Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

Gloomily Pomrath stared at his distorted reflection in the burnished framework of the elevator oval. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man just past forty, with heavy eyebrows and tired, sad eyes. The reflection made him look older, with much flesh at his throat. Give me time, he thought. He stepped through the oval and was sped upwards towards the surface level of the huge apartment house.

I made my choices of my own free will, he insisted. I married the voluptuous Helaine Quellen. I had my permitted two children. I opted for my kind of work. And here I am in one room for four people, and my wife is skinny and I don’t look at her when she’s naked because I have to spare her nerves, and the oxy quota is used up, and here I am going to punch the job machine and find out the old, old story, and then to drop a lousy few pieces at the sniffer palace, and—

Pomrath wondered what exactly he would do if some agent of the time-hopper people came up to him and offered to peddle him a ticket into a quieter yesterday. Would he do a Bud Wisnack and grab at the chance?

This is nonsense, Pomrath told himself. Such an option doesn’t exist. The time-hoppers are imaginary. A fraud perpetrated by the High Government. You can’t travel backward in time. All you can do is go relentlessly forward, at a rate of one second per second.

But if that’s the case, Norm Pomrath asked himself, where did Bud Wisnack really go?

When the apartment door closed, and Helaine found herself alone, she slumped down wearily on the edge of the allpurpose table in the middle of the room and bit down hard on her lower lip to keep back the tears.

He didn’t even notice me, she thought. I took a shower right in front of him and he didn’t even notice.

Actually, Helaine had to admit, that wasn’t true. She had watched his reflection in the coppery wall-plate that was their substitute for a window, and she had seen him covertly looking at her body as she stood with her back to him under the shower. And then, when she had walked naked across the room to pick up her tunic, he had looked at her again, the front view.

But he hadn’t done anything. That was the essential thing. If he felt some spark of sexual feeling for her, he would have showed it. With a caress, a smile, a hasty hand slammed against the button that would bring the hidden bed sliding out of the wall. He had looked at her body, and it hadn’t had any effect on him at all. Helaine suffered more from that than from all the rest.

She was thirty-seven, almost. That wasn’t really old. She had seventy or eighty years of actuarial lifespan ahead of her. Yet she felt middle-aged. She had lost a great deal of weight lately, so that her hip-bones jutted out like misplaced shoulderblades. She no longer wore her off-the-bosom dresses. She knew that she had ceased to have much sensual appeal for her husband, and it pained her.

Was it true, the stories going around that the High Government was promoting special anti-sex measures? That by order of Danton the men were getting impotence pills and the women were receiving desensualizers? That was what the women were whispering. Noelle Kalmuck said that the laundry-room computer had told her so. You had to believe what a computer told you, didn’t you? Presumably the machine was plugged right into the High Government itself.

But it made no sense. Helaine was no genius, but she had common sense. Why would the High Government want to meddle with the sex drive? Surely not as a birth-control measure. They controlled birth more humanely, by interfering with fertility, not with potency. Two children per married couple, that was it. If they allowed only one, they might be making some headway with the population problem, but unfortunately there were substantial pressure groups who insisted on the two-child family, and even the High Government had bowed. So population was stabilized, and even reduced a little—taking into account the bachelors, like Helaine’s brother Joe, and the couples who had sworn the Sterility Pledge, and such-but no real headway was made.

Still, with fertility controlled, it was illogical for the High Government to take away sex as well. Sex was the sport of the prolets. It was free. You didn’t need to have a job in order to enjoy sex. It passed the time. Helaine decided that the rumours she had heard were sheer foolishness, and she doubted that the laundry computer had said anything on the subject to Noelle Kalmuck. Why should the computer talk to Noelle at all? She was just a giggly little fool.

Of course, you could never tell. The High Government could be devious. This time-hopper business, for example: was there any truth in it, Helaine wondered? Well, there were all the accredited documents of time-hoppers who had arrived in previous centuries, but suppose they were all frauds inserted in the history books simply to baffle and confuse? What was real and what was imagined?

Helaine sighed. “What time is it?” she asked.

Her earwatch said gently, “Ten minutes to fifteen.”

The children would be arriving home from school soon. Little Joseph was seven, Marina was nine. At this age, they still had some shreds of innocence, as much as any children could have who had spent all their lives in the same room as their parents. Helaine turned to the foodbox and programmed their afternoon snack with furious jabs of her knuckles. She had just finished the job when the children appeared.

They greeted her. Helaine shrugged. “Plug in and have your snacks,” she said.

Joseph grinned angelically at her. “We saw Kloofman in school today. He looks like Daddy.”

“Sure,” Helaine said. “The High Government has nothing better to do than visit schoolrooms, I know. And the reason why Kloofman looks like Daddy is—” She cut herself short. She had been about to say something untrue, but Joseph had a literal mind. He’d repeat it, and the next day the investigators would come around to know why the Class Fourteen Pomrath family was claiming to be related to one of Them.

Marina broke in, “It wasn’t really Kloofman anyway. Not himself. They just showed pictures of him on the wall.” She nudged her brother. “Kloofman wouldn’t come to your grade, silly. He’s much too busy.”

“Marina’s right,” Helaine said. “Listen, children, I’ve programmed you. Have your snack and start your homework right away.”

“Where’s Daddy?” Joseph asked.

“He went to punch the job machine.”

“Will he get a job today?” Marina wanted to know.

“It’s hard to say.” Helaine smiled evasively. “I’m going to visit Mrs Wisnack.”

The children ate. Helaine stepped through the door and went uplevel to the Wisnack apartment. The door told her that Beth was home, so Helaine announced herself and was admitted. Beth Wisnack nodded to her wordlessly. She looked terribly tired. She was a small woman, just about forty, with dark, trusting eyes and dull-green hair pulled back in a tight grip to a bun. Her two children, the usual boy and girl, sat with their backs to the door, snacking.

“Any news?” Helaine asked.

“None. None. He’s gone, Helaine. They won’t admit it yet, but he’s hopped, and he won’t ever come back. I’m a widow.”

“What about the televector search?”

The little woman shrugged. “According to law they’ve got to keep it going eight days. Then that’s all. They’ve searched the registered list of hoppers, but there’s nobody named Wisnack on it. Which doesn’t mean a thing, of course. Very few of them used their real names when they arrived in the past. And the early ones, they didn’t even record the physical descriptions. So there’ll be no proof. But he’s gone. I’m applying for my pension next week.”

Helaine felt the weight of Beth Wisnack’s misery like some kind of additional humidity in the room. Her heart went out to her. Life wasn’t very attractive here in Class Fourteen, but at least you had your family structure to cling to in times of stress. Beth didn’t even have that, now. Her husband had put thumb to nose and disappeared on a one-way journey to the past. “Goodbye, Beth, goodbye, kids, goodbye, lousy twenty-fifth century,” he might have said, as he vanished down the time tunnel. The coward couldn’t face responsibility, Helaine thought. And who was going to marry Beth Wisnack now?