The Time Hoppers

  Pomrath got off the quickboat. The cowled girl remained aboard. How did they know who he was and where he was bound? He felt frightened. The world was full of spectres.

  Pray for the repose of my soul, he thought. I’m so tired. OOF! TON!

  He waited at the ramp. Around him the spires of ugly buildings of the previous century stabbed holes in the sky. He was out of the central slum-clearance zone now. Who knew what stinking warren he was heading towards? A new quickboat arrived. Pomrath boarded it unquestioningly. I am in your hands, he thought. LANOY I YONAL! Anyone. Anyone. Just get me out of here.

  Out!

  He journeyed northward. Was this still Appalachia? The sky was dark here. Programmed for rain, perhaps. A clean flush to purify the streets. What if Danton recommended a rain of sulphuric acid? The pavement hissing and smoking, citizens running to and fro as their flesh dissolved. The ultimate population control. Death from the skies. Serve you right for going outdoors. The quickboat halted. Pomrath got out and waited on the ramp. Rain was falling here, pocking against the sidewalk.

  ‘I’m Pomrath,’ he said to a kindly old lady.

  ‘Lanoy’s waiting. Come on.’

  He found himself in rural surroundings ten minutes later. There was a shack by the edge of a lake. Figures moved mysteriously in and out. Pomrath was thrust forward. A purring voice said, ‘Lanoy’s waiting for you out back.’

  He was a small man with a big nose. He wore clothing that seemed to be two hundred years old.

  ‘Pomrath?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What are you, Class Twelve?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ Pomrath confessed. ‘Get me out of here, will you, please?’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Lanoy.

  Pomrath looked at the lake. It was a hideous sight, crawling with pollution. Great greasy swatches of coarse algae roiled in the oily water.

  Lanoy said, ‘Isn’t it lovely? Six centuries of non-stop pollution interspersed with high-sounding official speeches. The renewal zone is still twenty years away by public count.

  Would you like to take a swim? We don’t practise baptism here, but we can arrange a ceremony to fit anybody’s religious preferences.’

  Pomrath shuddered. ‘I can’t swim. Just get me out of here.’

  ‘The alga is cladaphora. Biologists sometimes come up here to admire it. It reaches lengths of ninety feet. We’ve also got anaerobic sludgeworms here, and fingernail clams. Quite primeval. I don’t know how they survive. You’d be shocked if you knew the oxygen content of that water.’

  ‘Nothing shocks me,’ said Pomrath. ‘Please. Please.’

  ‘It’s full of coliform intestinal bacteria also,’ Lanoy remarked. ‘I believe the current count is 10,000,000 per 100 millilitres. That’s about 10,000 times the safe level for human contact. Lovely? Come inside, Pomrath. You know it’s not easy, being a hopper.’

  ‘It’s not easy being anything, these days.’

  ‘Consider the challenges, though.’ Lanoy led him within the shack. Pomrath was startled to see that the interior was out of keeping with the weatherbeaten exterior. Inside, everything was neat, spanking clean. A partition divided the building into two huge compartments. Lanoy dropped into a web and lay there, jiggling, like a spider. Pomrath remained standing. Lanoy said, ‘I can take you and dump you into the year 1990, if you’d like, or 2076, or most any other year. Don’t be fooled by what you read in the faxtapes. We’re actually more versatile than the public knows. We’re improving the process constantly.’

  ‘Send me anywhere,’ said Pomrath.

  ‘The correct term is anywhen. But look here: I send you to 1990. Can you face it? You won’t even be able to speak the language properly. You’ll speak a weird jargon that they won’t understand, all your grammar blurred. Do you know the distinction between “who” and “whom”? Between “shall” and “will”? Can you handle tenses?’

  Pomrath could feel the blood surging in his arteries. He did not understand why Lanoy was weaving this cocoon of words about him. He had had enough words.

  Lanoy laughed. ‘Don’t let me frighten you. You don’t need to know those things. They were forgotten, even then. People were sloppy in their speech. Not as sloppy as we are today, because we’ve had another few hundred years to erode the language. But they had blotted out all the conjugations and declensions already. Still, it’ll take you a couple of weeks to learn how to communicate. You can get into a lot of trouble in a couple of weeks. Are you prepared to be sent to a lunatic asylum? Shock treatments, straitjacket, all the barbarities of our ancestors?’

  ‘Just get me out of here.’

  ‘The police will interrogate you. Don’t give them your right name, Pomrath. You aren’t listed in the hopper records, which means you never gave them your right name, and don’t you dare try to do it. Make up a name. You can admit to being a hopper if you land in 1979 or later. If you go back earlier, you’re entirely on your own. Frankly, I wouldn’t try it. I don’t think you’ve got the calibre for a free-lance trip like that. You’re an intelligent man, Pomrath, but you’re worn thin by care. Don’t take risks. Go as an orthodox hopper and throw yourself on the mercies of the past. You’ll make out.’

  ‘What does it cost?’

  ‘Two hundred units. A token fee, really. Barely covers the energy costs.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘As safe as taking a quickboat ride.’ Lanoy grinned. ‘It’s disconcerting. No High Government to watch over you. Dozens of independent national states. Local rivalries. Conflicting taxing bodies. You’ll have to cope, but that’s all right. I think you’ll manage.’

  ‘It can’t be worse than what’s here.’

  ‘Are you married, Pomrath?’

  ‘Yes. Two children. I love them deeply.’

  ‘Want to take the whole family along?’

  ‘Can it be done?’

  ‘With uncertainties. We’ve got to send you separately: mass limits. You could get scattered over a range of as much as a dozen years. Your kids arriving first, then you and your wife a few years later, maybe.’

  Pomrath trembled. ‘Suppose I go first. Will you keep a record of where I’m sent – when I’m sent – so that my family can come after me if that’s what my wife wants to do?’

  ‘Of course. We look out for your welfare. I’ll get in touch with Mrs Pomrath. She’ll have the option of following you. Not many wives do it, of course, but she’ll have the option. Well, Pomrath? Still with us?’

  ‘You know I am,’ Pomrath said.

  Quellen, monitoring the conversation, sat trancelike and chilled. He could not see Lanoy, he had no real idea where the conversation was taking place, but yet he realized that his brother-in-law was about to enrol in the legion of hoppers, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Unless Brogg and Leeward reached Lanoy’s headquarters in the nick of time, and came bursting in to make the arrest –

  A voice said, ‘Sir, UnderSec Brogg is calling.’

  Quellen pulled himself away from the monitor. A visionless phone was rolled up. Quellen put it to his ear. ;

  ‘Where are you?’ he demanded. ‘Have you traced Lanoy yet?’

  ‘We’re working on it,’ Brogg said. ‘It turned out Brand didn’t know the exact location. He just knew somebody who could take him to somebody who could bring him to Lanoy.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But we’ve got a geographical area pegged. We’re cordoning it and closing in by televector. It’s only a matter of time now before we put the intercept on Lanoy in person.’

  ‘How much time?’ asked Quellen icily.

  ‘I’d say six hours,’ Brogg replied. ‘Plus or minus ninety minutes. We’re certain to nail him today.’

  Six hours, Quellen thought. Plus or minus. And then Lanoy would be in custody.

  But Norm Pomrath would be a hopper by then.

  Twelve

  Brogg said in a relaxed tone, ‘I have to arrest you, of course. You understand that. It’s regulatio
ns.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lanoy said. ‘It goes almost without saying. I wondered what took you people so long to get to me.’

  ‘Uncertainty in high places. There was a lot of dithering.’ Brogg smiled at the little man. ‘I don’t mind telling you, you have the High Government quite upset. They’re sweating to arrest you, but at the same time they’re afraid of wrecking their position of power through some sort of rearrangement of past events. So they’ve been stalemated. It’s the classic conflict situation: they must stop you, and they don’t dare it.’

  ‘I appreciate their troubles,’ said Lanoy. ‘It’s a terribly complicated life even for Them, isn’t it? Well, you’re here, now. Come outside. Let’s watch the sunset, shall we?’

  Brogg followed Lanoy from the shack. It was late, now, well into his overtime phase, but Brogg did not object. All day long he and Leeward had zeroed in on Lanoy, juggling televector constants until they had located him within a narrowing radius. As Brogg had told Quellen earlier in the day, it was only a matter of hours. In fact, it had taken four hours and some minutes from the time of Brogg’s call. Deftly, Brogg had sent Leeward off on a wild goose chase an hour ago. Now Brogg and Lanoy were alone at this remote shack. Brogg had much to say to the hopper man.

  A swollen golden sun hung suspended in the darkening sky. The track of illumination cast a purplish glow over the polluted lake. It took on an eerie glitter, and the slime-creatures that writhed on its surface seemed ennobled by the aura of the dying day. Lanoy stared raptly into the west.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ he said finally. ‘I could never leave this era, UnderSec Brogg. I see the beauty within the ugliness. Regard that lake. Was there ever anything like it? I stand here at sunset each night in awe.’

  ‘Remarkable.’

  ‘Very. There’s poetry in that ooze. The oxygen’s just about gone, you see. There’s been a devolution of organic life there, so that we’ve got only anaerobic forms. I like to think that the sludgeworms dance down there at sunset. About, about, in reel and rout. Look at the play of colours on that big swatch of algae. It grows as long as seaweed here. Do you care for poetry much, Brogg?’

  ‘My passion’s for history.’

  ‘What period?’

  ‘Roman. The early Empire. Tiberius through Trajan, approximately. Trajan’s time: a true golden age.’

  ‘The Republic doesn’t interest you?’ asked Lanoy. ‘The brave puritans? Cato? Lucius Junius Brutus? The Gracchi?’ Brogg was astounded. ‘You know such things?’

  ‘I cast a wide net,’ said Lanoy. ‘You realize that I deal with the past on a daily basis. I’ve acquired a certain familiarity with history myself. Trajan, eh? You’d like to visit Rome of Trajan’s era, would you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Brogg said huskily.

  ‘What about Hadrian? Still a golden age there. If you couldn’t have Trajan, would you settle for Hadrian? Let us say, a margin of error covering a generation – we might miss Trajan, but in that case we’d land somewhere in Hadrian. We’d do better to aim for the forward end of Trajan’s rule. Otherwise the error might take us the other way, and you wouldn’t like that, eh? You’d come out in Titus, Domitian, one of that nasty bunch. Not at all to your liking.’

  Brogg could manage only a hoarse, croaking voice. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know quite well.’ The sun had set. The magic glow ebbed from the ruined lake. ‘Shall we go in?’ Lanoy asked. ‘I’ll show you some of the equipment.’

  Brogg allowed himself to be led back inside. He towered over the little man; Lanoy was no bigger than Koll, and had something of Koll’s nervous inner energy. Yet Koll brimmed with hatred and pustulence; Lanoy seemed utterly confident, with a core of tranquillity within his active dynamism.

  Lanoy opened a door in the partition that divided the building. Brogg peered in. He saw vertical bars of some gleaming material, an openwork cage, dials, switches, an array of rheostats. Rows of colour-coded panels on the machinery radiated bright glows of data. It all seemed to be put together with an eye towards deliberate confusion.

  ‘This is the time-travel machine?’ Brogg asked.

  ‘Part of it. There are extensions both in time and space. I won’t plague you with the details. The principle is simple, anyway. A sudden strain on the fabric of the continuum; we thrust present-day material in, scoop out an equal buckeload of mass from the past. Conservation of matter, you understand. When our calculations are off by a few grammes, it causes disturbances, implosions, meteorological effects. We try not to miss, but we sometimes do. There’s a fusion plasma at the heart of it all. No better way to rip open the continuum; we use our own little sun to do it. We tap off the theta force, you see. Every time someone uses a stat, it builds up temporal potential that we grab and utilize. Even so, it’s an expensive process.’

  ‘What do you charge for a trip?’

  ‘Two hundred units, generally. That is, if we’re willing to take money at all.’

  ‘You send some people free?’ Brogg asked.

  ‘Not exactly. We won’t accept the money of certain individuals, I mean. We insist on payment of a different kind – services, information, that sort of thing. If they’re not willing to render what we need, we don’t transport them. For those people, no amount of money could hire us.’

  ‘I don’t altogether follow.’

  ‘You will,’ Lanoy said. He closed the partition and returned to the office part of the shack. Sprawling out comfortably in his web, he asked Brogg, ‘What arrest procedure are you going to follow in my case?’

  ‘You’ll have to come down to the office to talk to CrimeSec Quellen. He’ll have disposition of the case. Meanwhile we’ll have to cordon this place off with a wide-band radion, and it’ll remain sealed pending appeal. Any habeas corpus will go automatically to the High Government. Of course, if you can handle Quellen, the picture will change completely.’

  ‘But I must go to the office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of man is this Quellen? Malleable?’

  ‘I think so. Especially if you use the right hammer on him,’ Brogg said.

  ‘Does the hammer have a high rental cost?’

  ‘Not very high.’ Brogg leaned forward. ‘Is your machine really limited to a reach of only five centuries?’

  ‘Not at all. We keep improving. We’ve had a controlled reach of five centuries for quite some time, but an uncontrolled reach that’s much greater.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brogg. ‘The pigs and dogs thrown back to the twelfth century, and such.’

  ‘You know about those?’

  ‘I’ve been very thorough. What’s your controlled reach now?’

  Lanoy shrugged. ‘It’s variable. We can hit almost anywhere in two thousand years, but the built-in error gets wider the farther the throw. We’ve got it down to plus or minus thirty years now, but that’s quite a range. At the farthest, that is. We could hit 1492 or 1776 smack on the nose, I firmly believe.’ He smiled. ‘What’s the hammer for pounding Quellen?’

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ said Brogg.

  ‘What’s the cost of a ticket to Hadrian?’

  ‘The hammer for Quellen.’

  ‘You won’t take cash?’

  ‘Not from you.’

  Brogg nodded. ‘Let’s negotiate,’ he said. ‘I think we can strike a deal.’

  By sunset, Helaine Pomrath was convinced that her husband had become a hopper.

  It was almost a telepathic thing. He had not come home for dinner, but he had been late for dinner quite frequently the last few weeks. Yet this was different. Helaine felt a strange sense of his absence. She had shared her life with him for so long that she had grown accustomed to his presence, even when he was not with her physically. Now she felt herself in the company of the presence of his absence.

  The room seemed smaller, darker. The children’s eyes were wide. Helaine said reassuring things to them. She tried not to think of Beth Wisnack and her grim prophecy that Norm was soon t
o become a hopper. Helaine asked the time, and the ear-watch told her that it was half past eighteen. She gave the children their dinner, but did not eat herself.

  At quarter after nineteen, she phoned her brother at his apartment.

  ‘I hate to disturb you, Joe, but it’s about Norm. He isn’t home for dinner, and I’m worried.’

  There was a long silence at the other end. Helaine watched Quellen’s face, but the expression on it baffled her. His lips were tightly compressed.

  ‘Joe? Why aren’t you answering me? Listen, I know I’m just a foolish woman who’s worrying about nothing at all, but I can’t help it. I’ve got this definite feeling that something terrible has happened.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Helaine. I did what I could.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s been an arrest. We’ve pulled in the slyster who ran the hopper outfit. But there just wasn’t time to get Norm. He slipped right through.’

  She felt the chill sweeping up from her legs and invading her internal organs, turning them one by one to lumps of resonating ice. ‘Joe, I don’t understand you. Do you know something about Norm?’

  ‘We were monitoring him. Brogg put an Ear on him last night at my instruction. He went out to look for Lanoy this morning. The slyster.’

  ‘The one you arrested?’

  ‘Yes. Lanoy’s running the hopper game. Was running. He’s in custody. I’ll be interrogating him in the morning. Norm went to him. It was far out – the trip took him all morning. We were vectoring in on Lanoy, you understand, but there was absolutely no way to get to Norm in time. I’ve got a tape of the whole thing as it came out of the Ear.’