Barrett was the uncrowned king of Hawksbill Station. No one disputed that. He had been there the longest; he had suffered the most; he had the deepest inner resources of strength. Before his accident, he had been able to whip any man in the place. Now, to be sure, he was a cripple; but he still retained that aura of power that gave him command. When there were problems at the Station, they were brought to Barrett, and he took care of them. That went without saying. He was the king.
He ruled over quite a kingdom, too. In effect it was the whole world, pole to pole, meridian to meridian, the entire blessed earth. For what it was worth. It wasn't worth very much.
Now it was raining again. Barrett shrugged himself to his feet in that quick, easy gesture that cost him such an infinite amount of carefully concealed agony, and shuffled to the door of his hut. Rain made him tense and impatient, the sort of rain that fell here. The constant pounding of those great greasy drops against the corrugated tin roof was enough even to drive a Jim Barrett loony. The Chinese water torture wouldn't be invented for another billion years or so, but Barrett understood its effects all too well.
He nudged the door open. Standing in the doorway of his hut, Barrett looked out over his kingdom.
He saw barren rock, reaching nearly to the horizon. A shield of raw dolomite going on and on. Raindrops danced and bounced and splattered on that continental slab of glossy rock. No trees. No grass. Behind Barrett's sun lay the heavy sea, gray and vast. The sky was gray too, even when it didn't happen to be raining.
He hobbled out into the rain.
Manipulating his crutch was getting to be a simple matter for him now. At first the muscles of his armpit and side had rebelled at the thought that he needed help at all in walking, but they had fallen into line, and the crutch seemed merely to be an extension of his body. He leaned comfortably, letting his crushed left foot dangle unsupported.
A rockslide had pinned him last year, during a trip to the edge of the Inland Sea. Pinned him and ruined him. Back home, Barrett would have been hauled to the nearest state hospital, fitted with prosthetics, and that would have been the end of it: a new ankle, a new instep, refurbished ligaments and tendons, a swathe of homogeneous acrylic fibers where the damaged foot had been. But home was a billion years away from Hawksbill Station, and home there's no returning. The rain hit him hard, thudding against his skull, plastering the graying hair across his forehead. He scowled. He moved a little farther out of his hut, just taking stock.
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 better than two hundred fifty pounds in his prime, in the good old agitating days Up Front when he had carried banners and shouted angry slogans and pounded out manifestoes. But now he was past sixty and beginning to shrink a little, the skin getting loose around the places where the mighty muscles once had been. It was hard to keep your weight up to par in Hawksbill Station. The food was nutritious, but it lacked ... intensity. A man came to miss steak passionately, after a while. Eating brachiopod stew and trilobite hash wasn't the same thing at all.
Barrett was past all bitterness, though. That was another reason why the men regarded him as the Station's leader. He was solid. He didn't bellow. He didn't rant. He had become resigned to his fate, tolerant of eternal exile, and so he could help the others get over that difficult, heart-clawing period of transition, as they came to grips with the numbing fact that the world they knew was lost to them forever.
A figure arrived, jogging awkwardly through the rain: Charley Norton. The doctrinaire Khrushchevist with the Trotskyite leanings, a revisionist from way back. Norton was a small excitable man who frequently appointed himself messenger when there was news at the Station. He came sprinting toward Barrett's hut, slipping and sliding over the naked rocks, elbows lashing wildly at the air.
Barrett held up a meaty hand as he approached. "Whoa, Charley. Whoa! Take it easy or you'll break your neck!"
Norton halted with difficulty in front of the hut. The rain had pasted the widely spaced strands of his brown hair to his skull in an odd pattern of stripes. His eyes had the fixed, glossy look of fanaticism--or perhaps it was just astigmatism. He gasped for breath and staggered into the hut, standing in the open doorway and shaking himself like a wet puppy. Obviously he had run all the way from the main building of the Station, three hundred yards away. That was a long dash in this rain, and a dangerous one; the rock shield was slippery.
"Why are you standing around out there in the rain?" Norton asked.
"To get wet," Barrett said simply. He stepped into the hut and looked down at Norton. "What's the news?"
"The Hammer's glowing. We're going to get some company pretty soon."
"How do you know it's going to be a live shipment?"
"The Hammer's been glowing for fifteen minutes. That means they're taking precautions with what they're shipping. Obviously they're sending us a new prisoner. Anyway, no supplies shipment is due right now."
Barrett nodded. "Okay. I'll come over and see what's up. If we get a new man, we'll bunk him in with Latimer, I guess."
Norton managed a rasping laugh. "Maybe he's a materialist. If he is, Latimer will drive him crazy with all that mystic nonsense of his. We could put him with Altman instead."
"And he'll be raped in half an hour."
"Altman's off that kick now, didn't you hear?" said Norton. "He's trying to create a real woman, instead of looking for second-rate substitutes."
"Maybe our new man doesn't have any ribs to spare."
"Very funny, Jim." Norton did not look amused. There was sudden new intensity in his glittering little eyes. "Do you know what I want the new man to be?" he asked hoarsely. "A conservative, that's what. A black-souled reactionary straight out of Adam Smith. God, that's what I want those bastards to send us!"
"Wouldn't you be just as happy with a fellow Bolshevik, Charley?"
"This place is full of Bolsheviks," said Norton. "We've got them in all shades from pale pink to flagrant scarlet. Don't you think I'm sick of them? Sitting around all day fishing for trilobites and discussing the relative merits of Kerensky and Malenkov? I need somebody to talk to, Jim. Somebody I can really 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. Maybe a rip-roaring Objectivist, okay?" Barrett laughed. Then he said quietly, "You know something, Charley, maybe there's been a revolution Up Front since we got out last news from there. Maybe the left is in and the right is out, now, and they'll start shipping us nothing but reactionaries. How would you like that? Say, fifty or a hundred storm troopers coming here for a start, Charley? You'd have plenty of material for your economics debates. And the place will go on filling up with them as the heads roll Up Front, more and more of them shipped back here, until we're outnumbered, and then maybe the newcomers will decide to have a putsch and get rid of all the stinking leftists that were sent here by the old regime, and--"
Barrett stopped. Norton was staring at him in blank amazement, his faded eyes wide, his hand compulsively smoothing his thinning hair to hide his distress and 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 little outburst just now. What made it all the more troublesome was the fact that he was the one who had permitted himself such a luxury. He was supposed to be the strong man of this place, the stabilizer, the man of absolute integrity and principle and sanity on whom the others could lean when they felt themselves losing control. 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 Barrett said, "Let's go. Maybe the new man is here already."
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