“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—”