The Time Hoppers

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There was a beauty in the crowded world, so they said. The crystalline city towers in serried ranks assembled, the patterned rhythms of a surging mob at a quickboat ramp, the dance of sunlight on a million iridescent tunics in one of the great plazas—in such things, the aesthetes said, was the abode of beauty.

Quellen was no aesthete. He was a minor bureaucrat, a humble civil servant of decent intelligence and normal proclivities. He looked at the world as it presented itself in A D 2490, and found it hellish. Quellen was unable to perform the intricate inner dance by which hideous overcrowding could be written off as modem beauty. He hated it. If he had been Class One or even Class Two, Quellen might have been in a better position to appreciate the new aesthetics, because he would not have been required to live right in the middle of them. But Quellen was Class Seven. The world does not look quite the same to a man in Class Seven as it does to a man in Class Two.

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