Robert Silverberg - The Time Hoppers

He conquered the creeping apathy that beset him and snapped on the projector. Stereoscopic Julesz figures flashed on the screen while his eyes adjusted to undifferentiated blacks and whites. The Julesz edge kept the screen perpetually in focus, no matter what the degree of optical distortion. The history spool began to unroll. Quellen watched the words, sharp as blades, stream by:

The first sign of invasion from the future came about the year 1979, when several men in strange costumes appeared in the district of Appalachia then known as Manhattan. Records show they appeared with increasing frequency throughout the next decade, and when interrogated all ultimately admitted that they had come from the future. The pressure of repeated evidence eventually forced the people of the twentieth century to accept the disturbing conclusion that they were in truth being subjected to a peaceful but annoying invasion by time-travellers.

There was more, a whole reel more, but Quellen had had enough for the moment. He cut the projector off. The heat of the little room was oppressive, despite the air conditioning and the oxy vent. He could smell his own acrid sweat and didn’t like the sensation. Quellen looked despairingly at the confining walls, thinking with longing of the murky stream that ran by the front porch of his African retreat.

He nudged the pedal stud of the minislip dictator and delivered himself of a few memos:

“1. Can we catch a live hopper? That is, a man from our own time who went back, say, ten or twenty years and has lived on back through his own lifespan a second time? Are there such men? What would happen if one met himself of pre-hop existence?

“2 . Assuming capture of a live hopper, apply interrogation techniques to discover source of original backward momentum.

“3. Current indications are that hopper phenomenon ceases as of year 2491. Does this indicate success in our prevention attempts or merely lacunae in the records?

“4. Is it true that no hoppers were recorded prior to ad 1979? Why?

“5. Consider possibility of masquerading as Class Fifteen prolet in order to experience solicitation by hopper-transport agents. Would such an arrest be considered entrapment? Check with legal machines.

“6. Take depositions from families of recently departed prolet hoppers. Sociological index, reliability rating, etc. Also attempt to retrace events leading up to disappearance of hopper.

“7. Perhaps—”

Quellen rejected the last memo in unfinished form and kicked over the pedal. The dictator thrust minislips at him. He let them lie on his desk and started the projector again, reeling out some more of the history spool.

Analysis of the time-hopper records indicates that all reported arrivals took place within the years AD 1979 and 2106—that is, an era prior to the establishment of the High Government.

(Quellen made a mental note. Possibly it was significant.)

Those hoppers who upon interrogation were willing to admit to a year of departure listed the same as lying between AD 2486 and 2491, without exception. Of course, this does not foreclose the possibility of unreported hoppers departing from a time other than that, just as it does not eliminate all possibility that arrivals were not confined wholly to the aforementioned period of 127 years. Nonetheless—

There was an interruption in the text. Brogg had inserted his own memo here:

See Exhibits A, B. Examine possibility of time-travel outside recorded temporal zones. Occult phenomena. Worth study.

Quellen found Exhibits A and B on his desk: two more spools. He did not put them into the projector. Nor did he run the history spool any further just yet. He paused and considered.

All the hoppers seemed to be coming from a single five-year period, of which this was the fourth year. All the hoppers had landed within a temporal spectrum of about a century and a quarter. Naturally, some hoppers had escaped detection, slipping smoothly into the life-patterns of their new era and never showing up on the charts of time-travel. Methods of persona-detection had been fairly primitive three and four hundred years ago, Quellen knew, and it was surprising that so many of the hoppers had actually been found and recorded. Low-order prolets, though, weren’t likely to be subtle about concealing themselves in an era to which they were unaccustomed. But surely the syndicate running the hopper business was not sending back only prolets!

Removing the history spool from the projector, Quellen slipped Brogg’s Exhibit A into its place and switched the machine on. Exhibit A was uninspiring: nothing less nor more than a census roll of the recorded hoppers. Quellen tuned in on the data in a random way as it flowed past.

BACCALON, ELLIOT V. Detected 4 April 2007, Trenton, New Jersey. Interrogated eleven hours. Declared date of birth 17 May 2464. Skill classification: computer technician fifth grade. Assigned to Camden Hopper Rehabilitation Zone. Transferred to Westvale Polyclinic District 30 February 2011 for therapy. Discharged 11 April 2013. Employed as switching technician 2013-22. Died 7 March 2022, pleurisy and complications.

BACKHOUSE, MARTIN D. Detected 18 August 2102, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Interrogated fourteen minutes. Declared date of birth 10 July 2470, declared date of departure 1 November 2488. Skill classification: computer technician seventh grade. Assigned to West Baltimore Rehabilitation Zone. Released in full capacity 27 October 2102. Employed as computer technician, Internal Revenue Service, 2102-67. Married Lona Walk (q.v.) 22 June 2104.

Died 16 May 2187, pneumonia.

BAGROWSKI, EMANUEL. Detected—

Quellen halted the roster as ideas flooded his mind. He ran ahead to Lona Walk, q.v., and made the interesting discovery that she was a hopper who had landed in 2098, claiming to have been born in 2471 and to have shipped out for the past on 1 November 2488. This, obviously, had been a prearranged rendezvous; boy of eighteen, girl of seventeen, chucking the twenty-fifth century and heading for the past to start a new life together. Yet Martin Backhouse had landed in 2102, and his girl-friend in 2098. Clearly they hadn’t planned it that way. Which told Quellen that the hopper-transporting process was not exact in its attainment of destinations. Or, at least, had not been exact a few years ago. That must have been uncomfortable for poor Lona Walk, Quellen thought: to land in the past and then to find that her heart’s desire hadn’t made it to the same year.

Quellen was quick to devise some grievous hopper tragedies of this sort. Romeo lands in 2100, Juliet in 2025. Heartbroken Romeo comes upon decades-old gravestone of Juliet. Worse yet, youthful Romeo encounters ninety-year-old Juliet. How did Lona Walk spend the four years while waiting for Martin Backhouse to drop into her era? How could she be sure that he would arrive at all? What if she lost faith and married someone else the year before he showed up? What if the four-year gulf had destroyed their love—for by the time he reached the past, she was objectively twenty-one years old, and he was still only eighteen?

Interesting, Quellen thought. No doubt the playwrights of the twenty-second century had a rich time mining this lode of imaginative material. Bombarded with emigrants out of the future, bedevilled by paradoxes, how those ancient ones must have wrinkled their foreheads over these hoppers!

But of course it was nearly four hundred years since any known hoppers had turned up. The whole phenomenon had been forgotten for generations. Only the fact that the hoppers were coming from now had revived it. More’s the pity, Quellen thought dourly, that it had to be my time in office.

He pondered other aspects of the problem.