The Time Hoppers Read online

  Here was the account of a Class Eight hydroponics man who was accused of a biological crime: unlawful insertion of living matter in the body of another human being. It was alleged that he had anaesthetized a fellow technician, made a surgical opening in his body with an ultrasonic probe, and placed within a lethal quantity of a newly developed Asian carniphage that proceeded to devour the circulatory system of the victim, rampaging up one artery and down the next vein, flowing like flame through the web of vessels. Why? ‘To see his reactions,’ was the explanation. ‘It was quite instructive.’ Here was a Class Six instructor in advanced hermeneutics at a large Appalachian university who had invited a nubile young student to his luxurious two-room apartment and upon her refusal to participate in sexual relations with him did inflict on her a short-circuit of the pain centres, after which he raped her and turned her loose, minus all sensory reactions. Why? ‘A matter of masculine pride,’ he told the arresting officer. ‘The Latin-American concept of machismo – ’

  He had his pride. But the girl would never feel sensation again. Neither pain nor pleasure, unless the damage could be undone by surgery.

  And here, Quellen saw, was the seamy account of a gathering of believers in the cult of social regurgitation, which had ended in tragedy instead of mystical experience. One of the worshippers, impelled by fathomless motives of cruelty, had covertly intruded three crystals of pseudoliving glass in his cud before turning it over to his companions. The glass, expanding in a congenial environment, had penetrated the internal organs of the victims in a fatal fashion. ‘It was all a terrible error,’ the criminal declared. ‘My intention was to swallow one of the crystals myself, and so share with them the torment and the ultimate release. Unfortunately – ’

  The story touched a chord of shock in Quellen. Most of these daily nightmare tales left him unmoved; but it happened that his Judith was a member of this very cult, and Judith had been on his mind since Helaine’s visit. Quellen hadn’t seen Judith or even been in touch with her since his last return from Africa. And it might just as easily have been Judith who swallowed these devilish crystals of pseudoliving glass as the unknown victims listed here. It might even have been me, Quellen thought in distaste. I should call Judith soon. I’ve been ignoring her.

  He looked on through the reports.

  Not all of the current crimes had been so imaginative. There was the customary quota of bludgeonings, knifings, laserings, and other conventional assaults. But the scope for criminality was infinitely great, and fanciful atrocities were the hallmark of the era. Quellen turned page after page, jotting down his observations and recommendations. Then he pushed all the troublesome material aside.

  He had not yet had a chance to look at the spool that Brogg had labelled Exhibit B in the hopper investigation. Brogg had said that it represented some tangential evidence of time-travel outside the recorded 1979-2106 zone. Quellen put the spool on and settled back to watch.

  It consisted of Brogg’s scholarly cullings of the annals of occultism. The UnderSec had compiled hundreds of accounts of mysterious appearances and apparitions, evidently under the assumption that they might represent time travellers of a pre-hopper phase. ‘I wish to suggest,’ Brogg’s memorandum asserted, ‘that while the normal range of the time-transport apparatus lies within five hundred years of the present time, there have been instances when an overshoot resulted in transportation to a much earlier period.’

  Maybe so, Quellen mused. He examined the evidence in a mood of detached curiosity.

  Exhibit: the testimony of Giraldus Cambrensis, chronicler, born at the castle of Manorbier in Pembrokeshire, circa AD 1146. Giraldus offered the tale of a red-haired young man who turned up unexpectedly in the house of a knight known as Eliodore de Stakepole in western Wales:

  This strange man said his name was Simon. He took the keys from the seneschal, and took over, also, the seneschal’s job; but he was so clever and finished a manager that nothing was ever lost or wanting in the house, which ever more became prosperous. If the master or mistress thought of something they would like, and did not even speak their thought, he read their minds and, hey presto, he got it, and no orders given him! He knew where they cached their gold and jewels. He would say to them: ‘Why this niggard care of your gold and silver? Is not life short? Then enjoy it, spend your gold, or you will die without enjoying life and the money you so cautiously hoard will do you no service.’ He had an eye for the good opinion of menials and rustics, and he gave them the choicest food and drink . . . This strange red-haired man set foot in no church, used no breviary, and uttered no Catholic word or religious sentiment. He did not sleep in the manor house; but was always on hand to serve and spring forward to give what was wanted.

  The chronicler related that the Stakepole children were curious about this mysterious Simon, and took to spying on him around the grounds of the manor house:

  And, one night, peering out from behind a holly bush, when the strange man was, by chance, gazing hard into the waters of a still mill dam, they saw him moving his lips as if in converse with something unseen.

  Which was duly reported to the elder Stakepole, and that virtuous knight instantly summoned Simon to his private chamber and gave him the sack:

  As they took the keys from him, the lady of the manor asked him: ‘Who art thou?’

  He replied: ‘I am begotten of the wife of a yokel of this parish by a demon who lay upon her in the shape of her own husband.’

  He named the man who was so cuckolded, who was lately dead. The mother was still alive, and when strict enquiry was made of her, the thing was certified to be true by her public confession.

  Interesting, Quellen thought. Where did Brogg get these things? It could very well have been that the red-haired ‘demon’ was a hopper accidentally hurled too far in time. So, too, these other monkish accounts. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, according to Brogg’s researches, had been a fertile era for the arrival of inexplicable strangers. Not all of them had arrived in human form, either. Quellen observed an extract from the Eulogium Historiarum prepared at Malmesbury Abbey, under the rubric AD 1171:

  On the night of the birthday of the Lord, there were thunderings and lightnings of which the like had not been heard before. And at Andover, a certain priest, at midnight, in the presence of the whole congregation, was cast down by lightning, with no other injuries . . . but what looked like a pig was seen to run to and fro between his feet . . .

  Brogg had ferreted out a parallel case in the Annales Francortim Regium of the monk Bertin, inscribed circa AD 1160. The entry for AD 856 declared:

  In August, Teotogaudus, Bishop of Trier, with clerics and people was celebrating the office when a very dreadful cloud, with thunderstorms and lightning, terrified the whole congregation in the church, and deadened the sounds of the bells ringing in the tower. The whole building was filled with such dense darkness that one and another could hardly see or recognize his or her neighbour. On a sudden, there was seen a dog of immense size in a sudden opening of the floor or earth, and it ran to and fro around the altar.

  Pigs? Dogs? Trial runs, perhaps, in the early days of the time-travel enterprise? Quellen wondered. The machine was still new and unreliable, he imagined, and hapless beasts had been placed within its field, and then had been spurted into the past to the consternation of the devout, devil-dreading citizens of the Middle Ages. A deplorable overshoot had taken the unhappy creatures back beyond the industrial revolution, but of course the operators of the machine could not have known the ultimate destinations of their passengers, unless they had had knowledge of these same records that Brogg had unearthed.

  Nor did all Brogg’s cases involve medieval episodes. A good many sections of Exhibit B dealt with instances more recent, though still well outside the 1979 date that had been considered the extreme limit of pastward travel. Quellen gave heed to the case of the girl who appeared at the door of a cottage near Bristol, England, on the evening of 3 April 1817, and begged for food in wha
t was described as ‘an unknown language’.

  How did they know what she was begging for, then? Quellen asked himself. The spool did not answer. It informed him instead that the girl who spoke unintelligibly was brought before a magistrate, one Samuel Worral, who instead of arresting her on a vagrancy charge took her to his home. (Suspicious, Quellen thought!) He questioned her. She wrote replies in an unknown script whose characters looked like combs, birdcages, and frying pans. Linguists came to analyse her words. At length came one who described himself as ‘a gentleman from the East Indies’. He interrogated her in the Malay language and received comprehensible replies.

  She was, he declared, the Princess Caraboo, kidnapped by pirates from her Javan home and carried off to sea, involving her in many adventures before at length she made her escape on the English shore. Through the medium of the ‘gentleman from the East Indies’, Princess Caraboo imparted many details of life in Java. Then a woman of Devonshire, a Mrs Willcocks, came forward and announced that the Princess was actually her own daughter Mary, born in 1791. Mary Will-cocks confessed her imposture and emigrated to America.

  Brogg had appended the following speculation to the case of the Princess Caraboo:

  ‘According to some authorities a multiple imposture was practised here. A girl mysteriously appeared. A man stepped forward and claimed to understand her language. An older woman declared that it was all a fraud. But the records are faulty. What if the girl was a visitor from the future, and the ‘gentleman from the East Indies’ another hopper who shrewdly tried to pass her off as a Javan princess in order to keep her true origin from coming out, and the pretended mother yet another hopper who moved in to protect the girl when it looked likely that the Javan hoax would be exposed? How many time-travellers were living in England in 1817 anyway?’ It seemed to Quellen that Brogg was being too credulous. He passed on to the next instance.

  Cagliostro: appeared in London, then in Paris, speaking with an accent of an unidentifiable kind. Supernal powers. Aggressive, gifted, unconventional. Accused of being in actuality one Joseph Balsamo, a Sicilian criminal. The same never proven. Earned a good living in eighteenth-century Europe peddling alchemistic powders, love philtres, elixirs of youth, and other useful compounds. Grew careless, was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785, escaped, visited other countries, was arrested again, died in prison, 1795. Fraud? Impostor? Time-traveller? It was wholly possible. Anything, thought Quellen sadly, was possible once you began giving credence to such evidence.

  Kaspar Hauser: staggered into the town of Nuremberg, Germany, on an afternoon in May 1828. Apparently sixteen or seventeen years old. (A trifle young for becoming a hopper, Quellen thought. Perhaps deceptive in appearance.) Capable of speaking only two sentences in German. Given a pencil and paper, he wrote a name: ‘Kaspar Hauser’. Assumption made that that was his name. He was unacquainted with the commonest objects and experiences of everyday affairs of human beings. Dropped down out of a time fault, no doubt. A quick learner, though. Detained for a while in prison as a vagrant, then turned over to a schoolmaster, Professor Daumer. Mastered German and wrote an autobiographical essay, declaring that he had lived all his life in a small, dark cell, living on bread and water. Yet a policeman who had found him declared, ‘He had a very healthy colour: he did not appear pale or delicate, like one who had been some time in confinement.’

  Many contradictions. Universal fascination in Europe; everyone speculating on the mysterious origin of Kaspar Hauser. Some said he was the crown prince of Baden, kidnapped in 1812 by the agents of the morganatic wife of his postulated father, the grand duke. Denied. Subsequently disproves Others said he was sleepwalker, amnesiac. 17 October 1829: Kaspar Hauser found with a wound in forehead, allegedly inflicted by a man in a black mask. Policemen assigned to guard him. Several further purported assaults. 14 December 1833: Kaspar Hauser found dying in a park, with deep stab wound on his left breast. Claimed that a stranger had inflicted the wound. No sign of weapon in the park, no footprints in vicinity except Hauser’s own. Suggestion that the wound was self-inflicted. Died several days afterwards after exclaiming, ‘My God! that I should so die in shame and disgrace!’

  Quellen disconnected the spool. Pigs, dogs, the Princess Caraboo, Kaspar Hauser-it was all quite entertaining. It might even support a belief that the whole of human history was besprinkled with time-travellers, and not simply the period from 1979 to 2106. Fine. But such facts did little to solve Quellen’s immediate problems, however much the gathering of them had gratified the beefy Brogg’s taste for scholarship. Quellen put the spool away.

  He dialled Judith’s number. Her face appeared on the screen, pale, sombre, austere. She fell short of being beautiful by quite a good deal. The bridge of her nose was too high, her forehead was somewhat domed, her lips were thin, her chin was long. Her eyes were disquietingly far apart, with the right one slightly higher than the left. Yet she was not unattractive. Quellen had toyed with the temptation of allowing himself to fall in love with her. It was awkward, though; he could not let her get too far within his emotional defences without telling her about the place in Africa, and he did not want to share that fact with her. She had a streak of righteousness; she might inform on him.

  She said, ‘Have you been hiding from me, Joe?’

  ‘I’ve been busy. Submerged in work. I’m sorry, Judith.’

  ‘Don’t let your guilts overflow. I’ve been getting along quite well.’

  ‘I’m sure you have. How’s your frood?’

  ‘Dr Galuber? He’s fine. He’d like to have the chance to meet you, Joe.’

  Quellen bristled. ‘I’ve got no plans for entering therapy, Judith. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve said you were sorry in the last three sentences.’

  ‘I’m sor – ’ Quellen began, and then they both laughed. Judith said, ‘I meant for you to meet Dr Galuber socially. He’ll be at our next communion.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Tonight, as a matter of fact. Will you come?’

  ‘You know that social regurgitation has never delighted me very much, Judith.’

  She smiled in a wintry way. ‘I know that. But it’s time you got out of your shell a little. You live too much to yourself, Joe. If you want to be a bachelor, that’s your business, but you don’t have to be a hermit too.’

  ‘I can put a piece in the slot of a frood machine and get advice just as profound as that.’

  ‘Maybe so. Will you come to the communion, though?’ Quellen thought of the case he had studied only an hour or so back, of the earnest communicant who had slipped pseudoliving glass into the alimentary canals of his fellow worshippers and then had watched them die in agony. He pictured himself writhing in torment while a weeping Judith clung to him and tried to extract the last vestige of emphatic sorrow from his sufferings, after the manner of her cult.

  He sighed. She was right: he had been living too much to himself these days. He needed to get out, away from his official responsibilities.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, Judith, I’ll come to the communion. Are you happy?’

  Nine

  Stanley Brogg had had a busy day.

  The UnderSec was juggling a lot of Quellen’s hot potatoes at once, but it did not trouble him, for Brogg had a good capacity for work. He privately felt that he and Spanner between them kept the whole department going. They were two of a kind, both big men, massive and methodical, with a reserve of flesh to draw extra energy from in times of crisis. Of course, Spanner was in the administrative end, and Brogg a lowly legworker. Spanner was Class Six, Brogg Class Nine. Yet Brogg saw himself as Spanner’s comrade-in-arms.

  Those other two, Koll and Quellen – they were excrescences on the department. Koll was full of hatred and mischief, seething with wrath simply because he was small and ugly. He had ability, of course, but his basically neurotic orientation made him dangerous and useless. If ever there was a case for compulsory frooding, it was Koll. Brogg often compared h
im to Tiberius Caesar: a baleful man full of menace, not insane but badly askew and so to be avoided.

  If Koll were Tiberius, Quellen was Claudius; amiable, intelligent, weak to the core. Brogg despised his immediate superior. Quellen struck him as a ditherer, unfit for his post. Now and then Quellen could act with vigour and determination, but it didn’t come naturally to him. Brogg had been doing the legwork for Quellen for years; otherwise, the department would long since have fallen apart.

  A surprising thing about Quellen, though: he was capable of criminality. That had startled Brogg. He didn’t think the man had it in him. To obtain a plot of land in Africa by diligently falsifying records, to apply and receive illegal stat service from a Class Seven apartment to the Congo, to live a secret life of ease and even luxury – why, it was an achievement so monstrously bold that Brogg still couldn’t see how Quellen had carried it off. Unless the explanation was that Quellen was so repelled by the harshness of life all about him that he was willing to take any risk to escape from it. Even a coward could rise to what looked like moral grandeur in the interests of his own cowardice. In the same way, a soft, flabby man like the Emperor Nero could transform himself into a demon simply to preserve his own flabbiness. Nero, thought Brogg, hadn’t been innately demonic after the fashion of Caligula; he had drifted into monstrosity in easy stages. In a way it was out of character for him, just as Quellen’s surprising act of boldness jarred with the image of the man that Brogg had constructed.