Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2016-09-12T21:00:00+00:00

NINE

A couple of days passed before Barrett had the chance to draw Lew Hahn aside for a spot of political discussion. The Inland Sea party had set out by then, 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 at the Station, a man who could weave a tissue of dialectic from the least promising material. If anyone could find out the depth of Hahn’s revolutionary commitment, it was Norton.

But Norton was away leading the expedition, and so Barrett had to do the interrogating himself. His Marxism was a trifle rusty, and he couldn’t thread a 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 had served his time on the ideological battlefront, though it had been a long while past.

He picked a rainy evening when Hahn seemed to be in a fairly outgoing mood. There had been an hour’s entertainment at the Station that night, an ingenious computer-composed film that Sid Hutchett had programmed the week before. Up Front had been kind enough to ship back a modest computer, and Hutchett had rigged it to do animations by specifying line widths, shades of gray, and progressions of raster units. It was a simple but remarkably clever business, and it brightened the dull nights. He was able to produce cartoons, satiric lampoons, erotic amusements, anything at all.

Afterward, sensing that Hahn was relaxed enough tonight to lower his guard a bit, Barrett sat down beside him and said, “Good show tonight?”

“Very entertaining.”

“It’s Sid Hutchett’s work. He’s a rare one, that Hutchett. Did you get a chance to meet him before he went off on the Inland Sea trip?”

“Tall fellow with a sharp nose and no chin?”

“That’s the one,” Barrett said. “A clever boy. He was the top computer man for the Continental Liberation Front until they caught him back in ’19. He programmed that fake broadcast in which Chancellor Dantell denounced his own regime. God, I wish I had been there to hear that one! Remember it?”

“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. I guess I wasn’t very politically oriented. I was an unsophisticated kid, you might say. Slow to awaken.”

“A lot of us were. Still, you were nineteen, that’s pretty grown up. Too busy studying economics, I suppose.”

Hahn grinned. “That’s right. I was 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. The greatest achievement of the Continental Liberation Front. You’re familiar with 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, I’m afraid. One of the newer groups?”

“Less than five years old.

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