Hawksbill Station

Author: Robert Silverberg

Prison's overflowing, costing taxpayers too much money and occasioning bleeding-heart liberals to bemoan the terrible state of the penal system? Here's the solution: get rid of the blighters; without killing them and without them costing you anything once you've gotten rid of them. Find a kind of temporal Australia, penal colony extraordinaire. Especially if they're political prisoners! This is exactly what's been done: the men zipped to a penal settlement in the Precambrian era and women to the Silurian. Out of sight, out of mind, and never to return, because you can only travel backward in timeâ€”until, that is, technology advances to make forward travel possible and the oppressive government that invented this kind of disposal system has been overthrown. Except that after all these years in the penal colony, the middle-aged and elderly former rebels really don't know any other life and since their political enemies now have been overthrown, they've basically lost all purpose. Why it's on the list: It's not really about time-travel here, but about the rationales of penal systems, especially with regards to political enemies; and about what happens when people lose their purpose in lifeâ€”for even though their lives could be better than they had been, they wouldn't really know what to do with themselves anymore.