual for Barrett, difficult as it was since he had hurt
his foot. Before turning in, he visited the goofy ones and the psycho ones
and the catatonic ones, tucked them in, wished them a good night and a
healed mind in the morning. Someone had to show them that he cared.
Barrett did.

   Outside, Hahn peered up at the moon. It was nearly full tonight, shining
like a burnished coin, its face a pale salmon color and hardly pockmarked
at all.

  "I looks so different here," Hahn said. "The craters —where are the
craters?"

   "Most of them haven't been formed yet," said Barrett. "A billion years is
a long time even for the moon. Most of its upheavals are still ahead. We
think it may still have an atmosphere, too. That's why it looks pink to us.
Of course, Up Front hasn't bothered to send us much in the way of
astronomical equipment. We can only guess."

   Hahn started to say something. He cut himself off after one blurted
syllable.

  Quesada said, "Don't hold it back. What were you about to suggest?"

   Hahn laughed. "That you ought to fly up there and take a look. It struck
me as odd that you'd spend all these years here theorizing about whether
the moon's got an atmosphere and wouldn't ever once go up to look. But I
forgot."

   "It would be useful to have a commute ship from Up Front," Barrett
said. "But it hasn't occurred to them. All we can do is look. The moon's a
popular place in '29, is it?"

  "The biggest resort in the system," Hahn said. "I was there on my
honeymoon. Leah and I—"

  He stopped again.

  Barrett said hurriedly, "This is Bruce Valdosto's hut. He cracked up a
few weeks ago. When we go in, stand behind us so he doesn't see you. He
might be violent with a stranger. He's unpredictable."

   Valdosto was a husky man in his late forties, with swarthy skin, coarse
curling black hair, and the broadest shoulders any man had ever had.
Sitting down, he looked even burlier than Jim Barrett, which was saying a
great deal. But Valdosto had short, stumpy legs, the legs of a man of
ordinary stature tacked to the trunk of a giant, which spoiled the effect
completely. In his years Up Front, he had totally refused any prosthesis.
He believed in living with deformities.

   Right now he was strapped into a webfoam cradle. His domed forehead
was flecked with beads of sweat; his eyes were glittering beadily in the
darkness. He was a very sick man. Once he had been clear-minded enough
to throw a sleet bomb into a meeting of the Council of Syndics, giving a
dozen of them a bad case of gamma I poisoning, but now he scarcely knew
up from down, right from left.

  Barrett leaned over him and said, "How are you, 't Bruce?"

  "Who's that?"

  "Jim. It's a beautiful night, Bruce. How'd you like to come outside and
get some fresh air? The moon's almost full."

  "I've got to rest. The committee meeting tomorrow—"

  "It's been postponed."

  "But how can it? The Revolution—"

  "That's been postponed too. Indefinitely."

  "Are they disbanding the cells?" Valdosto asked harshly.

   "We don't know yet. We're waiting for orders. Come outside, Bruce. The
air will do you good."

  Muttering, Valdosto let himself be unlaced. Quesada and Barrett pulled
him to his feet and propelled him through the door of the hut. Barrett
caught sight of Hahn in the shadows, his face somber with shock.

   They stood together outside the hut. Barrett pointed to the moon. "It's
got such a lovely color here. Not like the dead thing Up Front. And look,
look down there, Bruce. The sea breaking on the rocky shore. Rudiger's out
fishing. I can see his boat by moonlight."

  "Striped bass," said Valdosto. "Sunnies. Maybe he'll catch some
sunnies."

   "There aren't any sunnies here. They haven't evolved yet." Barrett fished
in his pocket and drew out something ridged and glossy, about two inches
long. It was the exoskeleton of a small trilobite. He offered it to Valdosto,
who shook his head.

  "Don't give me that cockeyed crab."

  "It's a trilobite, Bruce. It's extinct, but so are we. We're a billion years in
our own past."

  "You must be crazy," Valdosto said in a calm, low voice that belied his
wild-eyed appearance. He took the trilobite from Barrett and hurled it
against the rocks. "Cockeyed crab," he muttered.

  Quesada shook his head sadly. He and Barrett led the sick man into the
hut again. Valdosto did not protest as the medic gave him the sedative.
His weary mind, rebelling entirely against the monstrous concept that he
had been exiled to the inconceivably remote past, welcomed sleep.

  When they went out Barrett saw Hahn 'holding the trilobite on his palm
and staring at it in wonder. Hahn offered it to him, but Barrett brushed it
away. "Keep it if you like," he said. "There are more."

   They went on. They found Ned Altman beside his hut, crouching on his
knees and patting his hands over the crude, lopsided form of what, from
its exaggerated breasts and hips, appeared to be the image of a woman.
He stood up when they appeared. Altman was a neat little man with yellow
hair and nearly invisible white eyebrows. Unlike anyone else in the
Station, he had actually been a government man once, fifteen years ago,
before seeing through the myth of syndicalist capitalism and joining one
of the underground factions. Eight years at Hawksbill Station had done
things to him.

   Altman pointed to his golem and said, "I hoped there'd be lightning in
the rain today. That'll do it, you know. But there isn't much lightning this
time of year. She'll get up alive, and then I'll need you, Doc, to give her her
shots and trim away some of the rough places."

  Quesada forced a smile. "I'll be glad to do it, Ned. But you know the
terms."

   "Sure. When I'm through with her, you get her. You think I'm a goddam
monopolist? I'll share her. There'll be a waiting list. Just so you don't
forget who made her, though. She'll remain mine, whenever I need her."
He noticed Hahn. "Who are you?"

  "He's new," Barrett said. "Lew Hahn. He came this afternoon."

   "Ned Altman," said Altman with a courtly bow. "Formerly in
government service. You're pretty young, aren't you? How's your sex
orientation? Hetero?"

  Hahn winced. "I'm afraid so."

  "It's okay. I wouldn't touch you. I've got a project going, here. But I just
want you to know, I'll put you on my list. You're young and you've probably
got stronger needs than some of us. I won't forget about you, even though
you're new here."

  Quesada coughed. "You ought to get some rest now, Ned. Maybe there'll
be lightning tomorrow."

  Altman did not resist. The doctor took him aside and put him to bed,
while Hahn and Barrett surveyed the man's handiwork. Hahn pointed
toward the figure's middle.

   "He's left out something essential," he said. "If he's planning to make
love to this girl after he's finished creating her, he'd better—"

  "It was there yesterday," said Barrett. "He must be changing orientation
again." Quesada emerged from the hut. They went on, down the rocky
path.

   Barrett did not make the complete circuit that night. Ordinarily, he
would have gone all the way down to Latimer's hut overlooking the sea, for
Latimer was on his list of sick ones. But Barrett had visited Latimer once
that day, and he didn't think his aching good leg was up to another hike
that far. So after he and Quesada and Hahn had been to all of the easily
accessible huts and had visited the man who prayed for alien beings to
rescue him and the man who was trying to break into a parallel universe
where everything was as it ought to be in the world and the man who lay
on his cot sobbing for all his wakeful hours, Barrett said good night to his
companions and allowed Quesada to escort Hahn back to his hut without
him.

   After observing Hahn for half a day, Barrett realized he did not know
much more about him than when he had first dropped onto the Anvil. But
maybe Hahn would open up a little more, after he'd been here a while.
Barrett stared up at the salmon moon and reached into his pocket to
finger the little trilobite before he remembered that he had given it to
Hahn. He shuffled into his hut. He wondered how long ago Hahn had
taken that lunar honeymoon trip.


                                      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.


                                    VI


  A couple of days passed before Barrett had the chance to: draw Lew
Hahn aside. The Inland Sea party had set out, and in a way that was too
bad, for Barrett could have used Charley Norton's services in penetrating
Hahn's armor.; Norton was the most gifted theorist around, a man who
could weave a tissue of dialectic from the least promising material. If
anyone could find out the depth of Hahn's Marxist commitment, if any, it
was Norton.
   But Norton was leading the expedition, so Barrett had to do the
interrogating himself. His Marxism was a trifle rusty, and he couldn't
thread his path through the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyite, Khrushchevist,
Maoist, Berenkovskyite and Mgumbweist schools with Charley Norton's
skills. Yet he knew what questions to ask.

   He picked a rainy evening when Hahn seemed to be in a fairly outgoing
mood. There had been an hour's entertainment that night, an ingenious
computer-composed film that Sid Hutchett had programmed last week.
Up Front had been kind enough to ship back a modest computer, and
Hutchett had rigged it to do animations by specifying line widths and
lengths, shades of gray and progression of raster units. It was a simple but
remarkably clever business,; and it brightened a dull night.

   Afterward, sensing that Hahn was relaxed enough to lower his guard a
bit, Barrett said, "Hutchett's a rare one. Did you meet him before he went
on the trip?"

  "Tall fellow with a sharp nose and no chin?"

   "That's the one. A clever boy. He was the top computer man for the
Continental Liberation Front until they caught him in '19. He
programmed that fake broadcast in which Chancellor Dantell denounced
his own regime. Remember?"

  "I'm not sure I do." Hahn frowned. "How long ago was this?"

   "The broadcast was in 2018. Would that be before your time? Only
eleven years ago—"

  "I was nineteen then," said Hahn. "I guess I wasn't very politically
sophisticated."

  "Too busy studying economics, I guess."

  Hahn grinned. "That's right. Deep in the dismal science."

  "And you never heard that broadcast? Or even heard of it?"

  "I must have forgotten."

  "The biggest hoax of the century," Barrett said, "and you forgot it. You
know the Continental Liberation Front, of course."

  "Of course." Hahn looked uneasy.
  "Which group did you say you were with?"

  "The People's Crusade for Liberty."

  "I don't know it. One of the newer groups?"

  "Less than five years old. It started in California."

  "What's its program?"

  "Oh, the usual," Hahn said. "Free elections, representative government,
an opening of the security files, restoration of civil liberties."

  "And the economic orientation? Pure Marxist or one of the offshoots?"

  "Not really any, I guess. We believed in a kind of— well, capitalism with
some government restraints."

   "A little to the right of state socialism and a little to the left of
laissez-faire?" Barrett suggested.

  "Something like that."

   "But that system was tried and failed, wasn't it? It had its day. It led
inevitably to total socialism, which produced the compensating backlash
of syndicalist capitalism, and then we got a government that pretended to
be libertarian while actually stifling all individual liberties in the name of
freedom. So if your group simply wanted to turn the clock back to 1955,
say, there couldn't be much to its ideas."

   Hahn looked bored. "You've got to understand I wasn't in the top
ideological councils."

  "Just an economist?"

  "That's it. I drew up plans for the conversion to our system."

  "Basing your work on the modified liberalism of Ricardo?"

  "Well, in a sense."

  "And avoiding the tendency to fascism that was found in the thinking of
Keynes?"

  "You could say so," Hahn said. He stood up, flashing a quick, vague
smile. "Look, Jim, I'd love to argue this further with you some other time,
but I've really got to go now. Ned Altman talked me into coming around
and helping him do a lightning-dance to bring that pile of dirt to life. So if
you don't mind—"

  Hahn beat a hasty retreat, without looking back.

  Barrett was more perplexed than ever. Hahn hadn't been "arguing"
anything. He had been carrying on a lame and feeble conversation, letting
himself be pushed hither and thither by Barrett's questions. And he had
spouted a lot of nonsense. He didn't seem to know Keynes from Ricardo,
nor to care about it, which was odd for a self-professed economist. He
didn't have a shred of an idea what his own political party stood for. He
had so little revolutionary background that he was unaware even of
Hutchett's astonishing hoax of eleven years back.

  He seemed phony from top to bottom.

  How was it possible that this kid had been deemed worthy of exile to
Hawksbill Station, anyhow? Only the top firebrands went there.
Sentencing a man to Hawksbill was like sentencing him to death, and it
wasn't done lightly. Barrett couldn't imagine why Hahn was here. He
seemed genuinely distressed at being exiled, and evidently he had left a
beloved wife behind, but nothing else rang true about the man.

  Was he—as Latimer suggested—some kind of spy?

  Barrett rejected the idea out of hand. He didn't want Latimer's
paranoia infecting him. The government wasn't likely to send anyone on a
one-way trip to the Late Cambrian just to spy on a bunch of aging
revolutionaries who could never make trouble again. But what was Hahn
doing here, then?

  He would bear further watching, Barrett thought.

  Barrett took care of some of the watching himself. But he had plenty of
assistance. Latimer. Altman. Six or seven others. Latimer had recruited
most of the ambulatory psycho cases, the ones who were superficially
functional but full of all kinds of fears and credulities.

  They were keeping an eye on the new man.

   On the fifth day after his arrival, Hahn went out fishing in Rudiger's
crew. Rudiger never went far from shore— eight hundred, a thousand
yards out—but the water was rough even there. The waves came rolling in
with X thousand miles of gathered impact behind them. A continental
shelf sloped off at a wide angle, so that even at a substantial distance off
shore the water wasn't very deep. Rudiger had taken soundings up to a
mile out, and had reported depths no greater than a hundred and sixty
feet. Nobody had gone past a mile.

  It wasn't that they were afraid of falling off the side of the world if they
went too far east. It was simply that a mile was a long distance to row in
an open boat, using stubby oars made from old packing cases. Up Front
hadn't thought to spare an outboard motor for them.

   Looking toward the horizon, Barrett had an odd thought. He had been
told that the women's equivalent of Hawksbill Station was safely
segregated out of reach, a couple of hundred million years up the
time-line. But how did he know that? There could be another station;
somewhere else in this very year, and they'd never know about it. A camp
of women, say, living on the far side of the ocean, or even across the Inland
Sea.

  It wasn't very likely, he knew. With the entire past to: pick from, the
edgy men Up Front wouldn't take any chance that the two groups of exiles
might get together; and spawn a tribe of little subversives. They'd take
every; precaution to put an impenetrable barrier of epochs between them.
Yet Barrett thought he could make it sound convincing to the other men.
With a little effort he could get them to believe in the existence of several
simultaneous Hawksbill Stations scattered on this level of time.

  Which could be our salvation, he thought.

   The instances of degenerative psychosis were beginning 't to snowball,
now. Too many men had been here too long and one crackup was starting
to feed the next, in this blank lifeless world where humans were never
meant to live. The men needed projects to keep them going. They were
starting to slip off into harebrained projects, like Altman's Frankenstein
girl friend and Latimer's psi pursuit.

  Suppose, Barrett thought, I could get them steamed up about reaching
the other continents?

  A round-the-world expedition. Maybe they could build some kind of big
ship. That would keep a lot of men busy for a long time. And they'd need
navigational equipment; —compasses, sextants, chronometers, whatnot.
Somebody would have to design an improvised radio, too. It was the kind
of project that might take thirty or forty years. A focus for our energies,
Barrett thought. Of course, I won't live to see the ship set sail. But even so,
it's a way of staving off collapse. We've built our staircase to the sea. Now
we need something bigger to do. Idle hands make for idle minds… sick
minds…

  Turning, he saw Latimer and Altman standing behind him. "How long
have you been there?" he asked.

  "Two minutes," said Latimer. "We brought you something to look at."

   Altman nodded vigorously. "You ought to read it. We brought it for you
to read."

  "What is it?"

   Latimer handed over a folded sheaf of papers. "I found this tucked away
in Hahn's bunk after he went out with Rudiger. I know I'm not supposed
to be invading his privacy, but I had to have a look at what he's been
writing. There it is. He's a spy, all right."

   Barrett glanced at the papers in his hand. "I'll read it a little later. What
is it about?"

   "It's a description of the station, and a profile of most of the men in it,"
said Latimer. He smiled frostily. "Hahn's private opinion of me is that I've
gone mad. His private opinion of you is a little more flattering, but not
much."

  Altman said, "He's also been hanging around the Hammer."

  "What?"

   "I saw him going there late last night. He went into the building. I
followed him. He was looking at the Hammer."

  "Why didn't you tell me that right away?" Barrett snapped.

  "I wasn't sure it was important," Altman said. "I had to talk it over with
Don first. And I couldn't do that until Hahn had gone out fishing."

  Sweat burst out on Barrett's face. "Listen, Ned, if you ever catch Hahn
going near the timetravel equipment again, you let me know in a hurry.
Without consulting Don or anyone else. Clear?"
  "Clear," said Altman. He giggled. "You know what I think? They've
decided to exterminate us Up Front. Hahn's been sent here to check us out
as a suicide volunteer. Then they're going to send a bomb through the
Hammer and blow the Station up. We ought to wreck the Hammer and
Anvil before they get a chance."

  "But why would they send a suicide volunteer?" Latimer asked. "Unless
they've got some way to rescue their spy--"

  "In any case we shouldn't take any chance," Altman argued. "Wreck the
Hammer. Make it impossible for them to bomb us from Up Front."

  "That might be a good idea. But—"

  "Shut up, both of you," Barrett growled. "Let me look at these papers."

  He walked a few steps away from them and sat down on a shelf of rock.
He began to read.


                                   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."


                                     VIII


  A little before midnight, Barrett was awakened by footsteps outside his
hut. As he sat up, groping for the luminescence switch, Ned Altman came
blundering through the door. Barrett blinked at him. "What's the matter?"

 "Hahn!" Altman rasped. "He's fooling around with the Hammer again.
We just saw him go into the building."

  Barrett shed his sleepiness like a seal bursting out of; water. Ignoring
the insistent throb in his leg, he pulled himself from bed and grabbed
some clothing. He was; more apprehensive than he wanted Altman to see.
If Hahn, fooling around with the temporal mechanisms, accidentally
smashed the Hammer, they might never get replacement equipment from
Up Front. Which would mean '. that all future shipments of supplies—if
there were any. —would come as random shoots that might land in any old
year. What business did Hahn have with the machine, anyway?

  Altman said, "Latimer's up there keeping an eye on him. He got
suspicious when Hahn didn't come back to the hut, and he got me, and we
went looking for him. And there he was, sniffing around the Hammer."

  "Doing what?"

  "I don't know. As soon as we saw him go in, I came I down here to get
you. Don's watching."

  Barrett stumped his way out of the hut and did his best to run toward
the main building. Pain shot like trails of hot acid up the lower half of his
body. The crutch dug mercilessly into his left armpit as he leaned all his
weight into it. His crippled foot, swinging freely, burned with a cold glow.
His right leg, which was carrying most of the burden, creaked and popped.
Altman ran breathlessly! alongside him. The Station was silent at this
hour.

   As they passed Quesada's hut, Barrett considered waking the medic and
taking him along. He decided against it. Whatever trouble Hahn might be
up to, Barrett felt he could handle it himself. There was some strength left
in the old gnawed beam.

   Latimer stood at the entrance to the main dome. He was right on the
edge of panic, or perhaps over the edge. Hew seemed to be gibbering with
fear and shock. Barrett had never seen a man gibber before.

  He clamped a big paw on Latimer's thin shoulder and said harshly,
"Where is he? Where's Hahn?"

  "He—disappeared."

  "What do you mean? Where did he go?"

   Latimer moaned. His face was fishbelly white. "He got onto the Anvil,"
Latimer blurted. "The light came on— the glow. And then Hahn
disappeared!"
  "No," Barrett said. "It isn't possible. You must be mistaken."

  "I saw him go!"

  "He's hiding somewhere in the building," Barrett insisted. "Close that
door! Search for him!"

   Altman said, "He probably did disappear, Jim. If Don says he
disappeared—"

  "He climbed right on the Anvil. Then everything turned red, and he was
gone."

   Barrett clenched his fists. There was a white-hot blaze just behind his
forehead that almost made him forget about his foot. He saw his mistake
now. He had depended for his espionage on two men who were patently
and unmistakably insane, and that had been itself a not very sane thing to
do. A man is known by his choice of lieutenants. Well, he had relied on
Altman and Latimer, and now they were giving him the sort of
information that such spies could be counted on to supply.

  "You're hallucinating," he told Latimer curtly. "Ned, go wake Quesada
and get him here right away. You, Don, you stand here by the entrance,
and if Hahn shows up I want you to scream at the top of your lungs. I'm
going to search the building for him."

   "Wait," Latimer said. He seemed to be in control of himself again. "Jim,
do you remember when I asked you if you thought I was crazy? You said
you didn't. You trusted me. Well, don't stop trusting me now. I tell you I'm
not hallucinating. I saw Hahn disappear. I can't explain it, but I'm
rational enough to know what I saw."

  In a milder tone Barrett said, "All right. Maybe so. Stay by the door,
anyway. I'll run a quick check."

   He started to make the circuit of the dome, beginning with the room
where the Hammer was located. Everything seemed to be in order there.
No Hawksbill Field glow was in evidence, and nothing had been disturbed.
The room had no closets or cupboards in which Hahn could be hiding.
When he had inspected it thoroughly, Barrett moved on, looking into the
infirmary, the mess hall, the kitchen, the recreation room. He looked high
and low. No Hahn. Of course, there were plenty of places in those rooms
where Hahn might have secreted himself, but Barrett doubted that he was
there. So it had all been some feverish fantasy of Latimer's then. He
completed the route and found himself back at the main entrance.
Latimer still stood guard there. He had been joined by a sleepy Quesada.
Altman, pale, and shaky-looking, was just outside the door.

  "What's happening?" Quesada asked.

  "I'm not sure," said Barrett. "Don and Ned had the idea they saw Lew
Hahn fooling around with the time equipment. I've checked the building,
and he's not here, so maybe they made a little mistake. I suggest you take
them both into the infirmary and give them a shot of something to settle
their nerves, and we'll all try to get back to sleep."

  Latimer said, "I tell you, I saw—"

  "Shut up!" Altman broke in. "Listen! What's that noise?"

  Barrett listened. The sound was clear and loud: the hissing whine of
ionization. It was the sound produced by a functioning Hawksbill Field.
Suddenly there were goose pimples on his flesh. In a low voice he said,
"The field's on. We're probably getting some supplies."

  "At this hour?" said Latimer.

  "We don't know what time it is Up Front. All of you stay here. I'll check
the Hammer."

  "Perhaps I ought to go with you," Quesada suggested mildly.

  "Stay here!" Barrett thundered. He paused, embarrassed at his own
explosive show of wrath. "It only takes one of us. I'll be right back."

  Without waiting for further dissent, he pivoted and limped down the
hall to the Hammer room. He shouldered the door open and looked in.
There was no need for him to switch on the light. The red glow of the
Hawksbill Field illuminated everything.

  Barrett stationed himself just within the door. Hardly daring to
breathe, he stared fixedly at the Hammer, watching as the glow deepened
through various shades of pink toward crimson, and then spread until it
enfolded the waiting Anvil beneath it.

  Then came the implosive thunderclap, and Lew Hahn dropped out of
nowhere and lay for a moment in temporal shock on the broad plate of the
Anvil.
                                     IX


    In the darkness, Hahn did not notice Barrett at first. He sat up slowly,
shaking off the stunning effects of a trip through time. After a few seconds
he pushed himself toward the lip of the Anvil and let his legs dangle over
it. He swung them to get the circulation going. He took a series of deep
breaths. Finally he slipped to the floor. The glow of the field had gone out
in the moment of his arrival, and so he moved warily, as though not
wanting to bump into anything.

  Abruptly Barrett switched on the light and said, "What have you been
up to, Hahn?"

  The younger man recoiled as though he had been jabbed in the gut. He
gasped, hopped backward a few steps, and flung up both hands in a
defensive gesture.

  "Answer me, " Barrett said.

  Hahn regained his equilibrium. He shot a quick glance past Barrett's
bulky form toward the hallway and said, "Let me go, will you? I can't
explain now."

  "You'd better explain now."

  "It's easier for everyone if I don't," said Hahn. "Let me pass."

 Barrett continued to block the door. "I want to know where you've been.
What have you been doing with the Hammer?"

  "Nothing. Just studying it."

  "You weren't in this room a minute ago. Then you appeared. Where'd
you come from, Hahn?"

  "You're mistaken. I was standing right behind the Hammer. I didn't—"

  "I saw you drop down on the Anvil. You took a time trip, didn't you?"

  "No."

  "Don't lie to me! You've got some way of going forward in time, isn't
that so? You've been spying on us, and you just went somewhere to file
your report—somewhen —and now you're back."

  Hahn's forehead was glistening. He said, "I warn you, don't ask too
many questions. You'll know everything in due time. This isn't the time.
Please, now. Let me pass."

  "I want answers first," Barrett said. He realized that he was trembling.
He already knew the answers, and they were answers that shook him to
the core of his soul. He knew where Hahn had been.

  Hahn said nothing. He took a few hesitant steps toward Barrett, who
did not move. He seemed to be gathering momentum for a rush at the
doorway.

  Barrett said, "You aren't getting out of here until you tell me what I
want to know."

  Hahn charged.

   Barrett planted himself squarely, crutch braced against the doorframe,
his good leg flat on the floor, and waited for the younger man to reach
him. He figured he outweighed Hahn by eighty pounds. That might be
enough to balance the fact that he was spotting Hahn thirty years and one
leg. They came together, and Barrett drove his hands down onto Hahn's
shoulder's, trying to hold him, to force him back into the room.

  Hahn gave an inch or two. He looked up at Barrett without speaking
and pushed forward again.

  "Don't—don't—" Barrett grunted. "I won't let you—"

  "I don't want to do this," Hahn said.

   He pushed again. Barrett felt himself buckling under the impact. He
dug his hands as hard as he could into Hahn's shoulders and tried to shove
the other man backward into the room, but Hahn held firm, and all of
Barrett's energy was converted into a thrust rebounding on himself. He
lost control of his crutch, and it slithered out from under his arm. For one
agonizing moment Barrett's full weight rested on the crushed uselessness
of his left foot, and then, as though his limbs were melting away beneath
him, he began to sink toward the floor. He landed with a reverberating
crash.

  Quesada, Altman and Latimer came rushing in. Barrett writhed in pain
on the floor. Hahn stood over him, looking unhappy, his hands locked
together.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "You shouldn't have tried to muscle me like that."

  Barrett glowered at him. "You were traveling in time, weren't you? You
can answer me now!"

  "Yes," Hahn said at last. "I went Up Front."

   An hour later, after Quesada had pumped him with enough neural
depressants to keep him from jumping out of his skin, Barrett got the full
story. Hahn hadn't wanted to reveal it so soon, but he had changed his
mind after his little scuffle.

   It was all very simple. Time travel now worked in both directions. The
glib, impressive noises about the flow of entropy had turned out to be just
noises.

  "How long has this been known?" Barrett asked.

   "At least five years. We aren't sure yet exactly when the breakthrough
came. After we're finished going through all the suppressed records of the
former government—"

  "The former government?"

  Hahn nodded. "The revolution came in January. Not really a violent
one, either. The syndicalists just mildewed from within, and when they got
the first push they fell over."

 "Was it mildew?" Barrett asked, coloring. "Or termites? Keep your
metaphors straight."

  Hahn glanced away. "Anyway, the government fell, We've got a
provisional liberal regime in office now. Don't ask me much about it. I'm
not a political theorist. I'm not even an economist. You guessed as much."

  "What are you, then?"

  "A policeman," Hahn said. "Part of the commission that's investigating
the prison system of the former government. Including this prison."

  Barrett looked at Quesada, then at Hahn. Thoughts were streaming
turbulently through him, and he could not remember when he had last
been so overwhelmed by events. He had to work hard to keep from
breaking into the shakes again. His voice quavered a little as he said, "You
came back to observe Hawksbill Station, right? And you went Up Front
tonight to tell them what you saw here. You think we're a pretty sad
bunch, eh?"

   "You've all been under heavy stress here," Hahn said. "Considering the
circumstances of your imprisonment—"

  Quesada broke in. "If there's a liberal government in power now and it's
possible to travel both ways in time, then am I right in assuming that the
Hawksbill prisoners are going to be sent Up Front?"

  "Of course," said Hahn. "It'll be done as soon as possible. That's been
the whole purpose of my reconnaissance mission. To find out if you people
were still alive, • first, and then to see what shape you're in, how badly in
need of treatment you are. You'll be given every available benefit of
modern therapy, naturally. No expense spared—"

  Barrett scarcely paid attention to Hahn's words. He had been fearing
something like this all night, ever since Altman had told him Hahn was
monkeying with the Hammer, but he had never fully allowed himself to
believe that it could really be possible.

  He saw his kingdom crumbling.

  He saw himself returned to a world he could not begin to
comprehend—a lame Rip Van Winkle, coming back after twenty years.

  He saw himself leaving a place that had become his home.

   Barrett said tiredly, "You know, some of the men aren't going to be able
to adapt to the shock of freedom. It might just kill them to be dumped
into the real world again. I mean the advanced psychos—Valdosto, and
such."

  "Yes," Hahn said. "I've mentioned them in my report."

   "It'll be necessary to get them ready for a return in gradual stages. It
might take several years to condition them to the idea. It might even take
longer than that."

  "I'm no therapist," said Hahn. "Whatever the doctors think is right for
them is what'll be done. Maybe it will be necessary to keep them here. I
can see where it would be pretty potent to send them back, after they've
spent all these years believing there's no return."

  "More than that," said Barrett. "There's a lot of work that can be done
here. Scientific work. Exploration. I don't think Hawksbill Station ought to
be closed down."

  "No one said it would be. We have every intention of keeping it going,
but not as a prison."

   "Good," Barrett said. He fumbled for his crutch, found it and got heavily
to his feet. Quesada moved toward him as though to steady him, but
Barrett shook him off. "Let's go outside," he said.

   They left the building. A gray mist had come in over the Station, and a
fine drizzle had begun to fall. Barrett looked around at the scattering of
huts. At the ocean, dimly visible to the east in the faint moonlight. He
thought of Charley Norton and the party that had gone on the annual
expedition to the Inland Sea. That bunch was going to be in for a real
surprise, when they got back here in a few weeks and discovered that
everybody was free to go home.

  Very strangely, Barrett felt a sudden pressure forming around his
eyelids, as of tears trying to force their way out into the open.

   He turned to Hahn and Quesada. In a low voice he said, "Have you
followed what I've been trying to tell you? Someone's got to stay here and
ease the transition for the sick men who won't be able to stand the shock
of return. Someone's got to keep the base running. Someone's got to
explain to the new men who'll be coming back here, the scientists."

  "Naturally," Hahn said.

  "The one who does that—the one who stays behind—I think it ought to
be someone who knows the Station well, someone who's fit to return Up
Front, but who's willing to make the sacrifice and stay. Do you follow me?
A volunteer." They were smiling at him now. Barrett wondered if there
might not be something patronizing about those smiles. He wondered if
he might not be a little too transparent. To hell with both of them, he
thought. He sucked the Cambrian air into his lungs until his chest swelled,
grandly.

  "I'm offering to stay," Barrett said loudly. He glared at them to keep
them from objecting. But they wouldn't dare object, he knew. In Hawksbill
Station, he was the king. And he meant to keep it that way. "I'll be the
volunteer," he said. "I'll be the one who stays."

  He looked out over his kingdom from the top of the hill.
                             —«»—«»—«»—




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  From "Best SF 1967" edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss

  2003.07.06