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.