The Time Hoppers Read online

  He was badly shaken, not by post-operative shock – that was unknown these days – but by the implications of what had almost happened. Meddling with the past! Pulling hoppers from the matrix! Suppose, he thought fretfully, some bureaucrat in Class Seven or Nine or thereabouts had gone ahead on his own authority, trying to win a quick uptwitch by dynamic action, and had rounded up a few known hoppers in advance of their departure. Thereby completely snarling the fabric of the time-line and irrevocably altering the past.

  Everything might have been different, Kloofman thought.

  I might have become a janitor, a technician, a peddler of fever pills. I might never have been born. Or I might have landed in Class Seven with Danton real and in charge. Or there might have been total anarchy, no High Government whatsoever. Anything. Anything. A wholly different world. The transformation would have come like a thief in the night, and the editing of the past would naturally be indetectable, so that I would never know there had been a change in my status. Perhaps there had already been several changes, Kloofman thought suddenly.

  Was it possible?

  Had two or three hoppers already been thwarted in their documented escapes by some zealous official? And had fundamental changes in the historical patterns of the past five centuries resulted, changes that could never be observed? Kloofman felt an abrupt and fatiguing sense of the instability of the universe. Here he was, two thousand feet down in the solid earth, living as always at the bottom of civilization, for the High Government was the lowest level occupied, and he had known absolute power for decades of a kind never remotely comprehended by Attila or Genghis Khan or Napoleon or Hitler, and yet he could feel the roots of the past ripping loose like tom strings about him. It sickened him. Some faceless individual, a mere government man, could wreck everything in a harmless blunder, and there was nothing Kloofman could do to prevent it from happening. It might already have begun to happen.

  I should never have embarked on this hopper enterprise, Kloofman thought.

  But that was wrongheaded, he knew. He had done the right thing, but he had done it carelessly, without full consideration of the danger factors. Before turning his bureaucracy loose on catching the shipper of time-hoppers, he should have issued strict orders concerning interference with the past. He trembled at the thought of the vulnerability he had opened for himself. At any time since 2486, his entire edifice of power, so laboriously constructed over so many years, could have been wrecked by the blind whim of an underling.

  The stabs of a dozen homeostatic injections reminded Kloofman that he was losing his calmness again.

  ‘Get me Giacomin,’ he said.

  The viceroy entered a few moments later, looking puzzled at the peremptory recall. Kloofman leaned heavily forward, straining himself half out of the tank, causing the servomechanisms within his body to whine in tinny protest. ‘I just wanted to make certain,’ he said, ‘that there was full understanding of my instruction. No interference with hopper departures. None. None whatever. Clear?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do I worry you, David? Do you think I’m a garrulous old man who ought to have his brain scraped? Let me tell you why I worry about this thing. I control the present and to some extent the future, right? Right. But not the past. How can I control the past? I see a whole segment of time that’s beyond my authority. I admit to being frightened. Maintain my authority over the past, David. See that it remains inviolate. What has happened must happen.’

  ‘I’ve already taken steps to see that it will,’ said Giacomin.

  Kloofman dismissed him a second time, feeling reassured but not sufficiently so. He summoned Mauberley, the Class Two man in charge of running the Danton operation. As one who considered himself a quasi-immortal, Kloofman did not spend much time designating heirs apparent, but he had high respect for Mauberley, and regarded him as a possible eventual successor. Mauberley entered. He was sixty years old, vigorous and muscular, with a flat-featured face and wiry, thick hair. Kloofman briefed him on the new development. ‘Giacomin is already at work on the problem,’ he said. ‘You work on it too. Redundancy, that’s the secret of effective government. Get Danton to make an official proclamation. Circulate it downwards through Class Seven. This is an emergency!’

  Mauberley said, ‘Do you believe there have already been changes in the past as a result of contra-hopper activity?’

  ‘No. But there could be. We’d never know.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ he said, and left.

  Kloofman rested. After a while, he had himself withdrawn from his nutrient bath and taken to his office. He had not been to the surface in sixteen years. The upper world had become slightly unreal to him; but he saw no harm in that, since he was well aware that to most of the inhabitants of the upper world he was slightly unreal, or more than slightly. Reciprocity, he thought. The secret of effective government. Kloofman lived in a complex of interlocking tunnels spreading out for hundreds of miles. At any given time, machines with glittering claws were energetically at work extending his domain. He hoped to have the world girdled with a continuous network of High Government access routes in another ten years or so. His personal Midgard Serpent of transportation. Strictly speaking, there was no need for it; he could govern just as effectively from a single room as from any point along a world-rimming tunnel. But he had his whims. What was the use of being the supreme leader of the entire world, Kloofman wondered, if he could not occasionally indulge a small whim?

  He moved on purring rollers to the master control room and allowed his attendants to attach him to contact leads. It bored him to depend on words for his knowledge of external events. One of the many surgical reconstructs that had been performed on him over the years allowed a direct neural cut-in; Kloofman could and did enter directly into the data stream, becoming a relay facet of the computer web itself. Then, only then, did a kind of ecstasy overwhelm him.

  He nodded, and the flow of data began.

  Facts. Births and deaths, disease statistics, transportation correlations, power levels, crime rates. Synapse after synapse clenched tight as Kloofman absorbed it all. Far above him, billions of people went through their daily routines, and he entered in some way into the life of each of them, and they entered into his. His perceptions were limited, of course. He could not detect individual fluctuations in the data except as momentary surges. Yet he could extrapolate them. At this very instant, he knew, a hopper was departing for the past. A life was subtracted from the present. What about mass? Was it conserved? The data on planetary mass failed to take into account the possibility of a sudden and total subtraction. Two hundred pounds abruptly removed from now and thrust into yesterday – how could it be possible, Kloofman wondered? It was done, though. The records showed it. Thousands of hoppers thrust out of his time and into the time of his predecessors. How? How?

  Peter Kloofman brushed the thought from his throbbing mind. It was an irrelevancy. What was relevant was the sudden, unthinkable possibility that the past might be altered, that all this might be taken away from him in a random fluctuation against which no defence existed. That struck horror into him. He filled his brain with data to drown out the possibility of total loss. He felt the onset of his delight.

  Caesar, did you ever have the whole world running through your brain at once?

  Napoleon, could you so much as imagine what it might be like to be plugged right into the master computers?

  Sardanapalus, were there joys like this in Nineveh?

  Kloofman’s bulky body quivered. The mesh of fine capillary wires just beneath his skin glowed. He ceased to be Peter Kloofman, world leader, lone human member of Class One, benevolent despot, sublime planner, the accidental inheritor of the ages. Now he was everyone who existed. A flux of cosmic power surged in him. This was the true Nirvana! This was the ultimate Oneness! This was the moment of full rapture!

  At such a time, it was not possible to brood on how easily it could all be taken away from him.

  Seve
n

  Helaine Pomrath said, ‘Norm, who’s Lanoy?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lanoy. L-A-N-’

  ‘Where did you hear that name?’

  She showed him the minislip and watched his face carefully. His eyes flickered. He was off balance.

  ‘I found this in your tunic last night,’ she said. ‘ “Out of work, see Lanoy,” it says. I just wondered who he was, what he could do for you.’

  ‘He – uh – runs some kind of employment bureau, I think. I’m not sure.’ Pomrath looked thoroughly uncomfortable. ‘Somebody slipped that to me as I was coming out of the sniffer palace.’

  ‘What good is it, if there’s no address on it?’

  ‘I guess you’re supposed to follow it up,’ Pomrath said. ‘Hunt around, do some detective work. I don’t know. Actually, I had forgotten all about it, to tell you the truth. Give it here.’

  She surrendered it. He took it quickly, and thrust it into his pocket. Helaine did not like the speed with which he got the incriminating document out of sight. Although she hadn’t even a remote notion of its implications, she was easily able to detect her husband’s guilt and general embarrassment.

  Maybe he’s planning a surprise for me, she thought. Maybe he’s already been to this Lanoy and done something about getting a job, but he was saving it to tell me next week when it’s our anniversary. And I bungled it by asking him questions. I should have let it go a while.

  Her son Joseph, stark naked, stepped down from the platform of the molecular bath. His sister, equally naked, got under it. Helaine busied herself with programming breakfast. Joseph said, ‘We’re going to learn geography in school today.’

  ‘How lovely,’ Helaine said vaguely.

  ‘Where’s Africa?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Far away. Across the ocean somewhere.’

  ‘Can I go to Africa when I grow up?’ Joseph persisted. There was a shrill giggle from the bath. Marina whirled around and said, ‘Africa’s where the Class Twos live! Are you going to be Class Two, Jo-Jo?’

  The boy glowered at his sister. ‘Maybe. Maybe I’ll be Class One. How do you know? You won’t be anything. I got something you don’t have already.’

  Marina made a face at him. All the same, she turned around to hide her undeveloped nine-year-old body from his beady eyes. From his corner of the room, Pomrath looked up from the morning faxtape and grunted, ‘Cut that out, both of you! Jo-Jo, get dressed! Marina, finish your bath!’

  ‘I just said I wanted to go to Africa,’ the boy muttered. ‘Don’t speak back to your father,’ said Helaine. ‘Breakfast’s ready, anyhow. Get dressed.’

  She sighed. Her head felt as though someone had poured powdered glass into it. The children always bickering. Norm sitting in the corner like a guest at his own wake, mysterious minislips popping up in the wash, four windowless walls hemming her in – no, it was too much. She didn’t understand how she could tolerate it. Eat, sleep, bathe, make love, all in one little room. Thousands of grubby neighbours mired in the same bog. Picnic once a year, via stat to some faraway place that wasn’t all built up yet – bread and circuses, keep the prolets happy. But it hurt to see a tree and then come back to Appalachia. There was actual pain in it, Helaine thought miserably. She had not bargained for this when she married Norm Pomrath. He had been full of plans.

  The children ate and left for school. Norm remained where he was, turning and twisting the faxtape in his stubby fingers. Now and then he shared an item of news with her. ‘Danton’s dedicating a new hospital in Pacifica next Tuesday. Totally automated, one big homeostat and no technicians at all. Isn’t that nice? It reduces government expenditures when no employees are required. And here’s a good one, too. Effective the first of May, oxy quotas in all commercial buildings are reduced by ten per cent. They say it’s to enable additional gas supplies to reach householders. You remember that, Helaine, when they cut the home quota too around August.

  It always goes down. When it gets to the point where they’re rationing air – ’

  ‘Norm, don’t get worked up.’

  He ignored her. ‘How did all this happen to us? We’ve got a right to something better. Four million people per square inch, that’s where we’re heading. Build the houses a thousand storeys high so there’s room for everyone, and it takes a month to get down to street level or up to the quickboat ramp, but what of it? It’s progress. And – ’

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to locate this Lanoy and get a job through him?’ she asked.

  ‘What we need,’ he went on, ‘is a first-class bacterial plague. Selective, of course. Wipe out all those who are lacking in functional job skills. That cuts the dole roll by a few billion units a day. Devote the tax money to makework programmes for the rest. If that doesn’t work, start a war. Extraterrestrial enemies, the Crab People from the Crab Nebula, everything for patriotism. Start a losing war. Cannonfodder.’

  He’s cracking up, Helaine thought as her husband went on talking. It was an endless monologue these days, a spewing fountain of bitterness. She tried not to listen. Since he showed no sign of leaving the apartment, she did. She hurled the dishes into the disposal unit and said to him, ‘I’m going to visit the neighbours,’ and walked out just as he launched into an exposition of the virtues of controlled nuclear warfare as a means of population check. Random spasms of noise, that was what Norm Pomrath was producing these days. He had to hear himself talk, so that he did not forget he was still there. Where shall I go? Helen wondered.

  Beth Wisnack, widowed by her time-hopping husband, looked smaller, greyer, sadder today than she had looked on Helaine’s last visit. Beth’s mouth was tightly drawn back in the quirk of suppressed rage. Behind the look of feminine resignation that she wore was inward fury: how dare he do this to me; how could he abandon me like this?

  Courteously Beth offered an alcohol tube to her guest. Helaine smiled pleasantly, took the snub-ended red plastic tube, thrust it against the fleshy part of her arm. Beth did the same. The ultrasonic snouts whirred; the stimulant spurted into their bloodstreams. An easy drunk, for those who did not like the taste of modem liquors. Helaine flickered her eyes, relaxing. She listened for a while to Beth’s song of complaint, pitched all on one note.

  Then Helaine said, ‘Beth, do you know about someone called Lanoy?’

  Beth was at instant attention. ‘Who Lanoy? What Lanoy? Where did you hear of him? What do you know of him?’

  ‘Not much. That’s why I asked you.’

  ‘I heard the name, yes.’ Her pale eyes were agitated. ‘Bud mentioned it. I heard him talking, telling some other man, Lanoy this, Lanoy that ... It was the week before he ran out on me. Lanoy, he said. Lanoy will fix it.’

  Helaine reached for a second alcohol tube without waiting to be invited. There was a sudden chill inside her that needed to be thawed.

  ‘Lanoy will fix what?’ she asked.

  Beth Wisnack subsided defeatedly. ‘I don’t know. Bud never discussed things with me. But I heard him talking about this Lanoy, anyway. A lot of whispering going on. Just before he left, he was talking Lanoy all the time. I’ve got a theory about Lanoy. You want to hear?’

  ‘Of course!’

  Smiling, Beth said, ‘I think Lanoy’s the one who runs the hopper business.’

  Helaine had thought so too. But she had come here to learn otherwise, not to have her worst fears confirmed. Tense, her hands trembling a little, she smoothed her tunic, shifted her position, and said, ‘You really think so? Do you have any reason to believe it?’

  ‘Bud talked Lanoy all week. Then he disappeared. He was hatching something and it had to do with Lanoy. I should know what? But I’ve got my theories. Bud met this Lanoy somewhere. They struck a deal. And – and – ’ The pain and rage welled too close to the surface. ‘And Bud left,’ Beth Wisnack said breathily. She popped another tube. Then she said, ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I found a slip in Norman’s clothes,’ Helaine said. ‘It was some kind of advert. “O
ut of work? See Lanoy.” I asked him about it. He got very embarrassed. Took the slip away from me, tried to tell me it was an employment agency, something like that. I could see he was lying. Hiding something. The trouble is, I don’t know what.’

  ‘You better start worrying hard, Helaine.’

  ‘You think it’s bad?’

  ‘I think it’s just the same as with Bud. Norm’s in contact with them. He’s probably trying to raise the money now. And they send him out. Poof! Gone. No husband. The widow Pomrath. Two kids, shift for yourself.’ Beth Wisnack’s eyes were glittering strangely now. She did not look unhappy at the prospect that Helaine’s husband might go hopper. It was the misery that craves company, Helaine knew. Let every husband in the world vanish into the maw of the past and perhaps Beth Wisnack would feel some delight.

  Helaine fought to stay calm.

  ‘When the police investigated Bud’s disappearance,’ she said, ‘did you mention this person Lanoy to them?’

  ‘I named him, yes. They wanted to know if Bud had been seeing anyone unusual just before he vanished, and I said I didn’t know, but there was this name he had mentioned a few times, Lanoy, that I didn’t know. They took it down. I don’t know what they did about it. It isn’t going to bring Bud back. You can only go one direction in time, you know; Backwards. They don’t have any machines back there to send people ahead again, and in any case I understand it isn’t possible. You go back, you’re stranded there for keeps. So when Norm goes – ’

  ‘He’s not going,’ said Helaine.

  ‘He’s seeing Lanoy, isn’t he?’ Beth asked.

  ‘All he had was the minislip. It didn’t even have an address on it. He said he didn’t know where to find Lanoy. And we aren’t sure that Lanoy is connected with the hopper business, anyhow.’

  Beth’s eyes sparkled. ‘The Lanoy mob is in contact with him,’ she said. ‘That means they can reach him any time. So he can reach them. And they’ll send him back. He’s going to be a hopper, Helaine. He’s going to go.’