Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

“What do you mean, run away?” Quellen’s voice was little more than a husky whisper.

“I mean run away to Africa, Quellen.”

That’s it, then, Quellen thought. Now it’s over; Brogg’s sold me completely down the river. He knew that with Lanoy in possession of the secret, he was totally in the little slyster’s power. He stood motionless before Lanoy, seething with the temptation to grab up a televector cable and knot it fatally around Lanoy’s neck.

Lanoy said, “I hate to do this to you, Quellen. Actually. There’s no personal animus in it at all. You’re a pretty good sort, caught in a world you didn’t make and don’t especially like. But I can’t help myself. It’s either you or me, and you know who’s got to win in a deal like that.”

“How did you find out?”

“Brogg told me.”

“Why would he do a thing like that? He was getting a good price from me.”

“I gave him a better one,” said Lanoy. “I sent him back to Hadrian’s time. Possibly Trajan. He’s gone back 2400 years, at any rate.”

Quellen felt the floor turn to sticky rubber beneath his feet, writhing and squirming and pulsing with heat. He clung to his desk so he would not slide through into oblivion. Brogg a hopper! Brogg gone? Brogg a traitor?

“When did this happen?” Quellen asked.

“Yesterday evening, about sunset. Brogg and I discussed the problem of how I was going to avoid being put out of business. He suggested that you had a point of vulnerability. I got it from him in return for the one thing he really wanted. He’s gone back to see Rome with his own eyes.”

“That’s impossible,” Quellen insisted. “There are records on the known hoppers, and Brogg wasn’t on the list.”

Even as he spoke, he knew how foolish the words were. The records went back only to AD 1979. Brogg—unless Lanoy were bluffing—was almost nineteen centuries farther back. There’d be no record.

Quellen felt sick. He knew that Brogg had planted autonomic telltales all over Appalachia, with taped accounts of Quellen’s crime in them. The telltales were programmed to march down to headquarters in the event of Brogg’s death or disappearance. The little springy legs must have been in motion since last night. I’m finished, Quellen thought. Unless Brogg had the good grace to deactivate the telltales before he hopped. He could have done it with no great trouble. The boxes responded to telephoned instruction. One call would have shut them down. But had he? Otherwise, the High Government was even now in possession of the truth about Joseph Quellen.

Quellen had talked to Koll only this morning, though, and Koll had congratulated him on his promotion. Koll was guileful, but not to that degree. He would surely have been the recipient of one of Brogg’s little telltales, and he wouldn’t have been able to conceal his fury and envy at the discovery that Quellen had been living in Class Two luxury all this time.

So possibly Brogg had turned the telltales off. Or possibly he had never gone hopper at all.

Scowling, Quellen slammed on his communicator and said, “Get me Brogg.”

“I’m sorry, UnderSec Brogg hasn’t been in contact today.”

“Not even to give a locus notice?”

“We haven’t heard from him, sir.”

“Ring his apartment. Check the district headquarters. If there’s no word from him within the next fifteen minutes, initiate a televector search. I want to know where he is!” Lanoy was beaming. “You’re not going to find him, Quellen. Believe me, he’s in Rome. I set up the displacement myself—temporal and geographical. If everything worked out, he landed just south of the city, somewhere along the Via Appia.” Quellen’s lips twitched. He was gripping the desk very, very tightly, now, so that his fingertips were beginning to make indentations in the top, which was thermal-sensitive and not designed to be handled that way. He said, “If you can send someone back that far in time, how is it that 1979 has been the terminal date for the hopper phenomenon?”

“Lots of reasons.”

“Such as?”

“For one, the process wasn’t reliable beyond about five hundred years until recently. We’ve improved the process. New research. Now we can confidently shoot people back a couple of thousand years and know they’ll get there.”

“The pigs in the twelfth century?”

“Yes,” Lanoy said. “Those were our experimental shots. Mow, then: it also happens that such a concentration of hoppers got sent back to the 1979 nexus that the phenomenon came to the attention of authorities. Any hopper landing in a previous elsewhen would generally end up detained for insanity, or arrested for witchcraft, or something. So we tried to limit our hoppers to the 1979 to 2106 period because any hopper landing there would be recognized for what he was, and he’d have minimal troubles. We only exceeded that range upon special request, or sometimes by an unintentional overshoot. You follow?”

“Yes,” said Quellen glumly. “And Brogg went back to Rome?”

“He really did. For a price. And now you’d better let me go, promising to keep the results of your investigation from getting any higher, or I’ll expose your little game. I’ll let it be known that you’ve got a hideaway in Africa.”

Quellen said coolly, “I could put a beam through your head right now and claim that you assaulted me.”

“No good, Quellen. For one thing, the High Government wants the time-transport process. Kill me and you lose the process.”

“We could dredge it out of your brain on a neural replay dead or alive.”

“Not if you lase me through the head,” Lanoy pointed out. “Anyway, the neural replay would also dredge up the Africa bit, wouldn’t it? Beside that, you’d suffer if I died. Didn’t you know that Brogg fed your story into a bunch of autonomic telltales programmed to walk into government headquarters if anything happened to him?”

“Yes, but—”

“He keyed them all over to me just before he hopped. Your fate is tied to mine, Quellen. You don’t want to harm me. You want to let me go.”

Quellen could feel the muscles of his face sag as the nastiness of his position came home. If he did not present Lanoy for prosecution, he ran the risk of demotion. If he turned Lanoy in, Lanoy would expose him. Nor could he simply let Lanoy walk out the way the slyster wished. It was already a matter of record that Lanoy was involved in the hopper affair. Koll knew. Spanner knew. Quellen could not easily expunge the knowledge from the records. If he tried to cover up for Lanoy, he would mire himself in lie upon lie. He was living one fraud as it was; he could not bear the strain of assuming another.

“Do I get what I want?” Lanoy asked.

A powerful surge of adrenalin rocketed through Quellen. He was a man in a trap, and a trapped man fights fiercely. He found unexpected reserves of strength.

There was one thing he could try, a monumentally audacious thing, something so vastly bold that it seemed almost sensible in its way. Perhaps it would fail; probably it would fail. But it was better than making deals with Lanoy and slipping deeper into a morass of bribery and compromise.

“No,” he said. “You don’t get what you want. I’m not releasing you, Lanoy. I’m going to remand you for indictment.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I don’t think so.” Quellen rang for attendants. “Put this man back in the custody tank,” he said crisply. “Leave him there until further notice.”

Lanoy was carried away, sputtering and protesting.

Now to secure the bait for the leviathan he hoped to share.

Quellen jabbed communicator buttons. “Get me the Donald Mortensen file,” he commanded.

The spool was brought to him. He threaded it through the projector and looked over Brogg’s investigation. The face of Mortensen gleamed out at him, youthful, pink. He looked like some kind of albino, Quellen thought, with that white hair and eyebrows. But albinos have pink eyes, don’t they? Mortensen’s were blue. Pure Nordic. How had he preserved his bloodline so well? Quellen wondered. He examined Mortensen’s dossier.