Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

And consider this Lanoy, Quellen ruminated, fingering the minislip in his pocket. Some kind of crookedness going on there, yet it was concealed well enough to have avoided the attention of the Secretariat of Crime. What did the computer files say about Lanoy? How did this Lanoy manage to hide his illegal activities from his family or roommates? Surely he did not live alone. Such an outlaw could not be Class Seven. Lanoy must be some shrewd prolet, running a free-enterprise swindle for his own private benefit.

Quellen felt a strange kinship with the unknown Lanoy, much as it repelled him to admit it. Lanoy, too, was beating the game. He was a wily one, possibly worth knowing. Quellen frowned. Quickly he moved on, back to his apartment.

Peter Kloofman lay sprawled out in a huge tub of nutrient fluid while the technicians changed his left lung. His chest panel was wide open on its hinges, exactly as though Kloofman were some sort of robot undergoing repair. He was no robot. He was mere mortal flesh and blood, but not very mortal. At the age of a hundred and thirty-two, Kloofman had undergone organ replacements so frequently that there was very little left of his original persona except for the grey slab of his wily brain itself, and even that was no stranger to the surgeon’s beam. Kloofman was willing to submit to such things gladly, for the sake of preserving his existence, which is to say his infinite power. He was real. Danton was not Kloofman preferred to keep things that way.

“David Giacomin is here to see you,” purred a voice from the probe riveted just within his skull.

“Admit him,” said Kloofman.

Some twenty years ago he had had himself reconstructed so that he could carry on the business of the state even while undergoing regenerative surgery. It would have been impossible to remain, in power, otherwise. Kloofman was the only flesh-and-blood member of Class One, which meant that ail power lines converged towards him. He delegated as much as he could to the assortment of cams and relays that went by the name of Benjamin Danton; but Danton, after all, was unreal, and in the long run even he was only an extension of the tireless Kloofman. It had not always been this way. Before the Flaming Bess affair there had been three members of Class One, and still farther back Kloofman had been but one of five.

He carried on satisfactorily this way, however. And there was no reason why he could not continue to bear his unique burden for another six or seven hundred years. No man in all the history of the world had held the power Peter Kloofman held. In his occasional moments of fatigue he found that a comforting thing upon which to reflect.

Giacomin entered. He stood in a position of relaxed attentiveness beside the nutrient tub in which Kloofman lay. Kloofman valued Giacomin highly. He was one of perhaps two hundred Class Two individuals who provided the indispensable underpinning for the High Government. Between Class Two and Class Three was a qualitative gulf. Class Two understood the way the world was run; Class Three, on the other hand, enjoyed great comforts, but no true understanding. To a Class Three surgeon or administrator, Danton was probably real, and other unnamed Class Ones existed as well. Giacomin, privy to the knowledge a Class Two man had, was aware of the truth.

“Well?” Kloofman asked, watching with detached interest as the surgeons lifted the grey, foamy mass of the replacement lung and inserted it in his gaping chest cavity. “What’s the story for today, David?”

“Hoppers.”

“Have they located the process yet?”

“Not yet,” said Giacomin. “They’re taking steps, though. It won’t be long.”

“Good, good,” murmured Kloofman. This enterprise of illicit time travel troubled him more than he cared to admit. For one thing, it went on despite the best efforts of the government to track it to its source, and that was bothersome. But of course it was only a few days since Kloofman had requested a detect on the operation, anyway. Much more annoying was the fact that for all his power he could not reach out instantly, seize this temporal process, and put it to his own uses. It had been developed independently of the instrumentalities of the High Government. Thus it was a conspicuous reminder to Kloofman that not even he was omnipotent.

Giacomin said, “There’s a problem. They’ve thought of isolating a potential hopper and keeping him from making the jump.”

Kloofman moved convulsively in his bath. Fluid splashed into his chest cavity. Homeostatic pumps imperturbably removed it, and a surgeon clamped his lips together and went about the job of stapling the new lung in place without comment. The world leader said, “A listed hopper? One who’s been recorded?”

“Yes.”

“Have you permitted this?”

“I brought it to you. I’ve got a hold on it until The Word comes down.”

“Kill it,” said Kloofman decisively. “Beyond a doubt. I go further: make absolutely certain that there’s no interference with any listed hoppers. Take that as a flat rule. Anyone who has left must leave. Yes? That’s The Word, David. It goes out to all departments that are even remotely connected with the hopper business.”

As he spoke, Kloofman felt a faint stinging sensation in the fleshy part of his left thigh. Sedation; he must be getting too excited. The automatic monitoring system was compensating by chemical means, dilating arteries, flooding his system with useful enzymes. He could do better than that. Consciously, he willed himself to be calm even in the face of this threat. Giacomin looked concerned.

Kloofman grew tranquil. Giacomin said, “That was all I wanted to report. I’ll pass your instructions along.”

“Yes. And notify the Danton programmers. Anything going through his office should carry the same notification. This is something too important to let slide. I don’t understand how I failed to anticipate the possibility.”

Giacomin departed, making his way carefully around the tank and out of the faintly clammy atmosphere of the chamber. Kloofman eyed the green vitreous walls with displeasure. He realized that he should have been forewarned. It was the job of those in Class Two to plot the pitfalls for him in advance, and they had been cognizant of the hopper problem for some time now. As far back as “83, contingency schedules had been drawn to deal with the hopper problem. Why had they not included this ? Of all things to forget!

Kloofman forgave himself for overlooking it. The others, though—they were in for a declassing.

Out loud he said, “Imagine what could have happened if anybody had begun meddling with the registered and documented hoppers. Pulling chunks out of the past—why, it might have turned the world upside-down!”

The surgeons did not reply. It would be worth their classifications if they ever spoke to Kloofman except on matters of their own sphere of professional competence. They closed his chest and ran anemostats over it. The instant healing process began. The temperature in the nutrient bath began to descend as the autonomic regulators prepared Kloofman for his return to independent motility.

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.