Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

He was dismissed.

Norman Pomrath looked coldly at his wife and said, “When is your brother going to do something for us, Helaine ?”

“I’ve told you. He can’t.”

“He won’t, you mean.”

“He can’t. Who do you think he is, Danton? And will you please get out of my way? I need a shower.”

“At least you said please,” Pomrath grumbled. “I’m grateful for small mercies.”

He stepped to one side. Out of some tatter of modesty he did not watch as his wife stripped off her green tunic. She crumpled the garment, tossed it aside, and got under the molecular bath. Since she stood with her back to him while she washed, he let himself watch her. Modesty was an important thing, Pomrath thought. Even when you’ve been married eleven years, you’ve got to give the other person some privacy in these stinking one-room lives. Otherwise you’ll click your gyros. He gnawed a fingernail and stole furtive glances at his wife’s lean buttocks.

The air in the Pomrath apartment was foul, but he didn’t dare turn up the oxy. He had drawn this week’s supply, and if he nudged the stud, the utility computer somewhere in the bowels of the earth would say unpleasant things to him. Pomrath didn’t think his nerves could stand much garbage from a utility computer just now. His nerves couldn’t stand much of anything. He was Class Fourteen, which was bad enough, and he hadn’t had any work in three months, which was worse, and he had a brother-in-law in Class Seven, which really cut into him. What good did Joe Quellen do him, though? The damned guy was never around. Ducking out on his family responsibilities.

Helaine was finished with her shower. The molecular bath used no water; only Class Ten and up was entitled to use water for purposes of bodily cleaning. Since most people in the world were Class Eleven and down, the planet would stink half-way across the universe but for the handy molecular baths. You stripped down, stood in front of the nozzle, and ultrasonic waves cunningly separated the grime from your skin and gave you the illusion of being clean. Pomrath did not bother to avert his eyes as Helaine’s nude white form crossed in front of him. She wriggled into her tunic. Once, he remembered, he had thought that she was voluptuous. He had been much younger then. Later, it had seemed to him that she had begun to lose weight. Now she was thin. There were times—especially at night—when she hardly looked female to him.

He slid down into the webfoam cradle along one window-less wall and said, “When do the kids get home?”

“Fifteen minutes. That’s why I showered now. Are you staying here, Norm?”

“I’m going out in five minutes.”

“To the sniffer palace?”

He scowled at her. His face, creased and pleated by defeat, was well designed for scowling. “No,” he said, “not to the sniffer palace. To the job machine.”

“But you know the job machine will contact you here if there’s any work, so—”

“I want to go to it,” Pomrath said with icy dignity. “I do not want it to come to me. I will go to the job machine. And then, most likely, to the sniffer palace afterwards. Perhaps to celebrate and perhaps to drown my sorrow.”

“I knew it.”

“Damn you, Helaine, why don’t you get off me? Is it my fault I’m between jobs? I rank high in skills. I ought to be working. But there’s a cosmic injustice in the universe that keeps me unemployed.”

She laughed harshly. The harshness was a new note, something of the last few years. “You’ve had work exactly twenty-three weeks in eleven years,” she told him. “The rest of the time we’ve collected doles. You’ve moved up from Class Twenty to Class Fourteen, and there you stick, year after year, and we’re getting nowhere, and the walls of this damned apartment are like a cage to me, and when those two kids are in it with me I feel like tearing their heads off, and—”

“Helaine,” he said quietly. “Stop it”

To his considerable surprise, she did. A muscle knotted in her jaw as she caught herself headlong in her stream of protest. Much more calmly she said, “I’m sorry, Norm. It’s not your fault we’re prolets. There are only so many jobs to be had. Even with your skills—”

“Yes. I know.”

“It’s the way things are. I didn’t mean to screech, Norm. I love you, do you know that? For better, for worse, like they say.”

“Sure, Helaine. All right.”

“Maybe I’ll go to the sniffer palace with you, this time. Let me get the kids programmed and—”

He shook his head. It was very touching, this sudden display of affection, but he saw enough of Helaine in the apartment, day and night. He didn’t want her following him around as he took his pitiful pleasures. “Not this time, sweeting,” he said quickly. “Remember, I’ve got to go punch the job machine first. You’d better stay here. Go visit Beth Wisnack, or somebody.”

“Her husband’s still gone.”

“Who, Wisnack? Haven’t they traced him?”

“They think he—he hopped. I mean, they’ve had a televector on him and everything,” Helaine said. “No trace. He’s really gone.”

“You believe in this hopper business?” Pomrath asked.

“Of course.”

“Travelling in time? It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, as a matter of teleology, if you start turning the universe upside down, if you confuse the direction in which events flow, Helaine, I mean—”

Her eyes were very wide. “The faxtapes say there’s such a thing. The High Government is investigating it. Joe’s own department. Norm, how can you say there are no time-hoppers, when people are disappearing every day? When Bud Wisnack right on the next level—”

“There’s no proof he did that.”

“Where else is he, then?”

“Antarctica, maybe. Poland. Mars. A televector can slip up just like anybody else. I can’t swallow this time-travel deal, Helaine. It has no thingness for me, do you follow? It’s unreal, a fantasy, something out of a sniffer dream.” Pomrath coughed. He was doing a lot of vociferous talking lately. He thought about Bud Wisnack, small and bald, with an eternal blue stubble on his cheeks, and wondered if he had really jumped a hoop in time and gone off to 1999 or whenever.

The Pomraths looked at each other in awkward silence for a moment. Then Helaine said, “Tell me something hypothetical, Norm. If you went outside now and a man came up to you and said he was running the hopper business, and did you want to go back in time and get away from it all, what would you say to him?”

Pomrath considered. “I’d tell him no. I mean, would it be honourable to skip out on my wife and family? It’s all right for a Bud Wisnack, but I couldn’t duck all my responsibilities, Helaine.”

Her grey-blue eyes sparkled. She smiled her don’t-fool-me-kiddo smile. “That’s very nobly said, Norm. But I think you’d go, all the same.”

“You’re entitled to think what you want to think. Since it’s all a fantasy anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I’m going to have a look at the job machine now. I’ll give it a real punch. Who knows? I might find myself twitched right up to Class Seven with Joe.”

“Could be,” Helaine said. “What time will you be back?”

“Later.”

“Norm, don’t spend too much time at the sniffer palace. I hate it when you get high on that stuff.”

“I’m the masses,” he told her. “I need my opium.”

He palmed the door. It slid open with a little whickering sound, and he went out. The hall light was burning feebly. Cursing, Pomrath groped his way towards the elevator. The hall lights weren’t like this in Class Seven places, he knew. He had visited Joe Quellen. Not often, true; his brother-in-law didn’t mingle much with the prolets, even when they were his own kin. But he had seen. Quellen led a damned good life. And what was he, anyway? What were his skills? He was just a bureaucrat, a paper-shuffler. There was nothing Joe Quellen could do that a computer couldn’t do better. But he had a job. Tenure.