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.”
“Traveling 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 honorable 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 gray-blue eyes sparked. 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 toward 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 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.
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 upward toward 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 all-purpose 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 shoulder blades. 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.