Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

He stepped outside, into the pale sunlight of the spring afternoon.

The sniffer palace he particularly favoured was four blocks away. There were plenty of them, dozens within a ten-block radius of the job-machine building, but Pomrath always went to the same one. Why not? They dispensed the same poisons at each one, so the only commodity that distinguished one from the next was personal service. Even an unemployed Class Fourteen likes to know that he’s a valued regular client of something, if only a sniffer palace.

Pomrath walked quickly. The streets were crowded; pedestrianism was in fashion again lately. The short, heavy set Pomrath had little patience for the obstacles in his way. In fifteen minutes he was at the sniffer palace. It was on the fortieth underlevel of a commercial tank building; by law, all such places of illusion-peddling had to be underground, so that impressionable children at street level would not be prematurely corrupted. Pomrath entered the tank and took the express dropshaft. With great dignity he descended five hundred feet. The tank had eighty levels, terminating in an undertrack that linked it to several adjoining buildings, but Pomrath had never been down that deep to see. He left such subterranean adventures to the members of the High Government, and had no wish to come face to face with Danton somewhere in the depths of the earth.

The sniffer palace had gaudy, somewhat defective argon lights out front. Most such establishments were all-mechanical, but this one had human attendants. That was why Pomrath liked it. He walked in, and there was good old Jerry just within the door, scanning him out of authentic, bloodshot human eyes.

“Norm. Good to see.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Business?”

“Lousy. Have a mask.”

“Glad to,” Pomrath said. “The wife? You got her pregnant yet?”

The plump man behind the counter smiled. “Would I do a crazy thing like that? In a Class Fourteen, do I need a house full of kids? I took the Sterility Pledge, Norm. You forget that?”

“I guess I did,” Pomrath said. “Well, okay. There are times I wish I’d done the same. Give me the mask.”

“What are you sniffing?”

“Butyl mercaptan,” he said at random.

“Come off it. You know we don’t—”

“Pyruvic acid, then. With a jolt of lactate dehydrogenase 5 as a spike.”

Pomrath drew laughter, but it was mechanical, the laughter of an entrepreneur humouring a valued if slightly embittered customer. “Here, Norm. Stop contaminating my brain and take this. And sweet dreams. You got couch nine, and you owe me a piece and a half.”

Taking the mask, Pomrath dropped a few coins into the fleshy palm and retreated to a vacant couch. He kicked his shoes off. He stretched out. He clasped the mask to his face and inhaled. A harmless pastime, a mild hallucinatory gas, a quick illusion to enliven the day. As he went under, Pomrath felt electrodes sliding into place against his skull. To serve as wardens for his alpha rhythms, was the official explanation; if his illusion got too violent, he could be awakened by the management before he did some harm to himself. Pomrath had heard that the electrodes served another, more sinister purpose: to record the hallucinations, to tape them for the benefit of Class Two millionaires who liked the vicarious kick of sitting inside a prolet’s mind for a while. Pomrath had asked Jerry about that, but Jerry had denied it. As well he might do. It hardly mattered, Pomrath thought, if the sniffer palace chose to peddle second-hand hallucinations. They were free to loot his alphas, if they cared to. So long as he got some decent entertainment for his piece and a half, his proprietary interests ended there.

He went under.

Abruptly he was Class Two, the occupant of a villa oil an artificial island in the Mediterranean. Wearing nothing but a strip of green cloth about his waist, he lay restfully on a fat pneumochair at the edge of the sea. A girl paddled back and forth in the crystal water, her tanned skin gleaming when she broke the surface. She smiled at him. Pomrath acknowledged her with a negligent wave of his hand. She looked quite lovely in the water, he told himself.

He was viceroy for interpersonal relations in Moslem East, a nice soft Class Two sinecure that involved nothing more than an occasional visit to Mecca and a few conferences each winter in Cairo. He had a pleasant home near Fargo, North Dakota, and a decent apartment in the New York zone of Appalachia, and of course this island in the Mediterranean. He firmly expected to reach Class One in the next personnel kickover of the High Government. Danton consulted with him frequently. Kloofman had invited him to dinner several times down on Level One Hundred. They had discussed wines. Kloofman was something of a connoisseur; he and Pomrath had spent a splendid evening analysing the virtues of a Chambertin that the synthesizers had produced back in “74. That was a good year, “74. Especially for the bigger Burgundies.

Helaine crawled up out of the water and stood incandescently bare before him, her tanned, full-blown body shimmering in the warm sunlight.

“Darling, why didn’t you come swimming?” she asked.

“I was thinking. Very delicate plans.”

“You know that that gives you a headache! Isn’t there a government to do the thinking for you?”

“Underlings like your brother Joe? Don’t be foolish, love. There’s the government, and there’s the High Government, and the two are quite distinct. I have my responsibilities. I have to sit here and think.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Helping Kloofman assassinate Danton.”

“Really, love? But I thought you were in the Danton faction!”

Pomrath smiled. “I was. Kloofman, though, is a connoisseur of fine wines. He tempted me. Do you know what he’s devised for Danton? It’s magnificent. An autonomic laser programmed to put a beam through him at the exact moment when he—”

“Don’t tell me,” Helaine said. “I might give away the secret!” She turned, presenting her back to him. Pomrath let his eyes rove up and down the succulent voluptuousness of her. She had never looked more delightful, he thought. He wondered if he should participate in Kloofman’s assassination scheme. Danton might reward him well for information. It was worth further thought.

The butler came rolling out of the villa and planted itself on four stubby telescoping legs beside Pomrath’s lounge chair. Pomrath regarded the grey metal box with affection. What could be better than a homeostatic butler, programmed to its master’s cycle of alcohol consumption?

“A filtered rum,” Pomrath said.

He accepted the drink, which was extended towards him by a spidery arm of crosshatched titanium fibres. He sipped it. A hundred yards offshore, the sea abruptly began to bubble and boil, as though something monstrous were churning upward from the depths. A vast corkscrew-shaped nose broke the surface. A metal kraken, paying a visit. Pomrath gestured in the defence-motion, and instantly the guardian cells of the island threw up a picket fence of evenly spaced copper wire, each strand eight feet high and a sixteenth of an inch thick. The defence screen glowed between the strands.

The kraken lumbered towards the shore. It did not challenge the defensive screen. Rearing twenty feet out of the water, the bulky greyish-green object cast a long shadow across Pomrath and Helaine. It had large yellow eyes. A lid opened in the tubular skull, and a panel slid forward, out of which a human figure descended. So the kraken was merely a means of transportation, Pomrath observed. He recognized the figure who was coming ashore, and ordered the screen to drop.

It was Danton.

Cold eyes, sharply beaked nose, thin lips, swarthy skin betokening a more than usually mixed ancestry: Danton. As he stepped ashore, the Class One potentate nodded courteously to the nude Helaine and held both palms out to the apprehensive Pomrath. Pomrath tapped the butler’s control panel; the metal box scuttled off to fetch a pneumochair for the newcomer. Danton settled into it. Pomrath produced a drink for him. Danton thanked him kindly. Helaine sprawled out on her belly to sunbathe.