“It can’t be worse than what’s here.”
“Are you married, Pomrath?”
“Yes. Two children. I love them deeply.”
“Want to take the whole family along?”
“Can it be done?”
“With uncertainties. We’ve got to send you separately: mass limits. You could get scattered over a range of as much as a dozen years. Your kids arriving first, then you and your wife a few years later, maybe.”
Pomrath trembled. “Suppose I go first. Will you keep a record of where I’m sent—when I’m sent—so that my family can come after me if that’s what my wife wants to do?”
“Of course. We look out for your welfare. I’ll get in touch with Mrs Pomrath. She’ll have the option of following you. Not many wives do it, of course, but she’ll have the option. Well, Pomrath? Still with us?”
“You know I am,” Pomrath said.
Quellen, monitoring the conversation, sat trancelike and chilled. He could not see Lanoy, he had no real idea where the conversation was taking place, but yet he realized that his brother-in-law was about to enrol in the legion of hoppers, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Unless Brogg and Leeward reached Lanoy’s headquarters in the nick of time, and came bursting in to make the arrest—
A voice said, “Sir, UnderSec Brogg is calling.”
Quellen pulled himself away from the monitor. A visionless phone was rolled up. Quellen put it to his ear. ;
“Where are you?” he demanded. “Have you traced Lanoy yet?”
“We’re working on it,” Brogg said. “It turned out Brand didn’t know the exact location. He just knew somebody who could take him to somebody who could bring him to Lanoy.”
“I see.”
“But we’ve got a geographical area pegged. We’re cordoning it and closing in by televector. It’s only a matter of time now before we put the intercept on Lanoy in person.”
“How much time?” asked Quellen icily.
“I’d say six hours,” Brogg replied. “Plus or minus ninety minutes. We’re certain to nail him today.”
Six hours, Quellen thought. Plus or minus. And then Lanoy would be in custody.
But Norm Pomrath would be a hopper by then.
Twelve
Brogg said in a relaxed tone, “I have to arrest you, of course. You understand that. It’s regulations.”
“Of course,” Lanoy said. “It goes almost without saying. I wondered what took you people so long to get to me.”
“Uncertainty in high places. There was a lot of dithering.” Brogg smiled at the little man. “I don’t mind telling you, you have the High Government quite upset. They’re sweating to arrest you, but at the same time they’re afraid of wrecking their position of power through some sort of rearrangement of past events. So they’ve been stalemated. It’s the classic conflict situation: they must stop you, and they don’t dare it.”
“I appreciate their troubles,” said Lanoy. “It’s a terribly complicated life even for Them, isn’t it? Well, you’re here, now. Come outside. Let’s watch the sunset, shall we?”
Brogg followed Lanoy from the shack. It was late, now, well into his overtime phase, but Brogg did not object. All day long he and Leeward had zeroed in on Lanoy, juggling televector constants until they had located him within a narrowing radius. As Brogg had told Quellen earlier in the day, it was only a matter of hours. In fact, it had taken four hours and some minutes from the time of Brogg’s call. Deftly, Brogg had sent Leeward off on a wild goose chase an hour ago. Now Brogg and Lanoy were alone at this remote shack. Brogg had much to say to the hopper man.
A swollen golden sun hung suspended in the darkening sky. The track of illumination cast a purplish glow over the polluted lake. It took on an eerie glitter, and the slime-creatures that writhed on its surface seemed ennobled by the aura of the dying day. Lanoy stared raptly into the west.
“It is beautiful,” he said finally. “I could never leave this era, UnderSec Brogg. I see the beauty within the ugliness. Regard that lake. Was there ever anything like it? I stand here at sunset each night in awe.”
“Remarkable.”
“Very. There’s poetry in that ooze. The oxygen’s just about gone, you see. There’s been a devolution of organic life there, so that we’ve got only anaerobic forms. I like to think that the sludgeworms dance down there at sunset. About, about, in reel and rout. Look at the play of colours on that big swatch of algae. It grows as long as seaweed here. Do you care for poetry much, Brogg?”
“My passion’s for history.”
“What period?”
“Roman. The early Empire. Tiberius through Trajan, approximately. Trajan’s time: a true golden age.”
“The Republic doesn’t interest you?” asked Lanoy. “The brave puritans? Cato? Lucius Junius Brutus? The Gracchi?” Brogg was astounded. “You know such things?”
“I cast a wide net,” said Lanoy. “You realize that I deal with the past on a daily basis. I’ve acquired a certain familiarity with history myself. Trajan, eh? You’d like to visit Rome of Trajan’s era, would you?”
“Of course,” Brogg said huskily.
“What about Hadrian? Still a golden age there. If you couldn’t have Trajan, would you settle for Hadrian? Let us say, a margin of error covering a generation—we might miss Trajan, but in that case we’d land somewhere in Hadrian. We’d do better to aim for the forward end of Trajan’s rule. Otherwise the error might take us the other way, and you wouldn’t like that, eh? You’d come out in Titus, Domitian, one of that nasty bunch. Not at all to your liking.”
Brogg could manage only a hoarse, croaking voice. “What are you talking about?”
“You know quite well.” The sun had set. The magic glow ebbed from the ruined lake. “Shall we go in?” Lanoy asked. “I’ll show you some of the equipment.”
Brogg allowed himself to be led back inside. He towered over the little man; Lanoy was no bigger than Koll, and had something of Koll’s nervous inner energy. Yet Koll brimmed with hatred and pustulence; Lanoy seemed utterly confident, with a core of tranquillity within his active dynamism.
Lanoy opened a door in the partition that divided the building. Brogg peered in. He saw vertical bars of some gleaming material, an openwork cage, dials, switches, an array of rheostats. Rows of colour-coded panels on the machinery radiated bright glows of data. It all seemed to be put together with an eye towards deliberate confusion.
“This is the time-travel machine?” Brogg asked.
“Part of it. There are extensions both in time and space. I won’t plague you with the details. The principle is simple, anyway. A sudden strain on the fabric of the continuum; we thrust present-day material in, scoop out an equal buckeload of mass from the past. Conservation of matter, you understand. When our calculations are off by a few grammes, it causes disturbances, implosions, meteorological effects. We try not to miss, but we sometimes do. There’s a fusion plasma at the heart of it all. No better way to rip open the continuum; we use our own little sun to do it. We tap off the theta force, you see. Every time someone uses a stat, it builds up temporal potential that we grab and utilize. Even so, it’s an expensive process.”
“What do you charge for a trip?”
“Two hundred units, generally. That is, if we’re willing to take money at all.”
“You send some people free?” Brogg asked.
“Not exactly. We won’t accept the money of certain individuals, I mean. We insist on payment of a different kind—services, information, that sort of thing. If they’re not willing to render what we need, we don’t transport them. For those people, no amount of money could hire us.”