The Time Hoppers

  He also knew that the neopuritan phase was soon to be struck down by another swing of the pendulum. So he would have the best of both cultures: first the covert pleasures of the inner revolt against the public morality, and then, in his declining days, the joys of witnessing the total breakdown of that morality. He had picked a good time. No wars to speak of, no particular crises. A man could enjoy himself here. Especially if he had useful skills, and a medical technician like Pomrath would thrive in this time of primitive medicine.

  No one had seen him appear. At least, any witnesses to his materialization had quickly scurried on about their businesses, without meddling. Good.

  He had to get his bearings, now.

  He was in a city, presumably New York. Shops and offices all around. Pomrath drifted with the pedestrian tide. A kiosk at the corner was peddling what seemed to be the this-time equivalent of a faxtape. Pomrath stared. There was a date: 6 May 2051. Good old Lanoy. Within a year of the requested time. The yellow tape chuttered out of the slot in the machine.

  Pomrath had difficulty reading the ancient sans-serif type face. He hadn’t realized how the shapes of the letters had changed. A moment, though, and he had the hang of it.

  Fine. Now all he needed was some money, an identity, a place to live. Within a week, he felt, he would be fully established in the matrix of this era.

  He filled his lungs with air. He felt confident, bouncy, buoyant. There was no job machine here. He could live by his own wits, doing solitary battle with the inexorable forces of the universe and actually getting the universe to yield a little. In his own time, he was just a number on a punched card, a patch of ions on a coded tape. Here he was free to select his own role and capitalize on it.

  Pomrath stepped into a shop at random. They were selling books in there. Not spools; books. He looked at them in wonder. Cheap, sleazy paper; blurry ink; flimsy bindings. He picked up a novel, flipped its pages, put it down. He found what seemed to be a popular medical guide. It would be useful; Pomrath wondered how he could gain possession of it without money. He didn’t want to admit to anyone that he was a hopper. He wanted to make the grade by his own devices.

  A man whom he assumed was the proprietor came up to him – plump, grimy-faced, with watery blue eyes. Pomrath smiled. He knew that his clothing marked him as a stranger, but he hoped it didn’t stamp him too clearly as a stranger out of time.

  The man said in a soft, feathery voice, ‘There’s better downstairs. Want to catch some haunch?’

  Pomrath’s smile grew broader. ‘Sorry, I be not easy speaking. My English very hard.’

  ‘Haunch, I said. Haunch. Downstairs. You from out of town?’

  ‘Visitor from Slavic country. Incomplete grasp your language,’ Pomrath said, laying on what he hoped sounded like a thick Czech accent. ‘Maybe you help? Am feeling un-settled here.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. A lonely foreigner. Well, go downstairs. The girls’ll cheer you up. Twenty dollars. You got dollars?’

  Pomrath began to see what was going on in the basement of the bookshop. He nodded vociferously and headed towards the rear of the store, still clutching his medical guide. The proprietor didn’t appear to notice that he had taken the book.

  Stairs led below. Stairs! Pomrath hardly knew what they were. He gripped the railing tightly, unsure of his footing as he descended. At the bottom, some sort of scanner beamed him and he heard a blipping sound that probably indicated he was carrying no weapons. A fleshy woman in bulky robes came swishing out to inspect him.

  In his own time there were public sex cubicles available to all, without concealment. It figured that in this neopuritan era there would be girlie cribs hidden in the lower levels of musty old buildings. Vice, Pomrath thought, was probably more common here per capita than up yonder.

  The woman said, ‘You’re the foreigner Al said was coming down, huh? You sure look foreign to me. Where you from, France?’

  ‘Slavic district. Praha.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  Pomrath looked uncertain. ‘Europe. To the east.’

  The woman shrugged and led him within. Pomrath found himself in a small, low-ceilinged room which contained a bed, a washstand, and a pasty-faced blonde girl. The girl slipped off her robe. Her body was soft and slightly flabby, but the basic material was pretty good. She looked young, and more intelligent than her job called on her to be.

  ‘It’s twenty dollars,’ she said patiently.

  Pomrath knew that the moment of truth had arrived. He flicked a wary glance around the little room and saw no sign of any scanning devices. He couldn’t be sure, naturally. Even way back here, they had been pretty sophisticated about espionage, and he didn’t doubt that they pulled the same dirty tricks that were common in his own time. But he had to take the risk. Sooner or later, he had to find himself an ally in this other time, and now was a reasonable time to begin.

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ said Pomrath, dropping the phony accent.

  ‘Then get the hell out of here.’

  ‘Shh. Not so fast. I’ve got some ideas. Sit down. Relax. How would you like to be rich?’

  ‘Are you a cop?’

  ‘I’m just a stranger in town, and I need a friend. I’ve got plans. Co-operate with me and you’ll be out of the bed-girl business in a hurry. What’s your name?’

  ‘Lisa. You talk funny. What are you, a hopper or something?’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Just a guess.’ The girl’s eyes were very blue, very wide. She picked up her robe and put.it on again, as though she did not think it proper to hold a business conference in the nude. She kept her voice low as she said, ‘You just get here?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a doctor. I can make us fabulously rich. With what I know – ’

  ‘We’ll turn all the turbines, child!’ she said. ‘You and me. What’s your label?’

  ‘Keystone,’ Pomrath said at random. ‘Mort Keystone.’

  ‘We’re going to twist orbits, Mort.’

  ‘I know we are. How soon can you get out of this place?’

  ‘Two more hours.’

  ‘Where should I meet you?’

  ‘There’s a park two blocks from here. You can sit there and wait and I’ll come along.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A park. You know, grass, benches, some trees. What’s the matter, Mort?’

  Pomrath was struck by the alienness of having trees and grass in the middle of a city. He managed a smile. ‘Nothing’s the matter. I’ll wait for you in the park.’ Then he handed her the book. ‘Here. Buy this for me when you leave the shop. I don’t want to have to steal it.’

  She nodded. Then she said, ‘You sure you don’t want anything else while you’re down here?’

  ‘There’s time for that later,’ said Pomrath. ‘I’ll be waiting in the park.’

  He went out. The bookstore proprietor waved cheerily to him. Pomrath replied in a string of improvised guttural sounds and stepped into the street. It was difficult for him to believe that he had been on the verge of psychotic collapse only a few hours ago and four hundred and forty-nine years from now.

  He was utterly calm. This world held challenges for him, and he knew he could meet those challenges.

  Poor Helaine, he thought. I wonder how she took the news.

  He walked briskly down the street, only momentarily bothered by the lack of resilience in the pavement. I am Mort Keystone, he told himself. Mort Keystone. Mort Keystone. And Lisa will help me get together some money to start a medical practice. I’ll be a rich man. I’ll live like a Class Two. There’s no High Government to slap me down.

  I’ll have power and status among these primitives, he told himself pleasantly. And after I’m established, I’ll track down a few people from my own time, just so I don’t feel too isolated from it. We’ll reminisce, he thought.

  We’ll reminisce about the future.

  Fourteen

  Quellen waited three hours, until Koll and. Spanner both we
re tied up on other government business. Then he went down the hall to the custody tank. He opened the scanner slot and peered in. Lanoy floated peacefully on the dark green fluid, utterly relaxed, evidently enjoying himself. On the stippled metal wall of the tank the indicators announced the slyster’s status. EEG and EKG bands wavered and crisscrossed. Heartbeat, respiration, everything was monitored.

  Summoning a technician, Quellen said, ‘Get him out of there.’

  ‘Sir, we just put him back in a few hours ago.’

  ‘I want to interrogate him. Get him out!’

  The technician obeyed. Lanoy was unplugged, filtered, and returned to consciousness. Attendant-robots wheeled him back to Quellen’s office. In a short while his reflexes were working again and he could move under his own power.

  Quellen shut down all recording devices in the office. He had a strong hunch that he wanted this conversation to be strictly off the record. Since there were only the two of them in the room, he also moved to cut down the oxy vent.

  ‘Leave it up, Quellen,’ Lanoy said. ‘I like to breathe well. It’s at government expense.’

  ‘Let’s finish our talk, then. What’s your game?’ Quellen was angry. Lanoy was a completely amoral creature, not even vicious in his criminality, who offended Quellen’s pride and sense of personal dignity.

  ‘I’ll be blunt with you, CrimeSec,’ the slyster said. ‘I want my freedom, and I want to continue in business. I like it that way. That’s what I want. You want to arrest me and let the government or perhaps the High Government take over my business. That’s what you want. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Now in a situation like that we have an interplay of mutually exclusive desires. So the stronger of the two forces wins – all the time. I’m stronger, and so you’ll have to let me go and suppress all the findings of your investigation.’

  ‘Who says you’re stronger, Lanoy?’

  ‘I know I am. I’m strong and you’re weak. I know a lot of things about you, Quellen. I know how you hate crowds and like fresh air and open spaces. These are pretty awkward idiosyncrasies to live with in a world like ours, aren’t they?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Quellen. He cursed Brogg silently. No one else could have revealed his secret to Lanoy. And obviously Lanoy knew too much about him.

  ‘So you’re going to let me walk out of here a free man,’ Lanoy continued, ‘or else you’ll find yourself back in a Class Nine or maybe Eleven unit. You won’t like it much there, CrimeSec. You’ll have to share a room, and you may not like your room-mate, but there’ll be nothing you can do. And when you have a room-mate, you won’t be free to run away. He’ll report you.’

  ‘What do you mean, run away?’ Quellen’s voice was little more than a husky whisper.

  ‘I mean run away to Africa, Quellen.’

  That’s it, then, Quellen thought. Now it’s over; Brogg’s sold me completely down the river. He knew that with Lanoy in possession of the secret, he was totally in the little slyster’s power. He stood motionless before Lanoy, seething with the temptation to grab up a televector cable and knot it fatally around Lanoy’s neck.

  Lanoy said, ‘I hate to do this to you, Quellen. Actually. There’s no personal animus in it at all. You’re a pretty good sort, caught in a world you didn’t make and don’t especially like. But I can’t help myself. It’s either you or me, and you know who’s got to win in a deal like that.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Brogg told me.’

  ‘Why would he do a thing like that? He was getting a good price from me.’

  ‘I gave him a better one,’ said Lanoy. ‘I sent him back to Hadrian’s time. Possibly Trajan. He’s gone back 2400 years, at any rate.’

  Quellen felt the floor turn to sticky rubber beneath his feet, writhing and squirming and pulsing with heat. He clung to his desk so he would not slide through into oblivion. Brogg a hopper! Brogg gone? Brogg a traitor?

  ‘When did this happen?’ Quellen asked.

  ‘Yesterday evening, about sunset. Brogg and I discussed the problem of how I was going to avoid being put out of business. He suggested that you had a point of vulnerability. I got it from him in return for the one thing he really wanted. He’s gone back to see Rome with his own eyes.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Quellen insisted. ‘There are records on the known hoppers, and Brogg wasn’t on the list.’

  Even as he spoke, he knew how foolish the words were. The records went back only to AD 1979. Brogg – unless Lanoy were bluffing – was almost nineteen centuries farther back. There’d be no record.

  Quellen felt sick. He knew that Brogg had planted autonomic telltales all over Appalachia, with taped accounts of Quellen’s crime in them. The telltales were programmed to march down to headquarters in the event of Brogg’s death or disappearance. The little springy legs must have been in motion since last night. I’m finished, Quellen thought. Unless Brogg had the good grace to deactivate the telltales before he hopped. He could have done it with no great trouble. The boxes responded to telephoned instruction. One call would have shut them down. But had he? Otherwise, the High Government was even now in possession of the truth about Joseph Quellen.

  Quellen had talked to Koll only this morning, though, and Koll had congratulated him on his promotion. Koll was guileful, but not to that degree. He would surely have been the recipient of one of Brogg’s little telltales, and he wouldn’t have been able to conceal his fury and envy at the discovery that Quellen had been living in Class Two luxury all this time.

  So possibly Brogg had turned the telltales off. Or possibly he had never gone hopper at all.

  Scowling, Quellen slammed on his communicator and said, ‘Get me Brogg.’

  ‘I’m sorry, UnderSec Brogg hasn’t been in contact today.’

  ‘Not even to give a locus notice?’

  ‘We haven’t heard from him, sir.’

  ‘Ring his apartment. Check the district headquarters. If there’s no word from him within the next fifteen minutes, initiate a televector search. I want to know where he is!’ Lanoy was beaming. ‘You’re not going to find him, Quellen. Believe me, he’s in Rome. I set up the displacement myself – temporal and geographical. If everything worked out, he landed just south of the city, somewhere along the Via Appia.’ Quellen’s lips twitched. He was gripping the desk very, very tightly, now, so that his fingertips were beginning to make indentations in the top, which was thermal-sensitive and not designed to be handled that way. He said, ‘If you can send someone back that far in time, how is it that 1979 has been the terminal date for the hopper phenomenon?’

  ‘Lots of reasons.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘For one, the process wasn’t reliable beyond about five hundred years until recently. We’ve improved the process. New research. Now we can confidently shoot people back a couple of thousand years and know they’ll get there.’

  ‘The pigs in the twelfth century?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lanoy said. ‘Those were our experimental shots. Mow, then: it also happens that such a concentration of hoppers got sent back to the 1979 nexus that the phenomenon came to the attention of authorities. Any hopper landing in a previous elsewhen would generally end up detained for insanity, or arrested for witchcraft, or something. So we tried to limit our hoppers to the 1979 to 2106 period because any hopper landing there would be recognized for what he was, and he’d have minimal troubles. We only exceeded that range upon special request, or sometimes by an unintentional overshoot. You follow?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quellen glumly. ‘And Brogg went back to Rome?’

  ‘He really did. For a price. And now you’d better let me go, promising to keep the results of your investigation from getting any higher, or I’ll expose your little game. I’ll let it be known that you’ve got a hideaway in Africa.’

  Quellen said coolly, ‘I could put a beam through your head right now and claim that you assaulted me.’

  ‘No good, Quellen. For one thing,
the High Government wants the time-transport process. Kill me and you lose the process.’

  ‘We could dredge it out of your brain on a neural replay dead or alive.’

  ‘Not if you lase me through the head,’ Lanoy pointed out. ‘Anyway, the neural replay would also dredge up the Africa bit, wouldn’t it? Beside that, you’d suffer if I died. Didn’t you know that Brogg fed your story into a bunch of autonomic telltales programmed to walk into government headquarters if anything happened to him?’

  ‘Yes, but – ’

  ‘He keyed them all over to me just before he hopped. Your fate is tied to mine, Quellen. You don’t want to harm me. You want to let me go.’

  Quellen could feel the muscles of his face sag as the nastiness of his position came home. If he did not present Lanoy for prosecution, he ran the risk of demotion. If he turned Lanoy in, Lanoy would expose him. Nor could he simply let Lanoy walk out the way the slyster wished. It was already a matter of record that Lanoy was involved in the hopper affair. Koll knew. Spanner knew. Quellen could not easily expunge the knowledge from the records. If he tried to cover up for Lanoy, he would mire himself in lie upon lie. He was living one fraud as it was; he could not bear the strain of assuming another.

  ‘Do I get what I want?’ Lanoy asked.

  A powerful surge of adrenalin rocketed through Quellen. He was a man in a trap, and a trapped man fights fiercely. He found unexpected reserves of strength.

  There was one thing he could try, a monumentally audacious thing, something so vastly bold that it seemed almost sensible in its way. Perhaps it would fail; probably it would fail. But it was better than making deals with Lanoy and slipping deeper into a morass of bribery and compromise.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t get what you want. I’m not releasing you, Lanoy. I’m going to remand you for indictment.’