Take it and read it, the sallow-faced man muttered.
He brushed against Quellen and shoved a wadded minislip into his hand. There was no way Quellen could have avoided the contact. The stranger could have done anything to him in that brief instant; right now Quellens bone calcium might be turning to jelly, or his brain sloughing off through his nostrils, all to satisfy the gratuitous needs of some bump-killer. But it seemed that all the man had done was to put some kind of advertisement into Quellens palm. Quellen unfolded the minislip after the other had disappeared up the flyramp, and read it:
OUT OF WORK?
SEE LANOY
That was all. Instantly Quellens CrimeSec facet came into play. Like most lawbreakers in public office, he was vigorous in prosecution of other lawbreakers, and there was something in Lanoys handbill that smacked of illegality, not just the offensive means of person-to-person transmission but also the offer itself. Was Lanoy running some kind of job placement operation? But that was a government responsibility! Quellen swung hastily around with the thought of pursuing the rapidly retreating sallow-faced man. He caught one last glimpse of the loose purple tunic, and then the man was gone. He could have gone almost anywhere after leaving the flyramp.
Out of work? See Lanoy.
Quellen wondered who Lanoy was and what his magic remedy might be. He made up his mind that he would have Leeward or Brogg look into the matter.
Carefully stowing the minislip in his pocket, Quellen entered the supply shop. The lead-lined door swung back to admit him. Robot merchandise-pickers were scuttling down the shelves, taking inventories, filling orders. The red-faced little man who ran the shopas a front for the computers, naturally; what housewife wanted to gossip with a computer?greeted Quellen with an unusual display of heartiness.
Oh, its the CrimeSec! We havent been honored by you in a long time, CrimeSec, the rotund shopkeeper said. I was beginning to think youd moved. But thats impossible, isnt it? Youd have notified me if you had gotten a promotion.
Yes, Greevy, thats true. Ive just not been around lately. Very busy these days. Investigations. Quellen frowned. He did not want the news of his frequent absences noised all around the community. Quickly, edgily, he grabbed up the greasy gray binding of the basic catalog and began to call off numbers. Canned foods, powdered concentrates, staples, all the components of a basic diet. He scrawled his list and jammed it before the sensors while the shopkeeper looked on benignly.
Greevy said, Your sister was in yesterday.
Helaine? I havent seen much of her lately.
She looks poorly, CrimeSec. Terribly thin. I programmed some Calfill for her, but she didnt want it. Has she been to the medics?
I really dont know, said Quellen. Her husbands had some medical training. Not a doctor, just a technician, but if theres anything wrong with her he ought to be able to diagnose it. If hes got his wits still working. The rest of him certainly isnt.
Thats a trifle unfair, CrimeSec. Im sure Mr. Pomrath would be happy to work more often. Why, I know it. No one likes to be idle. Your sister says hes really suffering. In fact the shopkeeper leaned close to whisper conspiratorially I shouldnt be telling you this, maybe, but theres some bitterness about you in that family. They think that perhaps, with your political influence
I cant do a thing for them! Not a thing! Quellen realized he was shouting. What business was it of this damned shopkeepers that Norman Pomrath was out of work? How dare he meddle like this? Quellen struggled for calm. He found it, somehow, apologized for his outburst, quickly left the supply shop.
He stepped out into the street for a moment and stood watching as the multitudes streamed past. Their clothes were of all designs and colors. They talked incessantly. The world was a beehive, vastly overpopulated and getting more so daily, despite all the restrictions on childbirth. Quellen longed for the quiet retreat he had built at such great cost and with so much trepidation. The more he saw of crocodiles, the less he cared for the company of the mobs who swarmed the crowded cities.
It was an orderly world, of course. Everybody numbered, labelled, registered, and tagged, not to say constantly monitored. How else could you govern a world of eleven or twelve or maybe thirty billion people without imposing a construct of order on them? Yet Quellen was in a fine position to know that within that superficial appearance of order, all sorts of shamelessly illegal things went onnot, as in Quellens case, justifiable efforts to escape an intolerable existence, but shady, vicious, unpardonable things. Take the drug addictions, he thought. There were laboratories in five continents grinding out new drugs as fast as the old addictions were abolished. Right now they were pushing some kind of deathly alkaloids, and they pushed them in the most flagrant ways. A man walks into a sniffer palace hoping to buy half an hour of innocent hallucinatory amusement, and buys a hellish addiction instead. Or, aboard a quickboat, a mans hand traverses a womans body in what seems like something no more deplorable than an indecent caress, but two days later the woman discovers she has developed an addiction, and must seek medical help to find out what it is shes addicted to.
Things like that, thought Quellen. Ugly, inhuman things. We are a dehumanized people. We injure one another without any need but the simple need to do injury. And when we turn to each other for help, we get no response but fear and withdrawal. Stay away, stay away! Let me alone!
And consider this Lanoy, Quellen ruminated, fingering the minislip in his pocket. Some kind of crookedness going on there, yet it was concealed well enough to have avoided the attention of the Secretariat of Crime. What did the computer files say about Lanoy? How did this Lanoy manage to hide his illegal activities from his family or roommates? Surely he did not live alone. Such an outlaw could not be Class Seven. Lanoy must be some shrewd prolet, running a free-enterprise swindle for his own private benefit.
Quellen felt a strange kinship with the unknown Lanoy, much as it repelled him to admit it. Lanoy, too, was beating the game. He was a wily one, possibly worth knowing. Quellen frowned. Quickly he moved on, back to his apartment.
6.
Peter Kloofman lay sprawled out in a huge tube of nutrient fluid while the technicians changed his left lung. His chest panel was open on its hinges, exactly as though Kloofman were some sort of robot undergoing repair. He was no robot. He was mere mortal flesh and blood, but not very mortal. At the age of a hundred thirtytwo, Kloofman had undergone organ replacements so frequently that there was very little left of his original persona except for the gray slab of his wily brain itself, and even that was no stranger to the surgeons beam. Kloofman was willing to submit to such things gladly, for the sake of preserving his existence, which is to say his infinite power. He was real. Danton was not. Kloofman preferred to keep things that way.
David Giacomin is here to see you, purred a voice from the probe riveted just within his skull.
Admit him, said Kloofman.
Some twenty years ago he had had himself reconstructed so that he could carry on the business of the state even while undergoing regenerative surgery. It would have been impossible to remain in power, otherwise. Kloofman was the only flesh-and-blood member of Class One, which meant that all power lines converged toward him. He delegated as much as he could to the assortment of cams and relays that went by the name of Benjamin Danton; but Danton, after all, was unreal, and in the long run even he was only an extension of the tireless Kloofman. It had not always been this way. Before the Flaming Bess affair there had been three members of Class One, and still further back Kloofman had been but one of five.
He carried on satisfactorily this way, however. And there was no reason why he could not continue to bear his unique burden for another six or seven hundred years. No man in all the history of the world had held the power Peter Kloofman held. In his occasional moments of fatigue he found that a comforting thing upon which to reflect.
Giacomin entered. He stood in a position of relaxed attentiveness beside the nutrient tub in which Kloofman lay. Kloofman valued Giacomin highly. He was one of perhaps two hundred Class Two individuals who provided the indispensable underpinning for the High Government. Between Class Two and Class Three was a qualitative gulf. Class Two understood the way the world was run; Class Three, on the other hand, enjoyed great comforts, but no true understanding. To a Class Three surgeon or administrator, Danton was probably real, and other unnamed Class Ones existed as well. Giacomin, privy to the knowledge a Class Two man had, was aware of the truth.
Well? Kloofman asked, watching with detached interest-as the surgeons lifted the gray, foamy mass of the replacement lung and inserted it in his gaping chest cavity. Whats the story for today, David?
Hoppers.
Have they located the process yet?
Not yet, said Giacomin. Theyre taking steps, though. It wont be long.
Good, good, murmured Kloofman. This enterprise of illicit time travel troubled him more than he cared to admit. For one thing, it went on despite the best efforts of the government to track it to its source, and that was bothersome. But of course it was only a few days since Kloofman had requested a detect on the operation, anyway. Much more annoying was the fact that for all his power he could not reach out instantly, seize this temporal process, and put it to his own uses. It had been developed independently of the instrumentalities of the High Government. Thus it was a conspicuous reminder to Kloofman that not even he was omnipotent.
Giacomin said, Theres a problem. Theyve thought of isolating a potential hopper and keeping him from making the jump.
Kloofman moved convulsively in his bath. Fluid splashed into his chest cavity. Homeostatic pumps imperturbably removed it, and a surgeon clamped his lips together and went about the job of stapling the new lung in place without comment. The world leader said, A listed hopper? One whos been recorded?
Yes.
Have you permitted this?
I brought it to you. Ive got a hold on it until The Word comes down.
Kill it, said Kloofman decisively. Beyond a doubt. I go further: make absolutely certain that theres no interference with any listed hoppers. Take that as a flat rule.
Anyone who has left must leave. Yes? Thats The Word, David. It goes out to all departments that are even remotely connected with the hopper business.
As he spoke, Kloofman felt a faint stinging sensation in the fleshy part of his left thigh. Sedation; he must be getting too excited. The automatic monitoring system was compensating by chemical means, dilating arteries, flooding his system with useful enzymes. He could do better than that. Consciously, he willed himself to be calm even in the face of this threat. Giacomin looked concerned.
Kloofman grew tranquil. Giacomin said, That was all I wanted to report. Ill pass your instructions along.
Yes. And notify the Danton programmers. Anything going through his office should carry the same notification. This is something too important to let slide. I dont understand how I failed to anticipate the possibility.
Giacomin departed, making his way carefully around the tank and out of the faintly clammy atmosphere of the chamber. Kloofman eyed the green vitreous walls with displeasure. He realized that he should have been forewarned. It was the job of those in Class Two to plot the pitfalls for him in advance, and they had been cognizant of the hopper problem for some time now. As far back as 83, contingency schedules had been drawn to deal with the hopper problem. Why had they not included this? Of all things to forget!
Kloofman forgave himself for overlooking it. The others,thoughthey were in for a declassing.
Out loud he said, Imagine what could have happened if anybody had begun meddling with the registered and documented hoppers. Pulling chunks out of the pastwhy, it might have turned the world upside-down!
The surgeons did not reply. It would be worth their classifications if they ever spoke to Kloofman except on matters of their own sphere of professional competence. They closed his chest and ran anemostats over it. The instant healing process began. The temperature in the nutrient bath began to descend as the automatic regulators prepared Kloofman for his return to independent motility.
He was badly shaken, not by postoperative shockthat was unknown these daysbut by the implications of what had almost happened. Meddling with the past! Pulling hoppers from the matrix! Suppose, he thought fretfully, some bureaucrat in Class Seven or Nine or thereabouts had gone ahead on his own authority, trying to win a quick uptwitch by dynamic action, and had rounded up a few known hoppers in advance of their departure. Thereby completely snarling the fabric of the time-line and irrevocably altering the past.
Everything might have been different, Kloofman thought.
I might have become a janitor, a technician, a peddler of fever pills. I might never have been born. Or I might have landed in Class Seven with Danton real and in charge. Or there might have been total anarchy, no High Government whatsoever. Anything. Anything. A wholly different world. The transformation would have come like a thief in the night, and the editing of the past would naturally be indetectable, so that I would never know there had been a change in my status. Perhaps there had already been several changes, Kloofman thought suddenly.
Was it possible?
Had two or three hoppers already been thwarted in their documented escapes by some zealous official? And had fundamental changes in the historical patterns of the past five centuries resulted, changes that could never be observed? Kloofman felt an abrupt and fatiguing sense of the instability of the universe. Here he was, two thousand feet down in the solid earth, living as always at the bottom of civilization, for the High Government was the lowest level occupied, and he had known absolute power for decades of a kind never remotely comprehended by Attila or Genghis Khan or Napoleon or Hitler, and yet he could feel the roots of the past ripping loose like torn strings about him. It sickened him. Some faceless individual, a mere government man, could wreck everything in a harmless blunder, and there was nothing Kloofman could do to prevent it from happening. It might already have begun to happen.
I should never have embarked on this hopper enterprise, Kloofman thought.
But that was wrongheaded, he knew. He had done the right thing, but he had done it carelessly, without full consideration of the danger factors. Before turning his bureaucracy loose on catching the shipper of time-hoppers, he should have issued strict orders concerning interference with the past. He trembled at the thought of the vulnerability he had opened for himself. At any time since 2486, his entire edifice of power, so laboriously constructed over so many years, could have been wrecked by the blind whim of an underling.
The stabs of a dozen homeostatic injections reminded Kloofman that he was losing his calmness again.
Get me Giacomin, he said.
The viceroy entered a few moments later, looking puzzled at the peremptory recall. Kloofman leaned heavily forward, straining himself half out of the tank, causing the servomechanisms within his body to whine in tinny protest. I just wanted to make certain, he said, that there was full understanding of my instruction. No interference with hopper departures. None. None whatever. Clear?
Of course.
Do I worry you, David? Do you think Im a garrulous old man who ought to have his brain scraped? Let me tell you why I worry about this thing. I control the present and to some extent the future, right? Right. But not the past.How can I control the past? I see a whole segment of time thats beyond my authority. I admit to being frightened. Maintain my authority over the past, David. See that it remains inviolate. What has happened must happen.
Ive already taken steps to see that it will, said Giacomin.
Kloofman dismissed him a second time, feeling reassured but not sufficiently so. He summoned Mauberley, the Class Two man in charge of running the Danton operation. As one who considered himself a quasi-immortal, Kloofman did not spend much time designating heirs apparent, but he had high respect for Mauberley, and regarded him as a possible eventual successor. Mauberley entered. He was sixty years old, vigorous and muscular, with a flat-featured face and wiry, thick hair. Kloofman briefed him on the new development. Giacomin is already at work on the problem, he said. You work on it too. Redundancy, thats the secret of effective government. Get Danton to make an official proclamation. Circulate it downward through Class Seven. This is an emergency!
Mauberley said, Do you believe there have already been changes in the past as a result of contra-hopper activity?
No. But there could be. Wed never know.
Ill deal with it, he said, and left.
Kloofman rested. After a while, he had himself withdrawn from his nutrient bath and taken to his office. He had not been to the surface in sixteen years. The upper world had become slightly unreal to him; but he saw no harm in that, since he was well aware that to most of the inhabitants of the upper world he was slightly unreal, or more than slightly. Reciprocity, he thought. The secret of effective government. Kloofman lived in a complex of interlocking tunnels spreading out for hundreds of miles. At any given time, machines with glittering claws were energetically at work extending his domain. He hoped to have the world girdled with a continuous network of High Government access routes in another ten years or so. His personal Midgard Serpent of transportation. Strictly speaking, there was no need for it; he could govern just as effectively from a single room as from any point along a world-rimming tunnel. But he had his whims. What was the use of being the supreme leader of the entire world, Kloofman wondered, if he could not occasionally indulge a small whim?
He moved on purring rollers to the master control room and allowed his attendants to attach him to contact leads. It bored him to depend on words for his knowledge of external events. One of the many surgical reconstructs that had been performed on him over the years allowed a direct neural cut-in; Kloofman could and did enter directly into the data stream, becoming a relay facet of the computer web itself. Then, only then, did a kind of ecstasy overwhelm him.
He nodded, and the flow of data began.
Facts. Births and deaths, disease statistics, transportation-correlations, power levels, crime rates. Synapse after synapse clenched tight as Kloofman absorbed it all. Far above him, billions of people went through their daily routines, and he entered in some way into the life of each of them, and they entered into his. His perceptions were limited, of course. He could not detect individual fluctuations in the data except as momentary surges. Yet he could extrapolate them. At this very instant, he knew, a hopper was departing for the past. A life subtracted from the present. What about mass? Was it conserved? The possibility of a sudden and total subtraction. Two hundred pounds abruptly removed from now and thrust into yesterdayhow could it be possible, Kloofman wondered? It was done, though. The records showed it. Thousands of hoppers thrust out of his time and into the time of his predecessors. How? How?
Peter Kloofman brushed the thought from his throbbing mind. It was an irrelevancy. What was relevant was the sudden, unthinkable possibility that the past might be altered, that all this might be taken away from him in a random fluctuation against which no defense existed. That struck horror into him. He filled his brain with data to drown out the possibility of total loss. He felt the onset of his delight.
Caesar, did you ever have the whole world running through your brain at once?
Napoleon, could you so much as imagine what it might be like to be plugged right into the master computers?
Sardanapalus, were there joys like this in Nineveh?
Kloofmans bulky body quivered. The mesh of fine capillary wires just beneath his skin glowed. He ceased to be Peter Kloofman, world leader, lone human member of Class One, benevolent despot, sublime planner, the accidental inheritor of the ages. Now he was everyone who existed. A flux of cosmic power surged in him. This was the true Nirvana! This was the ultimate Oneness! This was the moment of full rapture!
At such a time, it was not possible to brood on how easily it could all be taken away from him.
7.
Helaine Pomrath said, Norm, whos Lanoy?
Who?
Lanoy. LAN
Where did you hear that name?
She showed him the minislip and watched his face carefully. His eyes flickered. He was off balance.
I found this in your tunic last night, she said. Out of work, see Lanoy, it says. I just wondered who he was, what he could do for you.
Heuhruns some kind of employment bureau, I think. Im not sure. Pomrath looked thoroughly uncomfortable. Somebody slipped that to me as I was coming out of the sniffer palace.
What good is it, if theres no address on it?
I guess youre supposed to follow it up, Pomrath said. Hunt around, do some detective work. I dont know.
Actually, I had forgotten all about it, to tell you the truth. Give it here.
She surrendered it. He took it quickly, and thrust it into his pocket. Helaine did not like the speed with which he got the incriminating document out of sight. Although she hadnt even a remote notion of its implications, she was easily able to detect her husbands guilt and general embarrassment.
Maybe hes planning a surprise for me, she thought. Maybe hes already been to this Lanoy and done something about getting a job, but he was saving it to tell me next week when its our anniversary. And I bungled it by asking him questions. I should have let it go a while.
Her son Joseph, stark naked, stepped down from the platform of the molecular bath. His sister, equally naked, got under it. Helaine busied herself with programming breakfast. Joseph said, Were going to learn geography in school today.
How lovely, Helaine said vaguely.
Wheres Africa? the boy asked.
Far away. Across the ocean somewhere.
Can I go to Africa when I grow up? Joseph persisted.
There was a shrill giggle from the bath. Marina whirled around and said, Africas where the Class Twos live! Are you going to be Class Two, Jo-Jo?
The boy glowered at his sister. Maybe. Maybe Ill be Class One. How do you know? You wont be anything. I got something you dont have already.
Marina made a face at him. All the same, she turned around to hide her undeveloped nine-year-old body from his beady eyes. From his corner of the room, Pomrath looked up from the morning faxtape and grunted, Cut it out, both of you! Jo-Jo, get dressed! Marina, finish your bath!
I just said I wanted to go to Africa, the boy muttered.
Dont speak back to your father, said Helaine. Breakfasts ready, anyhow. Get dressed.
She sighed. Her head felt as though someone had poured powdered glass into it. The children always bickering, Norm sitting in the corner like a guest at his own wake, mysterious minislips popping up in the wash, four windowless walls hemming her inno, it was too much. She didnt understand how she could tolerate it. Eat, sleep, bathe, make love, all in one little room. Thousands of grubby neighbors mired in the same bog. Picnic once a year, via stat to some faraway place that wasnt all built up yet bread and circuses, keep the prolets happy. But it hurt to see a tree and then come back to Appalachia. There was actual pain in it, Helaine thought miserably. She had not bargained for this when she married Norm Pomrath. He had been full of plans.
The children ate and left for school. Norm remained where he was, turning and twisting the fax-tape in his stubby fingers. Now and then he shared an item of news with her. Dantons dedicating a new hospital in Pacifica next Tuesday. Totally automated, one big homeostat and no technicians at all. Isnt that nice? It reduces government expenditures when no employees are required. And heres a good one, too. Effective the first of May, oxy quotas in all commercial buildings are reduced by ten per cent. They say its to enable additional gas supplies to reach householders. You remember that, Helaine, when they cut the home quota too around August. It always goes down. When it gets to the point where theyre rationing air
Norm, dont get worked up.
He ignored her. How did all this happen to us? Weve got a right to something better. Four million people per square inch, thats where were heading. Build the houses a thousand stories high so theres room for everyone, and it takes a month to get down to street level or up to the quickboat ramp, but what of it? Its progress. And
Do you think youll be able to locate this Lanoy and get a job through him? she asked.
What we need, he went on, is a first-class bacterial plague. Selective, of course. Wipe out all those who are lacking in functional job skills. That cuts the dole roll by a few billion units a day. Devote the tax money to make work programs for the rest. If that doesnt work, start a war.
Extraterrestrial enemies, the Crab People from the Crab Nebula, everything for patriotism. Start a losing war. Cannonfodder.
Hes cracking up, Helaine thought as her husband went on talking. It was an endless monologue these days, a spewing fountain of bitterness. She tried not to listen. Since he showed no sign of leaving the apartment, she did. She hurled the dishes into the disposal unit and said to him, Im going to visit the neighbors, and walked out just as he launched into an exposition of the virtues of controlled nuclear warfare as a means of population check. Random spasms of noise, that was what Norm Pomrath was producing these days. He had to hear himself talk, so that he did not forget he was still there.
Where shall I go, Helaine wondered?
Beth Wisnack, widowed by her time-hopping husband, looked smaller, grayer, sadder today than she had looked on Helaines last visit. Beths mouth was tightly drawn back in the quirk of suppressed rage. Behind the look of feminine resignation that she wore was inward fury: how dare he do this to me, how could he abandon me like this?
Courteously Beth offered an alcohol tube to her guest. Helaine smiled pleasantly, took the snub-ended red plastic tube, thrust it against the fleshy part of her arm. Beth did the same. The ultrasonic snouts whirred; the stimulant spurted into their blood-streams. An easy drunk, for those who did not like the taste of modern liquors. Helaine flickered her eyes, relaxing. She listened for a while to Beths song of complaint, pitched all on one note.
Then Helaine said, Beth, do you know about someone called Lanoy?
Beth was at instant attention. Who Lanoy? What Lanoy? Where did you hear of him? What do you know of him?
Not much. Thats why I asked you.
I heard the name, yes. Her pale eyes were agitated. Bud mentioned it. I heard him talking, telling some other man, Lanoy this, Lanoy that . . . It was the week before he ran out on me. Lanoy, he said. Lanoy will fix it.
Helaine reached for a second alcohol tube without waiting to be invited. There was a sudden chill inside her that needed to be thawed.
Lanoy will fix what? she asked.
Beth Wisnack subsided defeatedly. I dont know. Bud never discussed things with me. But I heard him talking about this Lanoy, anyway. A lot of whispering going on. Just before he left, he was talking Lanoy all the time. Ive got a theory about Lanoy. You want to hear?
Of course!
Smiling, Beth said, I think Lanoys the one who runs the hopper business.
Helaine had thought so too. But she had come here to learn otherwise, not to have her worst fears confirmed. Tense, her hands trembling a little, she smoothed her tunic, shifted her position, and said, You really think so?
Bud talked Lanoy all week. Then he disappeared. He was hatching something and it had to do with Lanoy. I should know what? But Ive got my theories. Bud met this Lanoy somewhere. They struck a deal. Andand The pain and rage welled too close to the surface. And Bud left, Beth Wisnack said breathily. She popped another tube. Then she said, Why do you ask?