A quickboat slid onto its ramp. Quellen joined the multitudes pressing into it. He felt the thrum of power as it moved outward. Aching humbly from fear, Quellen headed downtown to meet Koll.
The building of Secretariat of Crime was considered an architectural masterpiece, Quellen had been told. Eighty stories, topped by spiked towers, and the crimson curtain-walls were rough and sandy in texture, so that they sparkled like a beacon when illuminated. The building had roots; Quellen had never learned how many underlevels there were, and he suspected that no one really knew, save certain members of the High Government. Surely there were twenty levels of computer down there, and a crypt for dead storage below that, and a further eight levels of interrogation rooms even deeper. Of that much, Quellen had sure knowledge. Some said that there was another computer, forty levels thick, underneath the interrogation rooms, and there were those who maintained that this was the true computer, while the one above was only for decoration and camouflage. Perhaps. Quellen did not try to probe too deeply into such things. For all he knew, the High Government itself met in secret councils a hundred levels below street level in this very building. He kept his curiosity under check. He did not wish to invite the curiosity of others, and that meant placing a limit on his own.
Clerical workers nodded respectfully to Quellen as he passed between their close-packed rows. He smiled. He could afford to be gracious; here he had status, the mana of Class Seven. They were Fourteens, Fifteens, the boy emptying the disposal basket was probably a Twenty. To them, he was a lofty figure, virtually a confidant of High Government people, a personal associate of Danton and Kloofman themselves. All a matter of perspective, Quellen thought.
Actually he had glimpsed Danton—or someone said to be Danton—only once. He had no real reason to think that Kloofman actually existed, though probably he did.
Clamping his hand vigorously on the doorknob, Quellen waited to be scanned. The door of the inner office opened. He entered and found unfriendly figures hunched at desks within. Little sharp-nosed Martin Koll, looking for all the world like some huge rodent, sat facing the door, sifting through a sheaf of minislips. Leon Spanner, Quellen’s other boss, sat opposite him at the glistening table, his great bull neck hunching over still more memoranda. As Quellen came into the room, Koll reached to the wall with a quick nervous gesture and flipped up the oxy vent, admitting a supply for three.
“Took you long enough,” Koll said, without looking up.
Quellen glowered at him. Koll was gray-haired, grayfaced, gray of soul. Quellen hated him. “Sorry,” he said. “I had to change. I was off duty.”
“Whatever we do won’t alter anything,” rumbled Spanner,as if no one had entered and nothing had been said. “What’s happened has happened, and nothing we do will have the slightest effect. Do you see? It makes me want to smash things! To pound and break!”
“Sit down, Quellen,” Koll said offhandedly. He turned to Spanner, a big, beefy man with a furrowed forehead and thick features. “I thought we’d been through this all before,” Koll said. “If we meddle it’s going to mix up everything. With about five hundred years to cover, we’ll scramble the whole framework. That much is clear.”
Quellen silently breathed relief. Whatever it was they were concerned about, it wasn’t his illegal African hideaway. From the way it sounded, they were talking about the time-hoppers. Good. He looked at his two superiors more carefully, now that his eyes were no longer blurred by fear and the anticipation of humiliating punishment. They had obviously been arguing quite a while, Koll and Spanner. Koll was the deep one, with his agile mind and nervous, birdlike energy. But Spanner had more power. They said he had connections in high places, even High places.
“All right, Koll,” Spanner grunted. “I’ll even grant that it will mix up the past. I’ll concede that much.”
“Well, that’s something,” the small man said.
“Don’t interrupt me. I still think we’ve got to put a stop to it. We can’t undo what’s done, but we can cut it short this year. In fact, we must.”
Koll glared balefully at Spanner. Quellen could see that his own presence was the only reason Koll was concealing the anger lying just behind his eyes. They would be spewing curses at one another if the underling Quellen did not happen to be in the room.
“Why, Spanner, why?” Koll demanded in what passed for measured tones. “If we keep the process going we maintain things as they are. Four thousand of them went in ’86, nine thousand in ’87, fifty thousand in ’88. And when we get last year’s figures, they’ll be even higher. Look—here it says that over a million hoppers arrived in the first eighty years, and after that the figures kept rising. Think of the population we’re losing! It’s wonderful! We can’t afford to let these people stay here, when we have a chance to get rid of them. And when history says that we did get rid of them.”
“History also says that they stopped going back to the past after 2491. Which means that we caught them next year,” Spanner said. “I mean, that we will catch them next year. It’s ordained. We’ve got no choice but to obey. The past’s a closed book.”
“Is it?” Koll laughed; it was almost a bark. “What if we don’t solve it? What if the hoppers keep on going back?”
“It didn’t happen that way, though. We know it. All the hoppers who reached the past came from the years 2486 to 2491. That’s a matter of record,” said Spanner doggedly.
“Records can be falsified.”
“The High Government wants this traffic stopped. Why must I argue with you, Koll? You want to defy history, that’s your business, but defying Them as well? No. We don’t have that option.”
“But to clear away millions of prolets—”
Spanner grunted and tightened his grasp on the minislip she was holding. Quellen, feeling like an intruder, let his eyes flick back from one man to the other.
“All right,” Spanner said slowly. “I’ll agree with you that it’s nice to keep losing all those prolets. Even though on the face of things it appears that we won’t go on losing them much longer. You say we have to let it keep going on, or else it’ll alter the past. I take the opposite view. But let that pass. I won’t argue the point, since you seem so positive. Furthermore, you think that it’s a good thing to use this time-hopper business as a method of reducing population.I’m with you on that too, Koll. I don’t like overcrowding any more than you do, and I’ll admit things have reached a ridiculous state nowadays. But consider: we’re being hoodwinked. For someone to be running a time-travel business behind our backs is illegal and unethical and a lot of other things, and he ought to be stopped. What do you say, Quellen? Ultimately this is going to be the responsibility of your department, you know.”
The sudden reference to him came as a jolt. Quellen was still struggling to get his bearings in this debate, and he was not entirely sure what they were talking about. He smiled weakly and shook his head.
“No opinion?” Koll asked abrasively.
Quellen looked at him. He was unable to stare straight into Koll’s hard, colorless eyes, and so he let his gaze rest on the bureau manager’s cheekbones instead. He remained silent.
“No opinion, Quellen? That’s too bad indeed. It doesn’t speak well of you.”