Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

Quellen returned to the stat. He stepped into the field, and was hurled back across the sea to his own apartment, leaving morning and entering the fist of night. He slept poorly.

At the office the following morning, Quellen found his two UnderSecs waiting for him with a third man, a tall, awkward, shabbily dressed fellow with a broken nose that projected beaklike from his face. Brogg had turned the oxy vent up to full, Quellen noticed.

“Who’s this?” Quellen asked. “You’ve made an arrest?” Could it be, he wondered, that this was Lanoy? It didn’t seem likely. How could this seedy prolet—too poor, apparently, to afford a plastic job on his nose-be the force behind the hoppers?

“Tell the CrimeSec who you are,” Brogg said, nudging the prolet roughly with his elbow.

“Name is Brand,” the prolet said in a thin, whiningly high voice. “Class Fifteen. I didn’t mean no harm, sir—it was just that he promised me a home all my own, and a job, and fresh air—”

Brogg cut him off. “We ran up against this man in a drinker. He had had one or two too many and was telling everyone that he’d have a job soon.”

“That’s what the fellow said,” Brand mumbled. “Just had to give him two hundred credits and he’d send me somewhere where everyone had a job. And I’d be able to send money back to bring my family along.”

“That can’t be right,” said Quellen. “Sending money back? Contact up the time-path?”

“That’s what he said. It sounded so good, sir.”

“A phony inducement,” Brogg suggested. “If there’s two-way contact, it upsets all our calculations. But there isn’t any such thing.”

Quellen said, “What was this fellow’s name?”

“Lanoy, sir.”

Lanoy! Lanoy everywhere, tentacles reaching in all directions at once!

Brand muttered, “Someone gave me this and told me to get in touch with him.”

He held out a crumpled minislip. Quellen unfolded it and read it. It said:

OUT OF WORK?

SEE LANOY

“These things are everywhere.” Quellen said. He reached into his own pocket and pulled out the slip he had been handed on the flyramp. Quellen had been carrying it around for several days, like a talisman. He laid it beside the first. They were identical.

OUT OF WORK?

SEE LANOY

“Lanoy’s sent a lot of my friends there,” Brand said. “He told me they were all working and happy there, sir—”

“Where does he send them?” Quellen asked gently.

“I don’t know, sir. Lanoy said he was going to tell me when I gave him the two hundred units. I drew out all my savings. I was on my way to him, and I just dropped in for a short one, when—when—”

“When we found him,” Brogg finished. “Telling everyone in sight that he was heading to Lanoy to get a job.”

“Mmm. Do you know what the hoppers are, Brand?”

“No, sir.”

“Never mind, then. Suppose you take us to Lanoy.”

“I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair. All my friends—”

“Suppose we make you take us to Lanoy,” Quellen said. “But he was going to give me a job! I can’t do it. Please, sir.”

Brogg looked sharply at Quellen. “Let me try,” he said. “Lanoy was going to give you a job, you say? For two hundred units?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What if we tell you that we’ll give you a job for nothing? No charge at all, just lead us to Lanoy and we’ll send you where he was going to send you, only free. And we’ll send your family along too.”

Quellen smiled. When it came to handling the lower prolets, Brogg was a far better psychologist than he was. He was forced to admit that.

“Sounds fair,” Brand said. “Only I feel bad about it. Lanoy was nice to me. But if you say you’ll send me for nix—”

“Quite right, Brand.”

“I’ll do it, then. I guess.”

Quellen turned down the oxy vent. Brogg gestured to Lee-ward, who led Brand out of the room. Quellen said, “Let’s go before he changes his mind. He’s obviously wavering.”

“Are you coming with us, sir?” Brogg asked. There was just a hint of sarcasm behind Brogg’s obsequious tones. “It’ll probably be a pretty filthy part of town. Vermin all over the place. The criminal section—”

Quellen scowled. “You’re right,” he said. “No need for me to go. You two take him. I’ve got plenty to do here.”

As soon as they were gone, Quellen rang Koll.

“We’re hot on the trail,” he said. “Brogg and Leeward have traced a lead to the man who’s behind the hoppers. They’ve gone out to make the arrest.”

“Fine work,” Koll said coldly. “It should be an interesting investigation.”

“I’ll report back to you as soon as—”

“Let it go for a while. Spanner and I are discussing departmental status changes. We’d prefer not to be disturbed during the next hour.” He hung up.

What did that mean, Quellen wondered? The coldness in Koll’s voice—well, that was nothing unusual, but it was significant. Koll had been harrying him all week for progress on the hopper business. Now that some progress had finally been made—now that a man was in custody who could lead them to the elusive Lanoy—Koll had been brusque, almost totally uninterested. Koll’s hiding something, Quellen thought.

His conscience pricked him. The instant suspicion returned: Koll knows about Africa. That trip I made last night was monitored, and it was the last chunk of evidence in the case against me. Now they’re getting the indictment ready.

No doubt Brogg had been offered a bigger price to talk than Quellen had been giving him to be silent, and he had sold out to the highest bidder. Koll knew everything, now.

Demotion would be the least of Quellen’s punishments.

Quellen’s offence was a unique one. No one else, to his knowledge, had been shrewd enough to find that particular way out of heavily overpopulated Appalachia, the octopus of a city that spread all over the eastern half of North America. Of all the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of Appalachia, only Joseph Quellen, CrimeSec, had had the cleverness to find a bit of unknown and unregistered land in the heart of Africa and build himself a second home there. That was something for pride. He had the standard Class Seven cubicle of a room in Appalachia, plus a Class Two villa beyond the dreams of most mortals, beside a murky stream in the Congo. It was nice, very nice, for a man whose soul rebelled at the hellish conditions of Appalachian life.

But it took money to keep people bribed. Quellen had silenced everyone concerned who might know that he was living luxuriously in Africa instead of dwelling in a ten-by-ten cubicle in Northwest Appalachia, like a good Seven. Someone—Brogg, he was sure—had sold him out to Koll. And now Quellen was on very thin ice indeed.

A demotion would rob him even of the privilege of maintaining a private cubicle, and he would go back to sharing his home, as he had with the unlamented room-mate Bruce Marok. It hadn’t been so bad when Quellen had been below Class Twelve and had lived, first in the public bachelor dorms, then in gradually more private accommodations. He hadn’t minded the presence of other people so much when he was younger. But when he had reached Class Eight and was put into a room with just one other person, that had been the most painful time of all, souring Quellen permanently.

In his own way, Marok was undoubtedly a genuinely fine fellow, Quellen reflected. But he had jarred On Quellen’s nerves, crucifying him with his sloppiness and his unending visiphone calls and his constant presence. Quellen had longed for the day when he would reach Seven and could live alone, no longer with a room-mate as a constant check. Then he would be free—free to hide from the inpressing crowd.