Robert Silverberg - Hawksbill Station

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 268.83KB 50 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

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.

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!"

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—"

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

HAWKSBILLSTATIONRobertSilverbergSilverbergisaprofessionalwritertohisfingertipswho,attheripeoldageofthirty-three,alreadyhasalifetimeofworkbehindhim.Icommissionedanarticlefromhimforasciencefictionmagazinein1953,hisfirstprofessionalsale,andIfeelsomewhatlikethemanwhotappedthebombwiththehammertoseeifitwa...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert Silverberg - Hawksbill Station.pdf

共50页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Silverberg - Hawksbill Station

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: