Altman pointed to his golem and said, “I hoped there’d be lightning in the rain today. That’ll do it, you know. But there isn’t much lightning this time of year. She’ll get up alive, and then I’ll need you, Doc, to give her her shots and trim away some of the rough places.”
Quesada forced a smile. “I’ll be glad to do it, Ned. But you know the terms.”
“Sure. When I’m through with her, you get her. You think I’m a goddam monopolist? I’ll share her. There’ll be a waiting list. Just so you don’t forget who made her, though. She’ll remain mine, whenever I need her.” He noticed Hahn. “Who are you?”
“He’s new,” Barrett said. “Lew Hahn. He came this afternoon.”
“Ned Altman,” said Altman with a courtly bow. “Formerly in government service. You’re pretty young, aren’t you? How’s your sex orientation? Hetero?”
Hahn winced. “I’m afraid so.”
“It’s okay. I wouldn’t touch you. I’ve got a project going, here. But I just want you to know, I’ll put you on my list. You’re young and you’ve probably got stronger needs than some of us. I won’t forget about you, even though you’re new here.”
Quesada coughed. “You ought to get some rest now, Ned. Maybe there’ll be lightning tomorrow.”
Altman did not resist. The doctor took him aside and put him to bed, while Hahn and Barrett surveyed the man’s handiwork. Hahn pointed toward the figure’s middle.
“He’s left out something essential,” he said. “If he’s planning to make love to this girl after he’s finished creating her, he’d better—”
“It was there yesterday,” said Barrett. “He must be changing orientation again.” Quesada emerged from the hut. They went on, down the rocky path.
Barrett did not make the complete circuit that night. Ordinarily, he would have gone all the way down to Latimer’s hut overlooking the sea, for Latimer was on his list of sick ones. But Barrett had visited Latimer once that day, and he didn’t think his aching good leg was up to another hike that far. So after he and Quesada and Hahn had been to all of the easily accessible huts and had visited the man who prayed for alien beings to rescue him and the man who was trying to break into a parallel universe where everything was as it ought to be in the world and the man who lay on his cot sobbing for all his wakeful hours, Barrett said good night to his companions and allowed Quesada to escort Hahn back to his hut without him.
After observing Hahn for half a day, Barrett realized he did not know much more about him than when he had first dropped onto the Anvil. But maybe Hahn would open up a little more, after he’d been here a while. Barrett stared up at the salmon moon and reached into his pocket to finger the little trilobite before he remembered that he had given it to Hahn. He shuffled into his hut. He wondered how long ago Hahn had taken that lunar honeymoon trip.
V
Rudiger’s catch was spread out in front of the main building the next morning when Barrett came up for breakfast. He had had a good night’s fishing, obviously. He usually did. Rudiger went out three or four nights a week, in a little dinghy that he had cobbled together a few years ago from salvage materials, and he took with him a team of friends whom he had trained in the deft use of the trawling nets.
It was an irony that Rudiger, the anarchist, the man who believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions, should be so good at leading a team of fishermen. Rudiger didn’t care for teamwork in the abstract. But it was hard to manipulate the nets alone, he had discovered. Hawksbill Station had many little ironies of that sort. Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.
The prize of the catch was a cephalopod about a dozen feet long—a rigid conical tube out of which some limp squidlike tentacles dangled. Plenty of meat on that one, Barrett thought. Dozens of trilobites were arrayed around it, ranging in size from the inch-long kind to the three-footers with their baroquely involuted exoskeletons. Rudiger fished both for food and for science; evidently these trilobites were discards, species that he already had studied, or he wouldn’t have left them here to go into the food hoppers. His hut was stacked ceiling-high with trilobites. It kept him sane to collect and analyze them.
Near the heap of trilobites were some clusters of hinged brachiopods, looking like scallops that had gone awry, and a pile of snails. The warm, shallow waters just off the coastal shelf teemed with life, in striking contrast to the barren land. Rudiger had also brought in a mound of shiny black seaweed. Barrett hoped someone would gather all this stuff up and get it into their heat-sink cooler before it spoiled. The bacteria of decay worked a lot slower here than they did Up Front, but a few hours in the mild air would do Rudiger’s haul no good.
Today Barrett planned to recruit some men for the annual Inland Sea expedition. Traditionally, he led that trek himself, but his injury made it impossible for him even to consider going any more. Each year, a dozen or so able-bodied men went out on a wide-ranging reconnaissance that took them in a big circle, looping northwestward until they reached the sea, then coming around to the south and back to the Station. One purpose of the trip was to gather any temporal garbage that might have materialized in the vicinity of the Station during the past year. There was no way of knowing how wide a margin of error had been allowed during the early attempts to set up the Station, and the scattershot technique of hurling material into the past had been pretty unreliable. New stuff was turning up all the time that had been aimed for Minus One Billion, Two Thousand Oh Five A. D., but which didn’t get there until a few decades later. Hawksbill Station needed all the spare equipment it could get, and Barrett didn’t miss a chance to round up any of the debris.
There was another reason for the Inland Sea expeditions, though. They served as a focus for the year, an annual ritual, something to peg a custom to. It was a rite of spring here.
The dozen strongest men, going on foot to the distant rock-rimmed shores of the tepid sea that drowned the middle of North America, were performing the closest thing Hawksbill Station had to a religious function. The trip meant more to Barrett himself than he had ever suspected, also. He realized that now, when he was unable to go. He had led every such expedition for twenty years.
But last year he had gone scrabbling over boulders loosened by the waves, venturing into risky territory for no rational reason, and his aging muscles had betrayed him. Often at night he woke sweating to escape from the dream in which he relived that ugly moment: slipping and sliding, clawing at the rocks, a mass of stone dislodged from somewhere and came crashing down with an agonizing impact on his foot, pinning him, crushing him. He could not forget the sound of grinding bones. Nor was he likely to lose the memory of the homeward march across hundreds of miles of bare rock, his bulky body slung between the bowed forms of his companions.
He had thought he would lose the foot, but Quesada had spared him from the amputation. He simply could not touch the foot to the ground and put weight on it now, or ever again. It might have been simpler to have the dead appendage sliced off. Quesada vetoed that, though. “Who knows,” he had said, “some day they might send us a transplant kit. I can’t rebuild a leg that’s been amputated.” So Barrett had kept his crushed foot. But he had never been quite the same since, and now someone else would have to lead the march.
Who would it be, he asked himself?
Quesada was the likeliest. Next to Barrett, he was the strongest man here, in all the ways that it was important to be strong. But Quesada couldn’t be spared at the Station. It might be handy to have a medic along on the trip, but it was vital to have one here. After some reflection Barrett put down Charley Norton as the leader. He added Ken Belardi—someone for Norton to talk to. Rudiger? A tower of strength last year after Barrett had been injured;; Barrett didn’t particularly want to let Rudiger leave the Station so long though. He needed able men for the expedition, true, but he didn’t want to strip the home base down to invalids, crackpots, and psychotics. Rudiger stayed. Two of his fellow fishermen went on the list. So did Sid Hutchett and Arny Jean-Claude.