The Time Hoppers

Three

Quellen was glad to escape from Koll and Spanner. Once he was back in his own office, behind his own small but private desk, Quellen could feel his status again. He was something more than a flunky, no matter how Koll chose to push him around.

He rang for Brogg and Leeward, and the two UnderSecs appeared almost instantly.

“Good to see you again,” Stanley Brogg said sourly. He was a large man, sombre-looking, with a heavy face and thick, hairy-backed fingers. Quellen nodded to him and reached out to open the oxy vent, letting the stuff flow into the office and trying to capture the patronizing look Koll had flashed at him while doing the same thing fifteen minutes before. Brogg did not look awed. He was only Class Nine, but he had power over Quellen, and both of them knew it.

Leeward did not look awed either, for different reasons. Leeward simply was not sensitive to small gestures. He was a towering, cadaverous, undemonstrative man who went about his work in a routinely methodical way. Not a dolt, but destined never to get out of Class Nine, either.

Quellen surveyed his two assistants. He could not bear the silent scrutiny he was getting from Brogg. Brogg was the one who knew the secret of the African hideaway; a third of Quellen’s substantial salary was the price that kept Brogg quiet about Quellen’s second, secret home. Big Leeward did not know and did not care; he took his orders directly from Brogg, not from Quellen, and blackmail was not his speciality.

“I suppose you’ve been informed of our assignment to handle the recent prolet disappearances,” Quellen began. “The so-called time-hoppers have become the problem of the Secretariat of Crime, as we have anticipated for several years now.”

Brogg produced a thick stack of minislips. “As a matter of fact, I was going to get in touch with you about the situation just now. The High Government’s taken quite an interest Koll no doubt has told you that Kloofman himself is involved. I have the new statistics. In the first four months of this year sixty-eight thousand prolets have vanished.”

“But you’re on the case?”

“Of course,” Brogg said.

“Progress report?”

“Well,” Brogg said, pacing up and down the little room and wiping the sweat from his heavy jowls, “you know the theory, though it’s been occasionally controverted. That the hoppers are starting out from our proximate time-nexus. I’ve plotted it all. Tell him, Leeward.”

Leeward said, “A statistical distribution shows that the theory is correct. The present disappearances of prolets are linked directly to historical records of the appearance of the so-called hoppers in the late twentieth century and succeeding years.”

Brogg pointed to a blue-covered volume lying on Quellen’s desk. “History spool. I put it there for you. It confirms my findings. The theory’s sound.”

Quellen ran a finger along his jawline and wondered what it was like to carry around as much fat on one’s face as Brogg did. Brogg was perspiring heavily, and his expression was a sad one; he was virtually begging Quellen with his eyes to open the oxy vent wider. The moment of superiority pleased the harried CrimeSec, and he made no move towards the wall.

Crisply Quellen said, “All you’ve done is to confirm the obvious. We know the hoppers have been taking off from this approximate era. That’s been a fact of record since roughly 1979. The High Government directive orders us to isolate the distribution vector. I’ve developed an immediate course of action.”

“Which has been approved by Koll and Spanner, of course,” Brogg said insolently. His jowls quivered as his voice rumbled through them.

“It has,” Quellen said with as much force as he could muster. It angered him that Brogg could so easily deflate him. Koll, yes, Spanner, yes—but Brogg was supposed to be his assistant. Brogg knew too much about him, though. Quellen said, “I want you to track down the slyster who’s shipping these hoppers back. Do anything within the codes to halt his illegal activity. Bring him here. I want him caught before he sends anyone else into the past.”

“Yes, sir,” Brogg said with unaccustomed humility. “We’!! work on it. Which is to say, we’ll continue our already established line of exploration. We have tracers out in various prolet strata. We’re doing all we can to pull in a lead. We think it’s only a matter of time, now. A few days. A week. The High Government will be satisfied.”

“Let’s hope so,” Quellen snapped, and dismissed them.

He activated a view-window and peered at the street far below. It seemed to him that he could make out the distant figures of Brogg and Leeward as they appeared on the street, jostled their way to a belt, and disappeared among the multitudes that thronged the outdoor environment. Turning away, Quellen reached for the oxy vent with almost savage joy and flipped it to its widest. He leaned back. Hidden fingers in his chair massaged him. He looked at the book Brogg had left for him, and thumbed his eyeballs wearily.

Hoppers!

It was inevitable, he realized, that this would be dumped on him. All the odd things were, the scrawny conspiracies against law and order. Four years ago, it had been that syndicate of bootlegged artificial organs. Quellen shuddered. Defective pancreases peddled in pestilent alleyways, throbbing blood-filled hearts, endless coils of gleaming intestines, marketed by shady slysters who flitted noiselessly from zone to zone. And then it had been the fertility bank and the grubby business of the sperm withdrawals. And then the alleged creatures from the adjoining universe who had run through the streets of Appalachia clashing hideous red mandibles and clutching at children with scaly claws. Quellen had handled those things, not brilliantly, for brilliance was not his style, but competently, at least And now hoppers.

The assignment unsettled him. He had haggled for secondhand kidneys and he had quibbled over the price of ova, all in a day’s work, but he did not like this business of coping with illegal time-travel. The framework of the cosmos seemed to warp a little, once you admitted the possibility that such a thing could occur. It was bad enough that time kept flowing relentlessly forward; a man could understand that, though he did not necessarily have to like it. Backward, though? A reversal of all logic, a denial of all reason? Quellen was a reasonable man. Time paradoxes troubled him. How easy it would be, he knew, to step into the stat and leave Appalachia behind, return to the tranquil humidity of his African hideaway, shrug off all responsibility.

He conquered the creeping apathy that beset him and snapped on the projector. Stereoscopic Julesz figures flashed on the screen while his eyes adjusted to undifferentiated blacks and whites. The Julesz edge kept the screen perpetually in focus, no matter what the degree of optical distortion. The history spool began to unroll. Quellen watched the words, sharp as blades, stream by:

There was more, a whole reel more, but Quellen had had enough for the moment. He cut the projector off. The heat of the little room was oppressive, despite the air conditioning and the oxy vent. He could smell his own acrid sweat and didn’t like the sensation. Quellen looked despairingly at the confining walls, thinking with longing of the murky stream that ran by the front porch of his African retreat.

He nudged the pedal stud of the minislip dictator and delivered himself of a few memos:

Quellen rejected the last memo in unfinished form and kicked over the pedal. The dictator thrust minislips at him. He let them lie on his desk and started the projector again, reeling out some more of the history spool.

(Quellen made a mental note. Possibly it was significant.)

There was an interruption in the text. Brogg had inserted his own memo here:

Quellen found Exhibits A and B on his desk: two more spools. He did not put them into the projector. Nor did he run the history spool any further just yet. He paused and considered.

All the hoppers seemed to be coming from a single five-year period, of which this was the fourth year. All the hoppers had landed within a temporal spectrum of about a century and a quarter. Naturally, some hoppers had escaped detection, slipping smoothly into the life-patterns of their new era and never showing up on the charts of time-travel. Methods of persona-detection had been fairly primitive three and four hundred years ago, Quellen knew, and it was surprising that so many of the hoppers had actually been found and recorded. Low-order prolets, though, weren’t likely to be subtle about concealing themselves in an era to which they were unaccustomed. But surely the syndicate running the hopper business was not sending back only prolets!

Removing the history spool from the projector, Quellen slipped Brogg’s Exhibit A into its place and switched the machine on. Exhibit A was uninspiring: nothing less nor more than a census roll of the recorded hoppers. Quellen tuned in on the data in a random way as it flowed past.

Quellen halted the roster as ideas flooded his mind. He ran ahead to Lona Walk, q.v., and made the interesting discovery that she was a hopper who had landed in 2098, claiming to have been born in 2471 and to have shipped out for the past on 1 November 2488. This, obviously, had been a prearranged rendezvous; boy of eighteen, girl of seventeen, chucking the twenty-fifth century and heading for the past to start a new life together. Yet Martin Backhouse had landed in 2102, and his girl-friend in 2098. Clearly they hadn’t planned it that way. Which told Quellen that the hopper-transporting process was not exact in its attainment of destinations. Or, at least, had not been exact a few years ago. That must have been uncomfortable for poor Lona Walk, Quellen thought: to land in the past and then to find that her heart’s desire hadn’t made it to the same year.

Quellen was quick to devise some grievous hopper tragedies of this sort. Romeo lands in 2100, Juliet in 2025. Heartbroken Romeo comes upon decades-old gravestone of Juliet. Worse yet, youthful Romeo encounters ninety-year-old Juliet. How did Lona Walk spend the four years while waiting for Martin Backhouse to drop into her era? How could she be sure that he would arrive at all? What if she lost faith and married someone else the year before he showed up? What if the four-year gulf had destroyed their love—for by the time he reached the past, she was objectively twenty-one years old, and he was still only eighteen?

Interesting, Quellen thought. No doubt the playwrights of the twenty-second century had a rich time mining this lode of imaginative material. Bombarded with emigrants out of the future, bedevilled by paradoxes, how those ancient ones must have wrinkled their foreheads over these hoppers!

But of course it was nearly four hundred years since any known hoppers had turned up. The whole phenomenon had been forgotten for generations. Only the fact that the hoppers were coming from now had revived it. More’s the pity, Quellen thought dourly, that it had to be my time in office.

He pondered other aspects of the problem.

Suppose, he speculated, some hoppers had made a good adaptation, settled down, married people of their new era. Not, like Martin Backhouse, marrying other hoppers, but marrying people whose time-lines began four or five hundred years before their own. That way they might well have married their own great-great-great-great-grandmothers. And thus become their own great-great-great-great-grandfathers. What did that do to genetic flow and continuity of the germ plasm?

Then, too, how about the hopper who lands in 2050, gets into a fist-fight with the first man he meets, knocks him to the pavement, kills him—only to discover that he’s slain one of his own direct ancestors and broken his own line of descent? Quellen’s head ached. Presumably, any hopper who did that would wink out of existence instantly, never having been born in the first place. Were there any records of such occurrences? Make a note, he said to himself. Check every angle of this thing.

He did not think that such paradoxes were possible. He dung firmly to the idea that it was impossible to change the past, because the past was a sealed book, unchangeable. It had already happened. Any manipulation done by a time-traveller was already in the record. Which makes puppets out of us all, Quellen thought gloomily, finding himself down the dead end of determinism. Suppose I went back in time and killed George Washington in 1772? But Washington, we know, lived till 1799. Would that make it impossible for me to kill him in 1772? He scowled. Such enquiries made his mind spin. Brusquely he ordered himself to return to the business at hand, which was to find some way to halt the further flow of hoppers, thus fulfilling the implied deterministic prophecy that there would be no more hoppers going back after 2491 anyway.

Here’s a point to consider, he realized:

Half an hour of patient searching, though, turned up the man he wanted:

It didn’t give the exact date, but it would do. A close watch would be kept on Clark Radant during the month to come, Quellen resolved. Let’s see if he can slip back to 1987 while we watch him!

He punched for Master Files.

“Get me documents on Clark Radant, born 14 May 2458,” Quellen snapped.

The huge computer somewhere below the building was designed to give instant response. It did not necessarily give instant satisfaction, however, and the response that Quellen got was less than useful.

“NO RECORD OF CLARK RADANT BORN 14 MAY 2458,” came the reply.

“No record? You mean there’s no such person?”

“AFFIRMATIVE.”

“That’s impossible. He’s in the hopper records. Check them. He turned up in Brooklyn on 12 May 1987. See if he didn’t.”

“AFFIRMATIVE. CLARK RADANT LISTED AMONG 1987 ARRIVALS AND 2490 DEPARTURES.”

“You see? So you must have some information on him! Why did you tell me there was no record of him, when—”

“POSSIBLY FRAUDULENT HOPPER LISTING IS ONLY ENTRY. NAME ON LIST DOES NOT IMPLY LEGITIMATE EXISTENCE. EXPLORE POSSIBILITY THAT RADANT NAME IS PSEUDONYM.”

Quellen nibbled his lower lip. Yes, no doubt of it! Radant, whoever he might be, had given a phony name when he landed in 1987. Perhaps all the hopper names on the list were pseudonyms. Maybe they were individually instructed to conceal their real names when they arrived, or possibly indoctrinated so that they could not reveal them, even after interrogation. The enigmatic Clark Radant had been interrogated eight days, it said, and he still hadn’t offered a name that corresponded to anything in the birth records.

Quellen saw his bold plan fluttering into the discard. He tried again, though. Expecting to search another half hour, he was rewarded with a new lead after only five minutes:

He hoped it had been a merry Christmas in Boston for Donald Mortensen four hundred and two year; ago. Quellen punched for Master Files again and demanded to know what there was to be known about Donald Mortensen, born 11 June 2462. He was prepared to learn that no such individual was recorded in the voluminous birth annals of that year.

Instead, the computer began to chatter to him about Donald Mortensen—his skill classification, his marital status, his address, his physical description, his health record. Quellen at length had to silence the machine.

Very well. There was a Donald Mortensen. He had not—would not—bother to use a pseudonym when he showed up in Boston on Christmas Day forty decades ago. If he showed up. Quellen consulted the hopper records again and learned that Mortensen had found employment as an automobile service technician (how prehistoric, Quellen thought!) and had married one Donna Brewer in 2091, fathering five children on her (even more prehistoric!) and living on until 2149, when he expired of an unrecorded disease.

Those five children no doubt had had multitudes of offspring themselves, Quellen realized. Thousands of modern-day human beings might be descended from them, including Quellen himself, or some leader of the High Government. Now, if Quellen’s minions closed in on Donald Mortensen as the critical day of 4 May arrived, and prevented him from taking off for the year 2088—He felt hesitant. The sensation of bold determination that had gripped him a few moments before evaporated completely as he considered the consequences of altering Donald Mortensen’s chosen path of action.

Perhaps, Quellen thought, I should have a talk with Koll and Spanner about this, first.