Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

“You better start worrying hard, Helaine.”

“You think it’s bad?”

“I think it’s just the same as with Bud. Norm’s in contact with them. He’s probably trying to raise the money now. And they send him out. Poof! Gone. No husband. The widow Pomrath. Two kids, shift for yourself.” Beth Wisnack’s eyes were glittering strangely now. She did not look unhappy at the prospect that Helaine’s husband might go hopper. It was the misery that craves company, Helaine knew. Let every husband in the world vanish into the maw of the past and perhaps Beth Wisnack would feel some delight.

Helaine fought to stay calm.

“When the police investigated Bud’s disappearance,” she said, “did you mention this person Lanoy to them?”

“I named him, yes. They wanted to know if Bud had been seeing anyone unusual just before he vanished, and I said I didn’t know, but there was this name he had mentioned a few times, Lanoy, that I didn’t know. They took it down. I don’t know what they did about it. It isn’t going to bring Bud back. You can only go one direction in time, you know; Backwards. They don’t have any machines back there to send people ahead again, and in any case I understand it isn’t possible. You go back, you’re stranded there for keeps. So when Norm goes—”

“He’s not going,” said Helaine.

“He’s seeing Lanoy, isn’t he?” Beth asked.

“All he had was the minislip. It didn’t even have an address on it. He said he didn’t know where to find Lanoy. And we aren’t sure that Lanoy is connected with the hopper business, anyhow.”

Beth’s eyes sparkled. “The Lanoy mob is in contact with him,” she said. “That means they can reach him any time. So he can reach them. And they’ll send him back. He’s going to be a hopper, Helaine. He’s going to go.”

Q.E.D.

A quickboat took her to the flamboyant skyscraper that housed the Secretariat of Crime. Some persistent work at the front desk yielded Helaine the information that her brother was at the office today, and if she cared to wait a while perhaps he would see her. She requisitioned an appointment with him. The machine asked for her thumbprint, and she gave it, and then sat down to wait in an anteroom draped with sombre purplish fabrics.

Helaine was not accustomed to venturing out in the world of office buildings and walking servomechanisms. She stayed close to home, and did her shopping by remote contact. “Downtown’—the world at the end of the quickboat routes—was a frightening place to her. She forced herself to remain cool. On a matter as serious as this, she had to see her brother face to face across a desk, so that he could not escape from her at the flick of a switch. She was terrified.

“The CrimeSec will see you,” a flat, impersonal vocoder voice told her.

She was ushered into the presence of her brother. Quellen stood up, flashed a quick, uncomfortable smile, beckoned her into a chair. The chair grabbed her and began to knead the muscles of her back. Helaine shuddered at the sensation, and pulled away in alarm as the invisible hands within the chair started to go to work on her thighs and buttocks. The delicate feedback sensors of the chair caught her mood, and the attentions ceased.

She looked uncertainly at her brother. Quellen seemed to be as ill at ease with her as she was with him; he tugged at his ear, clenched his jaws, popped his knuckles. They were practically strangers. They met on family occasions, but there had been no real communication between them for a long time. He was a few years older than she was. Once, they had been quite close, two devoted siblings bantering and heckling one another just as her Joseph and Marina did today. Helaine could remember her brother as a boy, stealing his peeks at her body in their one-room apartment, pulling her hair, helping her with her homework. Then he had begun his training for government service, and after that he had not been part of her world in any meaningful way. Now she was an edgy housewife and he was a busy public officer, and she was somewhat afraid of him.

For perhaps three minutes they exchanged friendly pleasantries about domestic matters. Helaine talked about her children, her social conscience unit in the apartment, her personal reading programme. Quellen said very little. He was a bachelor, which set him farther apart from her. Helaine knew that her brother kept company with some woman, somebody named Judith, but he rarely talked about her and seemed hardly ever even to think of her. There were times when Helaine suspected that Judith did not exist—that Quellen had invented her as camouflage for some solitary vice he preferred, or, worse, for some homosexual involvement. Sodomy was acceptable socially these days; it helped to keep the birth rate low. But Helaine did not like to think of her brother Joe taking part in such practices.

She brought the chatter to a deliberate end by asking about Judith. “Is she well? You’ve never kept your promise to bring her to visit us, Joe.”

Quellen looked as uncomfortable at the mention of Judith as Norm Pomrath had looked while Helaine was questioning him about the Lanoy minislip. He said evasively, “I’ve mentioned the idea to her. She thinks it would be fine to meet you and Norm, but not just yet. Judith’s a little disturbed by having to meet your children. Children unsettle her. But I’m sure we’ll work something out.” He flashed the quick, hollow smile again. Then he dismissed the touchy subject of Judith by getting down to the business at hand. “I’m sure this wasn’t just a social call, Helaine.”

“No. It’s business, Joe. I see by the faxtapes that you’re conducting an investigation of the hoppers.”

“Yes. True.”

“Norm’s going to hop.”

Quellen sat stiffly upright, his left shoulder rising higher than the right one. “What gives you that idea? Has he told you so himself?”

“No, of course not. But I suspect it. He’s been very depressed lately, about not working and all that.”

“Nothing new with him.”

“More so than usual. You should hear the way he talks. He’s so bitter, Joe! He talks absolute nonsense, just a stream of angry words that don’t make any sense. I wish I could quote him for you. He’s building up to some kind of psychological explosion, I know it. I can feel the steam gathering inside him.” She winced. The chair was starting to massage her again. “He hasn’t worked for months now, Joe.”

Quellen said, “I’m aware of that. You know, the High Government is furthering a whole sequence of plans designed to alleviate the unemployment problem.”

“That’s fine. But in the meanwhile Norm isn’t working, and I don’t think it’ll matter much longer. He’s in contact with the hopper people and he’s going to hop. Even while I’m sitting here telling you this, he might be getting into the machine!”

Her voice had risen to a tinny screech. She could hear the echoes of it go bouncing around in her brother’s office. It seemed to her that the ends of her nerves had burst through her skin all over her body, and were jutting out like quills.

Quellen’s manner changed. He seemed to make a conscious effort to relax, and he leaned forward benevolently, giving her a froodlike smile. Helaine expected him to ask, “Shall we now attempt to get to the bottom of this delusion of yours?” What he actually said, in honeyed, humoring tones, was, “Maybe you’re getting overwrought for no real reason, Helaine. What makes you think he’s having dealings with the hopper criminals?”

She told him about the Lanoy minislip, and about Norm’s exaggerated reaction of unconcern when she had queried him on Lanoy. As she quoted the five-word slogan on the slip, Helaine was startled to see her brother’s beaming look of phony solicitude give way for a moment to a blank expression betokening some sudden absolute terror within. Then Quellen recovered; but he had already betrayed himself. Helaine was sharp to detect such momentary flickers of the inner persona. She said, “You know about Lanoy?”