At quarter after nineteen, she phoned her brother at his apartment.
“I hate to disturb you, Joe, but it’s about Norm. He isn’t home for dinner, and I’m worried.”
There was a long silence at the other end. Helaine watched Quellen’s face, but the expression on it baffled her. His lips were tightly compressed.
“Joe? Why aren’t you answering me? Listen, I know I’m just a foolish woman who’s worrying about nothing at all, but I can’t help it. I’ve got this definite feeling that something terrible has happened.”
“I’m sorry, Helaine. I did what I could.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s been an arrest. We’ve pulled in the slyster who ran the hopper outfit. But there just wasn’t time to get Norm. He slipped right through.”
She felt the chill sweeping up from her legs and invading her internal organs, turning them one by one to lumps of resonating ice. “Joe, I don’t understand you. Do you know something about Norm?”
“We were monitoring him. Brogg put an Ear on him last night at my instruction. He went out to look for Lanoy this morning. The slyster.”
“The one you arrested?”
“Yes. Lanoy’s running the hopper game. Was running. He’s in custody. I’ll be interrogating him in the morning. Norm went to him. It was far out—the trip took him all morning. We were vectoring in on Lanoy, you understand, but there was absolutely no way to get to Norm in time. I’ve got a tape of the whole thing as it came out of the Ear.”
“He’s—gone?”
“Gone,” Quellen said. “His destination was 2050. Lanoy wasn’t sure that they could hit the year exactly, but he said the odds were in favor. I want you to know, Helaine, that Norm was thinking of you right up until he left. You can listen to the tapes yourself. He said he loved you and the children. He was trying to arrange things so you and the children could follow him to 2050. Lanoy agreed to do it. It’s all on record.”
“Gone. He just hopped like that.”
“He was in bad shape, Helaine. The things he was saying this morning—he was practically insane.”
“I know it. He’s been like that for days. I tried to get him to go to a frood, but—”
“Is there anything I can do, Helaine? Do you want me to come over and stay with you?”
“No.”
“I can have a registered consolation service come around.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Helaine, you’ve got to believe me, I did everything that was in my power to prevent this from happening. And if you choose to follow him the hopper way, I’ll see to it that you get the opportunity. That is, if the High Government permits further hopper operations, now that we’ve taken Lanoy into custody.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Helaine quietly. “I don’t know what I’ll do. Just let me alone now. Thanks for everything, anyway, Joe.”
She opaqued the screen and broke the contact. Now that the worst had happened, Helaine felt oddly calm. Glacially calm. She would not go into the past hunting for her husband. She was the widow Pomrath, betrayed, abandoned.
Joseph said, “Mommy, where’s Daddy?”
“He’s gone away, son.”
“Will he be coming back soon?”
“I don’t think so,” Helaine said.
Marina looked up. “Does that mean that Daddy’s dead?”
“Not quite,” Helaine told her. “It’s too complicated. I’ll explain it some other time. Plug yourselves in and do your homework, children. It’s almost bedtime.”
She went to the drawer where they kept the alcohol tubes. Withdrawing one quickly, she pressed the snout against her skin and took a quick, subcutaneous jolt. It left her feeling neither more animated nor more depressed. She was frozen, at an emotional constant of zero.
The widow Pomrath. Beth Wisnack will be pleased to hear it. She can’t bear the thought that any other woman might still have a husband.
Closing her eyes, she pictured Norm landing in 2050, a stranger and alone. He would make out, she knew. He had his medical skills. Dropped into the primitive past like that, he’d set up in business as a doctor, perhaps even concealing his hopper status—otherwise he’d have been on the roster of registered hoppers, wouldn’t he? He’d be rich and successful. Patients would flock to him, especially women patients. He would lose his look of bleak defeat, and take on the glow of prosperity. He’d stand taller, and smile more often. Helaine wondered what sort of woman he would marry.Hadmarried. It was all done. That was the weird part of it. Norm had already lived and died, perishing about the year 2100, and his body had turned to dust centuries ago, along with the bodies of his other wife and his other children. Perhaps his descendants in today’s world were a numerous tribe. Perhaps I’m one of them myself, Helaine thought. And the book was sealed; his destiny had been written hundreds of years before their wedding day. Even then, it was fated thathe would leave her and circle back into the past to die hundreds of years before he was born.
Helaine’s mind reeled. She took a second alcohol tube, and it helped her, but not much. The children sat with their backs to her, plugged into their homework machine, assiduously pretending to study.
I am lost, she thought.
I am nothing.
I am the widow Pomrath.
On the third tube, a new thought occurred to her. I am fairly young. Given a few months to relax, I could even be attractive again. Joe can arrange it; there must be a special government pension for the deserted wives of hoppers. I’ll go away, fill out, put some meat on my bones. Then I’ll marry again. Of course, I’ll have used up my reproductive quota, but that won’t matter. I can find a man who’s willing to forego fatherhood. He’ll adopt Joseph and Marina.
Someone tall and handsome, and high in slope. Can I catch a Class Six? A widower, maybe even a man whose wife turned hopper, if there are any.
I’ll show Norm. I’ll catch myself a real prize.
Already, she could feel her body blossoming, filling out, the sap rising in it. For months, years even, she had lived in a barren winter of terror, clinging to her husband and nurturing him through his mood of empty despair in the hope that she could prevent him from abandoning her. Now that he was gone, she no longer needed to fear that he would go. She was returning to life. She felt younger.
I’ll fix Norm Pomrath, Helaine thought. I’ll make him sorry he ever went away!
13.
It was morning. Quellen had deliberately allowed the captured slyster Lanoy to languish overnight in the custody tank, so that he could reflect on his crimes. Lanoy was in total sensory deprivation, floating in a warm bath of nutrients with all inputs plugged off, so that nothing would register on his mind but his own predicament. Such treatment often had a marked softening effect on the hardest of cases. And from what Brogg had said, Lanoy was the hardest case in a long while.
Quellen had received the news at home, late in the evening, not long before Helaine’s call. He had given instructions for Lanoy’s treatment, but he had not actually gone down to headquarters to view the slyster. Leeward had brought him in, Brogg remaining behind at the hopper place itself.
It had been a somber night for Quellen. He knew, of course, that Norm Pomrath had gone to the past. He had been listening helplessly, jacked into the realtime circuit, while Pomrath and Lanoy discussed the project and came to an agreement. Then and there, Pomrath had paid over his money—virtually wiping out the family savings—and had stepped up on the platform to be thrust into the year 2050. Ear transmissions had ceased at that point. The Ear was a sensitive device, but it had no way of broadcasting across a temporal gap.