Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

“Let’s have Brand in for interrogation,” Brogg said when he heard what Leeward had done. “Get him here. No—wait. I’ll get him. You cover the office.”

Brogg went out for a reconnaissance. He scouted the drinker, saw Brand, calculated the imponderables. After some hesitation he cut Brand out from the herd, identified himself as a government man, and remanded the prisoner for interrogation. Brand looked frightened. “I didn’t do nothing,” he insisted. “I didn’t do nothing !”

“There’ll be no harm to you,” Brogg promised. “We simply want to question you.”

He took Brand into custody. When he reached the Secretariat building with the prolet, Brogg learned that Quellen had issued a new instruction.

“He wants an Ear put on his brother-in-law,” Leeward said. Brogg grinned. “Nepotism even in criminal investigations? Doesn’t the man have any shame?”

“I couldn’t answer that,” said Leeward stolidly. “But he says that the brother-in-law is thinking of making a hop. He wants it checked. He wants an Ear on the fellow and round-the-clock monitoring, right away. Norman Pomrath’s the name. I’ve already got the data on him.”

“Good. We’ll take care of Pomrath at once.”

“Pomrath’s supposed to be in contact with Lanoy, Quellen said.”

“Looks like everybody’s in contact with Lanoy. Even Quellen’s been approached, did you know that?” Brogg laughed. “I haven’t had a chance to tell him that Mortensen was dealing with Lanoy too, but I doubt that it’ll surprise him. And this prolet here, this Brand you found—there’s another lead to Lanoy. We’re bound to trace one of them back to the source in another day or so.”

“Do you want me to-put the Ear on Pomrath?” Leeward asked.

“I’ll do it,” said Brogg. “I’ve got a gift for that kind of thing. You have to admit it.”

Brogg certainly did. He could move gracefully for a man of his bulk. As sinuously as any dedicated frotteur, Brogg could approach a victim in a quickboat and gently introduce an Ear to the unlikeliest of places. It was a gift that had stood him in good stead when he set out to spy on Quellen; he had handled the Mortensen situation equally skilfully. Now Pomrath. Brogg went down to the laboratory and rummaged about for the most advanced model Ear that was available.

“Here’s a beauty,” the lab technician told him with pride. “We’ve just finished it. We’ve succeeded in melding Ear technology to a substrate of pseudoliving glass, and the result is unique. Take a look.”

Brogg held out a fleshy palm. The technician dumped on to it a tiny metallic transponding plaque a few molecules in thickness, wholly invisible but snugly contained in a glossy little bead of some green plastic.

“What does it do?” Brogg asked.

“It functions normally as an Ear. But the spicule of the glass has a life-tropism of unusual character. Once the Ear is in place on the recipient’s body, the glass goes into action and bores its way through the skin, generally looking for entry by way of the pores. It’s a kind of artificial parasite, you see. It gets inside and stays there, where it can’t possibly be removed by an itchy subject. And it broadcasts indefinitely. Surgical removal is necessary to shut off the information flow.”

Brogg was impressed. There were plenty of models of Ear designed for internal use, of course, but they all had to be introduced through one of the bodily orifices of the victim, which presupposed certain difficulties for the agent. The usual method was to smuggle it into the victim’s food. Since most people were reticent about eating in the presence of strangers, that required considerable planning. And in any event the Ear would be digested or excreted in short order. There were other bodily orifices, naturally, and Brogg had on occasion planted Ears in women who were off their guard in a throbbing moment of ecstatic passion, but the technique was a tricky one. This was infinitely better: to slap the Ear on externally, and let the device itself take care of the job of getting within the victim’s body. Yes. Brogg liked the concept.

He spent an hour teaming how to use the new model Ear. Then he went after Norm Pomrath.

The televector scanner located Pomrath quickly for him: at the Central Employment Register, doubtless punching the job machine in the customary prolet mood of total despair. Brogg changed into a shabby prolet tunic, suitable for Class Twelve slope vicinity, and headed for the domed building of the job machine.

He had no difficulty finding Pomrath in the crowd. Brogg knew approximately what the man was supposed to look like—stocky, dark, tense—and almost at once he found himself staring right at him. Brogg insinuated himself into the line not far from Pomrath and observed the CrimeSec’s unhappy brother-in-law for a while. Pomrath spoke to no one. He peered at the red and green and blue banks of the job machine as though they were his personal enemies. His lips were tight with distress and his eyes were harshly shadowed. This man is in anguish, Brogg thought. No wonder he’s planning to become a hopper. Well, we’ll soon know a great deal about him, won’t we?

Brogg sidled up behind Pomrath.

“Excuse me,” he said, and stumbled. Pomrath reached out a hand to steady him. Brogg clasped his fingers around Pomrath’s wrist and pressed the Ear firmly into the hairy skin just above the ulna. Straightening, he thanked Pomrath for his assistance, and all the while the pseudoliving glass in which the Ear was embedded was activating its tropism and drilling a path into Pomrath’s living flesh.

By evening, the Ear would have migrated up Pomrath’s arm to some nice warm fatty deposit where it could settle down and transmit its signals.

“Clumsy of me,” Brogg muttered. He moved away. Pomrath did not show any sign of being aware that something had been affixed to him.

Returning to the office, Brogg examined the flow from the monitor device. Pomrath had left the job-machine building now, it appeared. The tracer line on the Oscilloscope showed the minute neural explosions that told of footsteps. Pomrath walked for ten minutes. Then he halted. Complex muscular actions: he was entering a building with a manually operated door. Now came a voice pick-up.

POMRATH : Here I am again, Jerry.

STRANGE VOICE : We got a couch all ready for you.

POMRATH : With a nice goddam hallucination, okay? Here I am fighting off the Crab People, you see, and there’s this naked blonde panting to be rescued, while Kloofman is waiting to give me the Galactic Medal of Honour.

VOICE: I can’t pick the effect for you, Norm. You know that. You pay your pieces and you get what comes. It’s all what’s stirring around inside your head that settles the picture for you.

POMRATH: There’s plenty stirring around inside my bead, pal. Where’s the mask? I’m going to dream a beauty. Norm Pomrath, the destroyer of worlds. Disrupting time and space. The devourer of continua.

VOICE : You sure got a crazy imagination, Norm.

Brogg turned away. Pomrath was in a sniffer palace, evidently. Nothing meaningful was going to turn up on the monitor now—nothing but Pomrath asleep on the couch enjoying or perhaps not enjoying his hallucination.

In another room, Leeward was still interrogating the hapless prolet Brand. Brand looked disturbed. Brogg listened in for a while, found little of significance going on, and checked out for the day. Quellen had already gone home, he observed. To Africa, maybe, for the evening.

Brogg reached his own apartment in a short while. As required, he had a room-mate—a legal assistant in one of the judiciary divisions—but they had managed to work things out so that their paths rarely crossed. You had to make the best accommodation you could to the existing living conditions.