The Time Hoppers

Eight

Quellen had not enjoyed the interview with his sister. Helaine always left him feeling flayed. She was so visibly unhappy that it pained him to see her at all. Now she looked five or six years older than he was. He remembered Helaine at thirteen or so, virginal and radiant, naive enough to think that life held something wonderful for her. Here she was a few years short of forty, marooned within four walls, clawing like a demon to hang on to her morose, embittered husband, because he was just about all that she had.

Still, she had given him some useful information. Lanoy had been on Quellen’s mind ever since the sallow-faced stranger had pressed the wadded minislip into his hand on the flyramp. The next day, Quellen had initiated a routine check, but it had turned up nothing tangible. A mere last name was useless to the computer. There were thousands of Lanoys in the world, and Quellen could scarcely investigate every one of them for possible criminal activities. A random scoop had yielded no information. Now, though, came Helaine with her intuitive conviction that Lanoy was behind the hopper business. And this woman she had mentioned, this Beth Wisnack—Quellen made a note to send a man around to talk to her again. No doubt Beth Wisnack had already been interrogated about her husband’s disappearance, but she would have to be approached from the direction of Lanoy information this time.

Quellen considered the possibility of posting a guard cm Norm Pomrath to prevent any untimely departure. He had been ordered in no ambiguous terms to leave Donald Mortensen alone and to do no meddling with any of the listed hoppers. Koll had received The Word from Giacomin, who had it from the lips of Kloofman himself: “Hands off Mortensen.”

They were afraid of changing the past. Quellen could feel the fear in them, running right up to the High Government. It was within his power to shake the underpinnings of the universe. Pick up Donald Mortensen for questioning and put a laser bolt through his skull, for example.

“Sorry. Resisted arrest and had to be destroyed.”

Yes. And then Donald Mortensen would never take off for the past on 4 May. Which would upset the entire structure of the last few centuries. At the moment I shoot Mortensen, Quellen thought, everything will shift and it will turn out that we were conquered by an army of slimy centipedes from the Magellanic Clouds in AD 2257—a conquest that would have been prevented by one of the descendants of Donald Mortensen, if I hadn’t been so thoughtless as to shoot him down.

Quellen had no intention of inviting the wrath of the High Government by interfering with the departure of Donald Mortensen. But Norm Pomrath was not on the hopper list. Was he covered by Kloofman’s directive, then? Was Quellen required to abstain from any action that could possibly lead to the time-departure of any person whatever?

That made no sense. Therefore Quellen agreed with himself that he could without compromising himself keep watch on his brother-in-law and take steps to prevent Norm from going hopper. That would make Helaine happy. It might also, Quellen thought, contribute to an ultimate solution to this entire worrisome assignment.

“Get me Brogg,” he said into his communicator mouthpiece.

Brogg turned out to be conducting an investigation outside the building. The other UnderSec, Leeward, entered Quellen’s office.

The CrimeSec said, “I’ve got a possible lead. My brother-in-law Norm Pomrath is allegedly on the verge of seeking out a contact who’ll help him become a hopper. I’m not sure there’s any truth in it, but I want it checked. Slap an Ear on Pomrath and have him monitored on a twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock basis. If he utters so much as a syllable about hopping, we’ll make our move.”

“Yes, sir,” said Leeward stolidly.

“There’s also this matter of a certain Lanoy. Did anything new turn up?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“I’ve learned that Pomrath’s supposed contact man is this Lanoy. So that’s our key syllable. Make sure that the monitors are triggered to flash if Pomrath mentions the name. I’m to be summoned immediately.”

Leeward went off to take care of things. There was the end to Norm Pomrath’s privacy, of course. From now until Quellen withdrew the Ear, Pomrath could not embrace his wife, relieve his bowels, scratch his armpit, or denounce the High Government without having some omniscient monitoring system making a record of it. Too bad. Quellen himself had been victimized by an Ear, and he knew the anguish of it, because that was how the treacherous Brogg had learned of the CrimeSec’s illegal home in Africa. Yet Quellen had no real regrets about what he was doing to Pomrath. It was for Helaine’s sake. She had asked to have Norm put in jail, hadn’t she? This would be far less inconvenient to him. He’d never even know, most likely. And he might just lead Quellen to the source of the hopper enterprise. In any event it would be extremely difficult for Pomrath to take leave of the present century while he was being monitored.

Quellen dismissed the Pomrath problem from his mind, for the moment, and turned his attention to other matters of urgency.

The day’s general crime reports had landed on his desk. Obsessed as he was with hoppers, Quellen still had responsibilities in other sectors. He was required to examine the details of all crimes committed within his zone of Appalachia, and to make recommendations for dispensation. The new stack was about the same size as yesterday’s—crime was a statistical constant—and, Quellen knew, today’s atrocities would be neither less nor more imaginative than yesterday’s.

He leafed through the documents.

The roster of crimes no longer chilled Quellen, and that was the worst part of the job. A creeping loss of sensitivity was overtaking him year by year. When he had been young and new at this game, a fledgling Class Eleven just finding out what it was all about, the extent of man’s capacity to do injury to man had numbed him. Now it was all statistics and coded tapes, divorced from reality.

The crimes tended to be motiveless. The benign High Government had removed most of the archaic causes for crime, such as hunger, want, and physical frustration. Everyone received a pay-cheque, whether he worked or not, and there was enough food for all, nutritious if not particularly tasty. No one was driven into banditry to support a starving family. Most addictive drugs were easily available. Sex of all varieties could be had cheaply at government-regulated cubicles. These measures were signs of maturity, so it was said. By making most things legal, the High Government had removed the need to commit illegalities.

True. The motives for crime were largely extinct. Crime itself, though, remained. Quellen had had ample proof of that melancholy sociological fact. Theft, murder, rape—these were amusements now, not matters of need. The middle classes were shot through with criminality. Respectable Class Six burghers did the most hideous things. Plump matrons from Class Five households waylaid strangers in dark alleyways. Bright-eyed children took part in abominations. Even the officers of the law themselves, Quellen knew, circumvented authority by illegal acts, such as establishing second homes for themselves in reservations supposedly limited to Class Two personnel. Yet at least Quellen’s own crime did no direct injury to other human beings. Whereas—

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:

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:

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

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:

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:

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 what 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?”