‘All right,’ Spanner said slowly. ‘I’ll agree with you that it’s nice to keep losing all those prolets. Even though on the face of things it appears that we won’t go on losing them much longer. You say we have to let it keep going on, or else it’ll alter the past. I take the opposite view. But let that pass. I won’t argue the point, since you seem so positive. Furthermore, you think that it’s a good thing to use this time-hopper business as a method of reducing population. I’m with you on that too, Koll. I don’t like overcrowding any more than you do, and I’ll admit things have reached a ridiculous state nowadays. But consider: we’re being hoodwinked. For someone to be running a time-travel business behind our backs is illegal and unethical and a lot of other things, and he ought to be stopped. What do you say, Quellen? Ultimately this is going to be the responsibility of your department, you know.’
The sudden reference to him came as a jolt. Quellen was still struggling to get his bearings in this debate, and he was not entirely sure what they were talking about. He smiled weakly and shook his head.
‘No opinion?’ Koll asked him abrasively.
Quellen looked at him. He was unable to stare straight into Koll’s hard, colourless eyes, and so he let his gaze rest on the bureau manager’s cheekbones instead. He remained silent.
‘No opinion, Quellen? That’s too bad indeed. It doesn’t speak well of you.’
Quellen repressed a shudder. ‘I’m afraid that I haven’t been keeping up with the latest developments in the time-hopper case. As you know, I’ve been very busy on certain projects that – ’
He let his voice trail off, feeling like a fool. His eager assistants probably knew all about this situation, he thought. He wondered why he had never bothered to check with Brogg. But how could he anticipate everything?
Koll said, ‘Are you aware that thousands of prolets have vanished into nowhere since the beginning of the year, Quellen?’
‘No, sir. Ah, I mean, of course, sir. Certainly. It’s just that we haven’t really had a chance to take action on it,’ Quellen said.
The footling sound of his own voice appalled him. Very lame, Quellen, very lame, he told himself. Of course you don’t know anything about it, when you spend all your free time in that pretty little hideaway across the ocean. But Stanley Brogg probably knows every detail. Brogg is very efficient.
‘Well, just where do you think they’ve gone?’ Koll asked. ‘Maybe you think they’ve all hopped into stats and gone off somewhere to look for work? To Africa, maybe?’
The barb had poison on it. Quellen came close to gasping in shock before he could convince himself that Koll was stabbing in the dark. He hid his reaction as well as he could and replied evenly, ‘I have no idea, sir.’
‘You haven’t been reading your history books very well, then, Quellen. Think, man: what was the most important historical development of the past five centuries?’
Quellen thought. What, indeed? The Entente? The coming of the High Government? The breakdown of the nations? The stat? He hated the way Koll could turn him into an idiotic schoolboy. Quellen knew he was no fool, however inane he might seem when hauled on the carpet. He was competent enough. But at the core of his being was his vulnerability, his hidden crime, and that meant he was jelly at the core. He began to sweat. He said, ‘I’m not sure how to evaluate that question, sir.’
Koll casually flipped the oxy up a little higher, in an almost insulting gesture of friendliness. The sweet gas purred into the room. Softly Koll said, ‘I’ll tell you, then. It’s the arrival of the hoppers. And this is the era they’re starting out from.’
‘Of course,’ Quellen said. Everyone knew about the hoppers, and he was annoyed with himself for not simply offering the obvious to Koll.
‘Someone’s developed time travel in the past few years,’ Spanner said. ‘He’s beginning to siphon the time-hoppers back to the past. Thousands of unemployed prolets are gone already, and if we don’t catch him soon he’ll clutter up the past with every wandering workingman in the country.’
‘So? That’s my point,’ Koll said impatiently. ‘We know they’ve already arrived in the past; our history books say so. Now we can sit back and let this fellow distribute our refuse all over the previous five centuries.’
Spanner swivelled round and confronted Quellen. ‘What do you think?’ he demanded. ‘Should we follow the order of the High Government, round up this fellow, and stop the departure of the hoppers? Or should we do as Koll says and let everything go on, which defies not only Them but also incidentally the information of history?’
‘I’ll need time to study the case,’ Quellen said suspiciously. The last thing that he wanted to have happen to him was to be forced into making a judgement in favour of one superior over another.
‘Let me show you your path right now,’ Spanner said, with a side glance at Koll. ‘We have our instructions from the High Government, and it’s futile to debate them. As Koll here knows quite well, Kloofman himself has taken an interest in this case. Our task is to locate the illegal nexus of time-travel activity and bring it under official control. Koll, if you object, you’d better appeal to the High Government.’
‘No objections,’ said Koll. ‘Quellen?’
Quellen stiffened. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘You heard Mr Spanner. Get on it, fast. Track down this fellow who’s shipping the hoppers and put him away, but not before you get his secret out of him. The High Government wants control of the process. And a halt to this illegal activity. It’s all yours, Quellen.’
He was dismissed.
Two
Norman Pomrath looked coldly at his wife and said, ‘When is your brother going to do something for us, Helaine ?’
‘I’ve told you. He can’t.’
‘He won’t, you mean.’
‘He can’t. Who do you think he is, Danton? And will you please get out of my way? I need a shower.’
‘At least you said please,’ Pomrath grumbled. ‘I’m grateful for small mercies.’
He stepped to one side. Out of some tatter of modesty he did not watch as his wife stripped off her green tunic. She crumpled the garment, tossed it aside, and got under the molecular bath. Since she stood with her back to him while she washed, he let himself watch her. Modesty was an important thing, Pomrath thought. Even when you’ve been married eleven years, you’ve got to give the other person some privacy in these stinking one-room lives. Otherwise you’ll click your gyros. He gnawed a fingernail and stole furtive glances at his wife’s lean buttocks.
The air in the Pomrath apartment was foul, but he didn’t dare turn up the oxy. He had drawn this week’s supply, and if he nudged the stud, the utility computer somewhere in the bowels of the earth would say unpleasant things to him. Pomrath didn’t think his nerves could stand much garbage from a utility computer just now. His nerves couldn’t stand much of anything. He was Class Fourteen, which was bad enough, and he hadn’t had any work in three months, which was worse, and he had a brother-in-law in Class Seven, which really cut into him. What good did Joe Quellen do him, though? The damned guy was never around. Ducking out on his family responsibilities.
Helaine was finished with her shower. The molecular bath used no water; only Class Ten and up was entitled to use water for purposes of bodily cleaning. Since most people in the world were Class Eleven and down, the planet would stink half-way across the universe but for the handy molecular baths. You stripped down, stood in front of the nozzle, and ultrasonic waves cunningly separated the grime from your skin and gave you the illusion of being clean. Pomrath did not bother to avert his eyes as Helaine’s nude white form crossed in front of him. She wriggled into her tunic. Once, he remembered, he had thought that she was voluptuous. He had been much younger then. Later, it had seemed to him that she had begun to lose weight. Now she was thin. There were times – especially at night – when she hardly looked female to him.
He slid down into the webfoam cradle along one window-less wall and said, ‘When do the
kids get home?’
‘Fifteen minutes. That’s why I showered now. Are you staying here, Norm?’
‘I’m going out in five minutes.’
‘To the sniffer palace?’
He scowled at her. His face, creased and pleated by defeat, was well designed for scowling. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not to the sniffer palace. To the job machine.’
‘But you know the job machine will contact you here if there’s any work, so – ’
‘I want to go to it,’ Pomrath said with icy dignity. ‘I do not want it to come to me. I will go to the job machine. And then, most likely, to the sniffer palace afterwards. Perhaps to celebrate and perhaps to drown my sorrow.’
‘I knew it.’
‘Damn you, Helaine, why don’t you get off me? Is it my fault I’m between jobs? I rank high in skills. I ought to be working. But there’s a cosmic injustice in the universe that keeps me unemployed.’
She laughed harshly. The harshness was a new note, something of the last few years. ‘You’ve had work exactly twenty-three weeks in eleven years,’ she told him. ‘The rest of the time we’ve collected doles. You’ve moved up from Class Twenty to Class Fourteen, and there you stick, year after year, and we’re getting nowhere, and the walls of this damned apartment are like a cage to me, and when those two kids are in it with me I feel like tearing their heads off, and – ’
‘Helaine,’ he said quietly. ‘Stop it’
To his considerable surprise, she did. A muscle knotted in her jaw as she caught herself headlong in her stream of protest. Much more calmly she said, ‘I’m sorry, Norm. It’s not your fault we’re prolets. There are only so many jobs to be had. Even with your skills – ’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘It’s the way things are. I didn’t mean to screech, Norm. I love you, do you know that? For better, for worse, like they say.’
‘Sure, Helaine. All right.’
‘Maybe I’ll go to the sniffer palace with you, this time. Let me get the kids programmed and – ’
He shook his head. It was very touching, this sudden display of affection, but he saw enough of Helaine in the apartment, day and night. He didn’t want her following him around as he took his pitiful pleasures. ‘Not this time, sweeting,’ he said quickly. ‘Remember, I’ve got to go punch the job machine first. You’d better stay here. Go visit Beth Wisnack, or somebody.’
‘Her husband’s still gone.’
‘Who, Wisnack? Haven’t they traced him?’
‘They think he – he hopped. I mean, they’ve had a televector on him and everything,’ Helaine said. ‘No trace. He’s really gone.’
‘You believe in this hopper business?’ Pomrath asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Travelling in time? It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, as a matter of teleology, if you start turning the universe upside down, if you confuse the direction in which events flow, Helaine, I mean – ’
Her eyes were very wide. ‘The faxtapes say there’s such a thing. The High Government is investigating it. Joe’s own department. Norm, how can you say there are no time-hoppers, when people are disappearing every day? When Bud Wisnack right on the next level – ’
‘There’s no proof he did that.’
‘Where else is he, then?’
‘Antarctica, maybe. Poland. Mars. A televector can slip up just like anybody else. I can’t swallow this time-travel deal, Helaine. It has no thingness for me, do you follow? It’s unreal, a fantasy, something out of a sniffer dream.’ Pomrath coughed. He was doing a lot of vociferous talking lately. He thought about Bud Wisnack, small and bald, with an eternal blue stubble on his cheeks, and wondered if he had really jumped a hoop in time and gone off to 1999 or whenever.
The Pomraths looked at each other in awkward silence for a moment. Then Helaine said, ‘Tell me something hypothetical, Norm. If you went outside now and a man came up to you and said he was running the hopper business, and did you want to go back in time and get away from it all, what would you say to him?’
Pomrath considered. ‘I’d tell him no. I mean, would it be honourable to skip out on my wife and family? It’s all right for a Bud Wisnack, but I couldn’t duck all my responsibilities, Helaine.’
Her grey-blue eyes sparkled. She smiled her don’t-fool-me-kiddo smile. ‘That’s very nobly said, Norm. But I think you’d go, all the same.’
‘You’re entitled to think what you want to think. Since it’s all a fantasy anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I’m going to have a look at the job machine now. I’ll give it a real punch. Who knows? I might find myself twitched right up to Class Seven with Joe.’
‘Could be,’ Helaine said. ‘What time will you be back?’
‘Later.’
‘Norm, don’t spend too much time at the sniffer palace. I hate it when you get high on that stuff.’
‘I’m the masses,’ he told her. ‘I need my opium.’
He palmed the door. It slid open with a little whickering sound, and he went out. The hall light was burning feebly. Cursing, Pomrath groped his way towards the elevator. The hall lights weren’t like this in Class Seven places, he knew. He had visited Joe Quellen. Not often, true; his brother-in-law didn’t mingle much with the prolets, even when they were his own kin. But he had seen. Quellen led a damned good life. And what was he, anyway? What were his skills? He was just a bureaucrat, a paper-shuffler. There was nothing Joe Quellen could do that a computer couldn’t do better. But he had a job. Tenure.
Gloomily Pomrath stared at his distorted reflection in the burnished framework of the elevator oval. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man just past forty, with heavy eyebrows and tired, sad eyes. The reflection made him look older, with much flesh at his throat. Give me time, he thought. He stepped through the oval and was sped upwards towards the surface level of the huge apartment house.
I made my choices of my own free will, he insisted. I married the voluptuous Helaine Quellen. I had my permitted two children. I opted for my kind of work. And here I am in one room for four people, and my wife is skinny and I don’t look at her when she’s naked because I have to spare her nerves, and the oxy quota is used up, and here I am going to punch the job machine and find out the old, old story, and then to drop a lousy few pieces at the sniffer palace, and –
Pomrath wondered what exactly he would do if some agent of the time-hopper people came up to him and offered to peddle him a ticket into a quieter yesterday. Would he do a Bud Wisnack and grab at the chance?
This is nonsense, Pomrath told himself. Such an option doesn’t exist. The time-hoppers are imaginary. A fraud perpetrated by the High Government. You can’t travel backward in time. All you can do is go relentlessly forward, at a rate of one second per second.
But if that’s the case, Norm Pomrath asked himself, where did Bud Wisnack really go?
When the apartment door closed, and Helaine found herself alone, she slumped down wearily on the edge of the allpurpose table in the middle of the room and bit down hard on her lower lip to keep back the tears.
He didn’t even notice me, she thought. I took a shower right in front of him and he didn’t even notice.
Actually, Helaine had to admit, that wasn’t true. She had watched his reflection in the coppery wall-plate that was their substitute for a window, and she had seen him covertly looking at her body as she stood with her back to him under the shower. And then, when she had walked naked across the room to pick up her tunic, he had looked at her again, the front view.
But he hadn’t done anything. That was the essential thing. If he felt some spark of sexual feeling for her, he would have showed it. With a caress, a smile, a hasty hand slammed against the button that would bring the hidden bed sliding out of the wall. He had looked at her body, and it hadn’t had any effect on him at all. Helaine suffered more from that than from all the rest.
She was thirty-seven, almost. That wasn’t really old. She had seventy or eighty years of actuarial lifespan ahead of her. Yet she felt mid
dle-aged. She had lost a great deal of weight lately, so that her hip-bones jutted out like misplaced shoulderblades. She no longer wore her off-the-bosom dresses. She knew that she had ceased to have much sensual appeal for her husband, and it pained her.
Was it true, the stories going around that the High Government was promoting special anti-sex measures? That by order of Danton the men were getting impotence pills and the women were receiving desensualizers? That was what the women were whispering. Noelle Kalmuck said that the laundry-room computer had told her so. You had to believe what a computer told you, didn’t you? Presumably the machine was plugged right into the High Government itself.
But it made no sense. Helaine was no genius, but she had common sense. Why would the High Government want to meddle with the sex drive? Surely not as a birth-control measure. They controlled birth more humanely, by interfering with fertility, not with potency. Two children per married couple, that was it. If they allowed only one, they might be making some headway with the population problem, but unfortunately there were substantial pressure groups who insisted on the two-child family, and even the High Government had bowed. So population was stabilized, and even reduced a little – taking into account the bachelors, like Helaine’s brother Joe, and the couples who had sworn the Sterility Pledge, and such-but no real headway was made.
Still, with fertility controlled, it was illogical for the High Government to take away sex as well. Sex was the sport of the prolets. It was free. You didn’t need to have a job in order to enjoy sex. It passed the time. Helaine decided that the rumours she had heard were sheer foolishness, and she doubted that the laundry computer had said anything on the subject to Noelle Kalmuck. Why should the computer talk to Noelle at all? She was just a giggly little fool.
Of course, you could never tell. The High Government could be devious. This time-hopper business, for example: was there any truth in it, Helaine wondered? Well, there were all the accredited documents of time-hoppers who had arrived in previous centuries, but suppose they were all frauds inserted in the history books simply to baffle and confuse? What was real and what was imagined?