The Time Hoppers Read online

  The

  Time

  Hoppers

  Robert Silverberg

  Fontana/Collins

  First published in the USA by Doubleday & Co. 1967 Published in Great Britain by Sidgwick and Jackson 1968 First issued in Fontana 1979

  Copyright © Robert Silverberg 1967

  Made and printed in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, Glasgow

  Conditions of sale: This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of cover or binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  for Michael Moorcock

  One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory,-but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers.

  – W. H. Auden, Infernal Science

  That Time should be a length travelled over is, all said and done, a rather elaborate conception; yet that this is the way we do habitually think of Time is agreed to by everyone, both educated and – which is much more curious – uneducated. . . . How did we arrive at this remarkable piece of knowledge?

  – J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time

  One

  There was a beauty in the crowded world, so they said. The crystalline city towers in serried ranks assembled, the patterned rhythms of a surging mob at a quickboat ramp, the dance of sunlight on a million iridescent tunics in one of the great plazas – in such things, the aesthetes said, was the abode of beauty.

  Quellen was no aesthete. He was a minor bureaucrat, a humble civil servant of decent intelligence and normal proclivities. He looked at the world as it presented itself in A D 2490, and found it hellish. Quellen was unable to perform the intricate inner dance by which hideous overcrowding could be written off as modem beauty. He hated it. If he had been Class One or even Class Two, Quellen might have been in a better position to appreciate the new aesthetics, because he would not have been required to live right in the middle of them. But Quellen was Class Seven. The world does not look quite the same to a man in Class Seven as it does to a man in Class Two.

  And yet, all things considered, Quellen was not too badly off. He had his comforts. Illegal comforts, true, obtained by bribery and cajolery. Strictly speaking, what Quellen had done was shameful, for he had taken possession of that to which he was not entitled. He had pocketed a private corner of the world, just as though he were a member of the High Government – that is to say, Class One or Class Two. Since Quellen had none of the responsibilities of the High Government, he deserved none of the privileges.

  He had taken those privileges though. It was wrong, criminal, a betrayal of integrity. But a man is entitled to a fatal flaw of character somewhere. Like everyone else, Quellen had begun with high dreams of rectitude. Like nearly everyone else, he had learned to abandon them.

  Pong.

  That was the warning bell. Someone wanted him, back in the miserable warrens of Appalachia. Quellen left the bell alone. He was in a tranquil mood, and he didn’t care to puncture it simply to answer the bell.

  Pong. Pong. Pong.

  It was not an insistent sound, merely an obtrusive one, low and mellow, the sound of a bronze dish struck with a’ felt-covered hammer. Quellen, ignoring the sound, continued to rock uneasily back and forth in his pneumochair, watching the sleepy crocodiles paddling gently through the murky waters of the stream that ran below his porch. Pong. Pong. After a while the bell stopped ringing. He sat there, joyously passive, sensing about him the warm smell of green growing things and the buzzing insect noises in the air.

  That was the only part of Eden that Quellen did not like, the constant hum of the ugly insects that whizzed through the calm, muggy air. In a way they represented an invasion; they were symbols to him of the life he had led before moving up to Class Seven. The noise in the air then had been the steady buzz of people, people swarming around in a vast hive of a city, and Quellen detested that. There were no real insects in Appalachia, of course. Merely that symbolic buzz.

  He stood and walked to the rail, looking out over the water. He was a man just short of middle years and just above middle height, leaner than he once had been, with unruly brown hair, a wide, sweat-flecked forehead, and mild eyes of a shade not quite green and not quite blue. His lips were thin and tautly compressed, giving him a look of determination instantly belied by a less than affirmative chin.

  Idly he flipped a stone into the water. ‘Get it!’ he called, as two crocs glided noiselessly towards the disturbance in hopes of nabbing a fat gobbet of meat. But the stone sank, sending up black bubbles, and the crocs bumped their pointed noses lightly together and drifted apart. Quellen smiled.

  It was a good life here at the heart of darkness, here in tropical Africa. Insects and all, black mud and all, humid solitude and all. Even the fear of discovery was supportable.

  Quellen rehearsed the catalogue of his blessings, Marok, he thought? No Marok here. No Koll, no Spanner, no Brogg, no Leeward. None of them. But especially no Marok. I miss him the least.

  What a relief it was to be able to stay out here and not suffer their buzzing voices, not shudder when they burst into his office! Of course, it was wanton and immoral of him to set up shop as an übermensch this way, a modem Raskolnikov transcending all laws. Quellen admitted that. Yet, he often told himself, life’s journey was a trip he’d take only once, and at the end what would matter but that he had travelled First Class pan of the way?

  This was the only freedom, out here.

  And being far from Marok, the hated room-mate, was best of all. No more to worry over his piles of undone dishes, his heaps of books scattered all over the tiny room they shared, his dry, deep voice endlessly talking on the visiphone when Quellen was trying to concentrate.

  No. No Marok here.

  But yet, Quellen thought sadly, yet, the peace he had anticipated when he built his new home had somehow not materialized. That was the way of the world: satisfaction draining off into nowhere at the moment of attainment. For years he had waited with remarkable patience for the day he reached Class Seven and was entitled to live alone. That day had come; but it had not been enough. So he had purloined Africa for himself. And now that he had encompassed even that, life was simply one uneasy fear after another.

  Restlessly, he shied another stone into the water.

  Pong.

  As he watched the concentric circles of ripples fanning out on the dark surface of the stream, Quellen became conscious again of the warning bell ringing again at the other end of the house. Pong. Pong. Pong. The uneasiness within him turned to sullen foreboding. He eased himself out of his chair and headed hurriedly towards the phone. Pong.

  Quellen switched it on, leaving the vision off. It hadn’t been easy to arrange things so that any calls coming to his home, back in Appalachia half a world away, were automatically relayed to him here.

  ‘Quellen,’ he said, eyeing the grey blank screen.

  ‘Koll speaking,’ came the crackling reply. ‘Couldn’t reach you before. Why don’t you turn on your visi, Quellen?’

  ‘It’s not working,’ Quellen said. He hoped sharp-nosed Koll, his immediate superior at the Secretariat of Crime, would not smell the lie in his voice.

  ‘Get over here quickly, will you, Quellen? Spanner and I have something urgent to take up with you. Got it, Quellen? Urgent. It’s a High Government matter. They’re treading us hard.’
/>   ‘Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?’

  ‘No. We’ll fill in the details for you when you get here. Which will be at once.’ Koll decisively snapped the contact.

  Quellen stared at the blank screen for a while, chewing at his lip. Terror clawed his soul. Was this it, the summons to headquarters to discuss his highly illegal, criminally selfish hideaway? Had the downfall come at last? No. No. They couldn’t have found out. It was impossible. He had everything squared.

  But, came Quellen’s insistent thought, they must have discovered his secret. Why else would Koll send for him so urgently, with the whiplash tone in his voice? Quellen began to perspire despite the air conditioning, which kept away most of the fierce Congo heat.

  They would put him back in Class Eight if they found out. Or, much more likely, they would bounce him all the way back to Twelve or Thirteen, and slap a perpetual hold on him. He would be doomed to spend the rest of his life in a tiny room inhabited by two or three other people, the biggest, smelliest, most unpleasant people the clicking computers could find for him.

  Quellen calmed himself. Perhaps he was taking alarm for no reason. Koll had said it was High Government business, hadn’t he? A directive from above, not any private arrest. When they really found him out, Quellen knew, they wouldn’t simply summon him. They would come for him. So this was some affair of work. He had a momentary vision of the members of the High Government, shadowy demigods at least eleven feet high, pausing in their incomprehensible labours to drop a minislip memo down the chute to Koll.

  Quellen took a long look at the green overhanging trees, bowed under the weight of their leaves and glistening with the beaded drops of the morning’s rain. He let his eyes rove regretfully over the two spacious rooms, his luxurious porch, the uncluttered view. Each time he left here, it was as though for the last time. For a moment, now that everything might well be just about lost, Quellen almost relished the buzzing of the flies. He gulped in a final sweeping look and stepped towards the stat. The purple field enveloped him. He was sucked into the machine.

  Quellen was devoured. The hidden power generators of the stat were connected by direct link to the central generator that spun endlessly on its poles at the bottom of the Atlantic, condensing the theta force that made the stat travel possible. What was theta force? Quellen could not say. He could barely explain electricity, and that had been around for a longer time. He took it for granted and gave himself to the stat field. If someone had introduced a minor abscissa distortion, Quellen’s atoms would be broadcast to the universe and never reassembled, but one did not think about such things.

  The effect was instantaneous. The lean, lanky form of Quellen was shattered, a stream of tagged wavicles was relayed half-way across the planet, and Quellen was reconstituted. It happened so fast – molecule ripped from molecule in a fragment of a nanosecond – that his neural system could not pick up the pain of total dissolution. The restoration to life came just as swiftly.

  One did not think about the realities of stat travel. One simply travelled. To do otherwise was to ask for the miseries.

  Quellen emerged in the tiny apartment for Class Seven citizens of Appalachia that everyone thought he inhabited. Some messages awaited him. He glanced at them: they were advertising blares mainly, although a note told him that his sister Helaine had come calling. Quellen felt a twitch of guilt. Helaine and her husband were prolets of the prole, ground under by the harsh realities. He had often wished he could do something for them, since their unhappiness added prongs to his own sense of conscience. Yet what could he do? He preferred not to get involved.

  In a series of swift motions he slipped out of his lounging clothes and into his crisp business uniform, and removed the Privacy radion from the door. Thus he transformed himself from Joe Quellen, owner of an illegal privacy-nest in the heart of an unreported reservation in Africa, into Joseph Quellen, CrimeSec, staunch defender of law and order. He left the house. The elevator tumbled him endless storeys to the tenth-floor quickboat landing. Stat transmission within a city was technically impossible; more’s the pity, Quellen felt.

  A quickboat slid off to its ramp. Quellen joined the multitudes pressing into it. He felt the thrum of power as it moved outward. Aching numbly from fear, Quellen headed downtown to meet Koll.

  The building of the Secretariat of Crime was considered an architectural masterpiece, Quellen had been told. Eighty storeys, topped by spiked towers, and the crimson curtain-walls were rough and sandy in texture, so that they sparkled like a beacon when illuminated. The building had roots; Quellen had never learned how many underlevels there were, and he suspected that no one really knew, save certain members of the High Government. Surely there were twenty levels of computer down there, and a crypt for dead storage below that, and a further eight levels of interrogation rooms even deeper. Of that much, Quellen had sure knowledge. Some said that there was another computer, forty levels thick, underneath the interrogation rooms, and there were those who maintained that this was the true computer, while the one above was only for decoration and camouflage. Perhaps. Quellen did not try to probe too deeply into such things. For all he knew, the High Government itself met in secret councils a hundred levels below street level in this very building. He kept his curiosity under check. He did not wish to invite the curiosity of others, and that meant placing a limit on his own.

  Clerical workers nodded respectfully to Quellen as he passed between their close-packed rows. He smiled. He could afford to be gracious; here he had status, the mana of Class Seven. They were Fourteens, Fifteens, the boy emptying the disposal basket was probably a Twenty. To them, he was a lofty figure, virtually a confidant of High Government people, a personal associate of Danton and Kloofman themselves. All a matter of perspective, Quellen thought. Actually, he had glimpsed Danton – or someone said to be Danton – only once. He had no real reason to think that Kloofman actually existed, though probably he did.

  Clamping his hand vigorously on the doorknob, Quellen waited to be scanned. The door of the inner office opened. He entered and found unfriendly figures hunched at desks within. Little sharp-nosed Martin Koll, looking for all the world like some huge rodent, sat facing the door, sifting through a sheaf of minislips. Leon Spanner, Quellen’s other boss, sat opposite him at the glistening table, his great bull neck hunching over still more memoranda. As Quellen came into the room, Koll reached to the wall with a quick nervous gesture and flipped up the oxy vent, admitting a supply for three.

  ‘Took you long enough,’ Koll said, without looking up. Quellen glowered at him. Koll was grey-haired, grey-faced, grey of soul Quellen hated him. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to change. I was off duty.’

  ‘Whatever we do won’t alter anything,’ rumbled Spanner, as if no one had entered and nothing had been said. ‘What’s happened has happened, and nothing we do will have the slightest effect. Do you see? It makes me want to smash things! To pound and break!’

  ‘Sit down, Quellen,’ Koll said offhandedly. He turned to Spanner, a big, beefy man with a furrowed forehead and thick features. ‘I thought we’d been through this all before,’ Koll said. ‘If we meddle it’s going to mix up everything. With about five hundred years to cover, we’ll scramble the whole framework. That much is clear.’

  Quellen silently breathed relief. Whatever it was they were concerned about, it wasn’t his illegal African hideaway. From the way it sounded, they were talking about the time-hoppers. Good. He looked at his two superiors more carefully, now that his eyes were no longer blurred by fear and the anticipation of humiliating punishment. They had obviously been arguing quite a while, Koll and Spanner. Koll was the deep one, with his agile mind and nervous, birdlike energy. But Spanner had more power. They said he had connections in high places, even High places.

  ‘All right, Koll,’ Spanner grunted. ‘I’ll even grant that it will mix up the past. I’ll concede that much.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ the small man said.

  ‘Don’t i
nterrupt me. I still think we’ve got to put a stop to it. We can’t undo what’s done, but we can cut it short this year. In fact, we must.’

  Koll glared balefully at Spanner. Quellen could see that his own presence was the only reason Koll was concealing the anger lying just behind his eyes. They would be spewing curses at one another if the underling Quellen did not happen to be in the room.

  ‘Why, Spanner, why?’ Koll demanded in what passed for measured tones. ‘If we keep the process going we maintain things as they are. Four thousand of them went in ‘86, nine thousand in ‘87, fifty thousand in ‘88. And when we get last year’s figures, they’ll be even higher. Look – here it says that over a million hoppers arrived in the first eighty years, and after that the figures kept rising. Think of the population we’re losing! It’s wonderful! We can’t afford to let these people stay here, when we have a chance to get rid of them. And when history says that we did get rid of them.’

  ‘History also says that they stopped going back to the post after 2491. Which means that we caught them next year,’ Spanner said. ‘I mean, that we will catch them next year. It’s ordained. We’ve got no choice but to obey. The past’s a closed book.’

  ‘Is it?’ Koll laughed; it was almost a bark. ‘What if we don’t solve it? What if the hoppers keep on going back?’

  ‘It didn’t happen that way, though. We know it. All the hoppers who reached the past came from the years 2486 to 2491. That’s a matter of record,’ said Spanner doggedly. ‘Records can be falsified.’

  ‘The High Government wants this traffic stopped. Why must I argue with you, Koll? You want to defy history, that’s your business, but defying Them as well? No. We don’t have that option.’

  ‘But to dear away millions of prolets – ’

  Spanner grunted and tightened his grasp on the minislips he was holding. Quellen, feeling like an intruder, let his eyes flick back from one man to the other.