announcement of how Executive Councilman Salgath Trod had called him
by visiphone, admitting to complicity in the recently-discovered
paratemporal slave-trade.
"Here is a recording of Councilman Salgath's call to me from his
apartment to my office at 1945 this evening."
The screen-image shattered into light-shards and rebuilt itself:
Salgath Trod, at his desk in the library of his apartment, the
brandy-goblet and the needler within reach, appeared. He began to
speak: from time to time the voice of Tortha Karf interrupted,
questioning or prompting him.
"You understand that this confession renders you liable to
psycho-rehabilitation?" Tortha Karf asked.
Yes, Councilman Salgath understood that.
"And you agree to come voluntarily to Paratime Police Headquarters,
and you will voluntarily undergo narco-hypnotic interrogation?"
Yes, Salgath Trod agreed to that.
"I am now terminating the playback of Councilman Salgath's call to
me," Tortha Karf said, re-appearing on the screen. "At this point
Councilman Salgath began making a statement about his criminal
activities, which we have on record. Because he named a number of his
criminal associates, whom we have no intention of warning, this
portion of Councilman Salgath's call cannot at this time be made
public. We have no intention of having any of these suspects escape,
or of giving their associates an opportunity to murder them to prevent
their furnishing us with additional information. Incidentally, there
was an attempt, made on the landing stage of Paratime Police
Headquarters, to murder Councilman Salgath, when he was brought here
guarded by Paratime Police officers--"
He went on to give a colorful and, as far as possible, truthful,
account of the attack by the two pseudo-policemen and their
pseudo-prisoner. As he told it, however, all three had been killed
before they could accomplish their purpose, one of them by Salgath
Trod himself.
The image of Tortha Karf was replaced by a view of the three assassins
lying on the landing stage. They all looked dead, even the one who
wasn't; there was nothing to indicate that he was merely drugged.
Then, one after another, their faces were shown in closeup, while
Tortha Karf asked for close attention and memorization.
"We believe that these men were Fifth Level Proles; we think that they
were under hypnotic influence or obeying posthypnotic commands when
they made their suicidal attack. If any of you have ever seen any of
these men before, it is your duty to inform the Paratime Police."
* * * * *
That ended it. Tortha Karf pressed a button in front of him and the
screen went dark. The spectators relaxed.
"Well! Nothing like being sincere with the public, is there?" Della
commented. "I'll remember this the next time I tune in a Management
public statement."
"In about five minutes," one of the bureau-chiefs, said, "all hell is
going to break loose. I think the whole thing is crazy!"
"I hope you have somebody who can give a convincing impersonation,"
Lovranth Rolk said.
"Yes. A field agent named Kostran Galth," Tortha Karf said. "We ran
the personal description cards for the whole Force through the
machine; Kostran checked to within one-twentieth of one per cent; he's
on Police Terminal, now, coming by rocket from Ravvanan Equivalent. We
ought to have the whole thing ready for telecast by 1730 tomorrow."
"He can't learn to imitate Salgath's voice convincingly in that time,
with all the work the cosmeticians'll have to be doing on him," Dalla
said.
"Make up a tape of Salgath's own voice, out of that pile of recordings
we got at his apartment, and what we can get out of the news file."
Vall said. "We have phoneticists who can split syllables and splice
them together. Kostran will deliver his speech in dumb-show, and we'll
dub the sound in and telecast them as one. I've messaged PolTerm to
get to work on that; they can start as soon as we have the speech
written."
[Illustration:]
"The more it succeeds now, the worse the blow-up will be when we
finally have to admit that Salgath was killed here tonight," the Chief
Inter-officer Coördinator, Zostha Olv said. "We'd better have
something to show the public to justify that."
"Yes, we had," Tortha Karf agreed. "Vall, how about the Kholghoor
Sector operation. How far's Ranthar Jard gotten toward locating one of
those Wizard Trader time lines?"
"Not very far," Vall admitted. "He has it pinned down to the
sub-sector, but the belt seems to be one we haven't any information at
all for. Never been any legitimate penetration by paratimers. He has
his own hagiologists, and a couple borrowed from Outtime Religious
Institute; they've gotten everything the slaves can give them on that.
About the only thing to do is start random observation with
boomerang-balls."
"Over about a hundred thousand time lines," Zostha Olv scoffed. He was
an old man, even for his long-lived race; he had a thin nose and a
narrow, bitter, mouth. "And what will he look for?"
"Croutha with guns." Tortha Karf told him, then turned to Vall. "Can't
he narrow it more than that? What have his experts been getting out of
those slaves?"
"That I don't know, to date." Vall looked at the clock. "I'll find
out, though; I'll transpose to Police Terminal and call him up. And
Skordran Kirv. No. Vulthor Tharn; it'd hurt the old fellow's feelings
if I by-passed him and went to one of his subordinates. Half an hour
each way, and at most another hour talking to Ranthar and Vulthor;
there won't be anything doing here for two hours." He rose. "See you
when I get back."
Dalla had turned on the telescreen again; after tuning out a dance
orchestra and a comedy show, she got the image of an angry-faced man
in evening clothes.
"... And I'm going to demand a full investigation, as soon as Council
convenes tomorrow morning!" he was shouting. "This whole story is a
preposterous insult to the integrity of the entire Executive Council,
your elected representatives, and it shows the criminal lengths to
which this would-be dictator, Tortha Karf, and his jackal Verkan Vall
will go--"
"So long, jackal." Dalla called to him as he went out.
* * * * *
He spent the half-hour transposition to Police Terminal sleeping.
Paratime-transpositions and rocket-flights seemed to be his only
chance to get any sleep. He was still sleepy when he sat down in front
of the radio telescreen behind his duplicate of Tortha Karf's desk and
put through a call to Nharkan Equivalent. It was 0600 in India; the
Sector Regional Deputy Subchief who was holding down Ranthar Jard's
desk looked equally sleepy; he had a mug of coffee in front of him,
and a brown-paper cigarette in his mouth.
"Oh, hello, Assistant Verkan. Want me to call Subchief Ranthar?"
"Is he sleeping? Then for mercy's sake don't. What's the present
status of the investigation?"
"Well, we were dropping boomerang balls yesterday, while we had sun to
mask the return-flashes. Nothing. The Croutha have taken the city of
Sohram, just below the big bend of the river. Tomorrow, when we have
sunlight, we're going to start boomerang-balling the central square.
We may get something."
"The Wizard Traders'll be moving in near there, about now," Vall said.
"The Croutha ought to have plenty of merchandise for them. Have you
gotten anything more done on narrowing down the possible area?"
The deputy bit back a yawn and reached for his coffee mug.
"The experts have just about pumped these slaves empty," he said. "The
local religion is a mess. Seems to have started out as a Great Mother
cult; then it picked up a lot of gods borrowed from other peoples;
then it turned into a dualistic monotheism; then it picked up a lot of
minor gods and devils--new devils usually gods of the older pantheon.
And we got a lot of gossip about the feudal wars and faction-fights
among the nobility, and so on, all garbled, because these people are
peasants who only knew what went on on the estate of their own lord."
"What did go on there?" Vall asked. "Ask them about recent
improvements, new buildings, new fields cleared, new paddies flooded,
that sort of thing. And pick out a few of the highest IQ's from both
time lines, and have them locate this estate on a large-scale map, and
draw plans showing the location of buildings, fields and other visible
features. If you have to, teach them mapping and sketching by
hypno-mech. And then drop about five hundred to a thousand boomerang
balls, at regular intervals, over the whole paratemporal area. When
you locate a time line that gives you a picture to correspond to their
description, boomerang the main square in Sohram over the whole belt
around it, to find Croutha with firearms."
The deputy looked at him for a moment then gulped more coffee.
"Can do, Assistant Verkan. I think I'll send somebody to wake up
Subchief Ranthar, right now. Want to talk to him."
"Won't be necessary. You're recording this call, of course? Then play
it back to him. And get cracking with the slaves; you want enough
information out of them to enable you to start boomerang balling as
soon as the sun's high enough."
* * * * *
He broke off the connection and sent out for coffee for himself. Then
he put through a call to Novilan Equivalent, in western North America.
It was 1530, there, when he got Vulthor Tharn on the screen.
"Good afternoon. Assistant Verkan. I suppose you're calling about the
slave business. I've turned the entire matter over to Field Agent
Skordran; gave him a temporary rank of Deputy Subchief. That's subject
to your approval and Chief Tortha's, of course--"
"Make the appointment permanent," Vall said. "I'll have a confirmation
along from Chief Tortha directly. And let me talk to him now, if you
please. Subchief Vulthor."
"Yes, sir. Switching you over now." The screen went into a beautiful
burst of abstract art, and cleared, after a while, with Skordran Kirv
looking out of it.
"Hello, Deputy Skordran, and congratulations. What's come up since we
had Nebu-hin-Abenoz cut out from under us?"
"We went in on that time line, that same night, with an airboat and
made a recon in the hills back of Careba. Scared the fear of Safar
into a party of Caleras while we were working at low altitude, by the
way. We found the conveyer-head site: hundred-foot circle with all the
grass and loose dirt transposed off it and a pole pen, very unsanitary
where about two-three hundred slaves would be kept at a time. No
indications of use in the last ten days. We did some pretty thorough
boomeranging on that spatial equivalent over a couple of thousand time
lines and found thirty more of them. I believe the slavers have closed
out the whole Esaron Sector operation, at least temporarily."
That was what he'd been afraid of; he hoped they wouldn't do the same
thing on the Kholghoor Sector.
"Let me have the designations of the time lines on which you found
conveyer heads," he said.
"Just a moment, Chief's Assistant; I'll photoprint them to you. Set
for reception?"
Vall opened a slide under the screen and saw that the photoprint film
was in place, then closed it again, nodding. Skordran Kirv fed a sheet
of paper into his screen cabinet and his arm moved forward out of the
picture.
"On, sir," he said. He and Vall counted ten seconds together, and then
Skordran Kirv said: "Through to you." Vall pressed a lever under his
screen, and a rectangle of microcopy print popped out.
"That's about all I have, sir. Want me to keep my troops ready here,
or shall I send them somewhere else?"
"Keep them ready, Kirv," Vall told him. "You may need them before
long. Call you later."
He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged print
with him to the conveyer room. There was something odd about the list
of time line designations. They were expressed numerically, in First
Level notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exact
expression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers. Vall had only a
general-education smattering of mathematics--enough to qualify him for
the chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the Fourth
Level Europo-American Sector--and he could not identify the
peculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort of
pattern. Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of the
chairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him,
and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished. He
woke, the list of time line designations in his hand, when the
conveyor rematerialized on Home Time Line. Putting it in his pocket,
he hurried to an antigrav shaft and floated up to the floor on which
Tortha Karf's office was.
* * * * *
Tortha Karf was asleep in his chair; Dalla was eating a dinner that
had been brought in to her--something better than the sandwich and mug
of coffee Vall had mentioned to Thalvan Dras. Several of the bureau
chiefs who had been there when he had gone out had left, and the
psychist who had taken charge of the prisoner was there.
"I think he's coming out of the drug, now," he reported. "Still
asleep, though. We want him to waken naturally before we start on him.
They'll call me as soon as he shows signs of stirring."
"The Opposition's claiming, now, that we drugged and hypnotized
Salgath into making that visiscreen confession," Dalla said. "Can you
think of any way you could do that without making the subject
incapable of lying?"
"Pseudo-memories," the psychist said. "It would take about three times
as long as the time between Salgath Trod's departure from his
apartment and the time of the telecast, though--"
"You know much higher math?" Vall asked the psychist.
"Well, enough to handle my job. Neuron-synapse inter-relations,
memory-and-association patterns, that kind of thing, all have to be
expressed mathematically."
Vall nodded and handed him the time-line designation list.
"See any kind of a pattern there?" he asked.
The psychist looked at the paper and blanked his face as he drew on
hypnotically-acquired information.
"Yes. I'd say that all the numbers are related in some kind of a
series to some other number. Simplified down to kindergarten level,
say the difference between A and B is, maybe, one-decillionth of the
difference between X and A, and the difference between B and C is
one-decillionth of the difference between X and B, and so on--"
A voice came out of one of the communication boxes:
"Dr. Nentrov; the patient's out of the drug, and he's beginning to
stir about."
"That's it," the psychist said. "I have to run." He handed the sheet
back to Vall, took a last drink from his coffee cup, and bolted out of
the room.
Dalla picked up the sheet of paper and looked at it. Vall told her
what it was.
"If those time lines are in regular series, they relate to the base
line of operations," she said. "Maybe you can have that worked out. I
can see how it would be; a stated interval between the Esaron Sector
lines, to simplify transposition control settings."
"That was what I was thinking. It's not quite as simple as Dr. Nentrov
expressed it, but that could be the general idea. We might be able to
work out the location of the base line from that. There seems to be a
break in the number sequence in here; that would be the time line
Skordran Kirv found those slaves on." He reached for the pipe he had
left on the desk when he had gone to Police Terminal and began filling
it.
A little later, a buzzer sounded and a light came on on one of the
communication boxes. He flipped the switch and said, "Verkan Vall
here." Sothran Barth's voice came cut of the box.
"They've just brought in Salgath Trod's servants. Picked them up as
they came out of the house conveyer at the apartment building. I don't
believe they know what's happened."
Vall flipped a switch and twiddled a dial; a viewscreen lit up,
showing the landing stage. The police car had just landed: one
detective had gotten out, and was helping the girl, Zinganna, who had
been Salgath Trod's housekeeper and mistress, to descend. She was
really beautiful. Vall thought: rather tall, slender, with dark eyes
and a creamy light-brown skin. She wore a black cloak, and, under it,
a black and silver evening gown. A single jewel twinkled in her black
hair. She could have very easily passed for a woman of his own race.
The housemaid and the butler were a couple of entirely different
articles. Both were about four or five generations from Fourth Level
Primitive savagery. The maid, in garishly cheap finery, was big-boned
and heavy-bodied, with red-brown hair; she looked like a member of one
of the northern European reindeer-herding peoples who had barely
managed to progress as far as the bow and arrow. The butler was
probably a mixture of half a dozen primitive races; he was wearing one
of his late master's evening suits, a bright mellow-pink, which was
distinctly unflattering to his complexion.
The sound-pickup was too far away to give him what they were saying,
but the butler and maid were waving their arms and protesting
vehemently. One of the detectives took the woman by the arm; she
jerked it loose and aimed a backhand slap at him. He blocked it on his
forearm. Immediately, the girl in black turned and said something to
her, and she subsided. Vall said, into the box:
"Barth, have the girl in the black cloak brought down to Number Four
Interview Room. Put the other two in separate detention cubicles;
we'll talk to them later." He broke the connection and got to his
feet. "Come on, Dalla. I want you to help me with the girl."
"Just try and stop me," Dalla told him. "Any interviews you have with
that little item, I want to sit in on."
* * * * *
The Proletarian girl, still guarded by a detective, had already been
placed in the interview room. The detective nodded to Vall, tried to
suppress a grin when he saw Dalla behind him, and went out. Vall saw
his wife and the prisoner seated, and produced his cigarette case,
handing it around.
"You're Zinganna; you're of the household of Councilman Salgath Trod,
aren't you?" he asked.
"Housekeeper and hostess," the girl replied. "I am also his mistress."
Vall nodded, smiling. "Which confirms my long-standing respect for
Councilman Salgath's exquisite taste."
"Why, thank you," she said. "But I doubt if I was brought here to
receive compliments. Or was I?"
"No, I'm afraid not. Have you heard the newscasts of the past few
hours concerning Councilman Salgath?"
She straightened in her seat, looking at him seriously.
"No. I and Nindrandigro and Calilla spent the evening on ServSec
One-Six-Five. Councilman Salgath told me that he had some business and
wanted them out of the apartment, and wanted me to keep an eye on
them. We didn't hear any news at all." She hesitated. "Has anything
... serious ... happened?"
Vall studied her for a moment, then glanced at Dalla. There existed
between himself and his wife a sort of vague, semitelepathic, rapport;
they had never been able to transmit definite and exact thoughts, but
they could clearly prehend one another's feelings and emotions. He was
conscious, now, of Dalla's sympathy for the Proletarian girl.
"Zinganna, I'm going to tell you something that is being kept from the
public," he said. "By doing so, I will make it necessary for us to
detain you, at least for a few days. I hope you will forgive me, but I
think you would forgive me less if I didn't tell you."
"Something's happened to him," she said, her eyes widening and her
body tensing.
"Yes, Zinganna. At about 2010, this evening," he said, "Councilman
Salgath was murdered."
"Oh!" She leaned back in the chair, closing her eyes. "He's dead?"
Then, again, statement instead of question: "He's dead!"
For a long moment, she lay back in the chair, as though trying to
reorient her mind to the fact of Salgath Trod's death, while Vall and
Dalla sat watching her. Then she stirred, opened her eyes, looked at
the cigarette in her fingers as though she had never seen it before,
and leaned forward to stuff it into an ash receiver.
"Who did it?" she asked, the Stone Age savage who had been her
ancestor not ten generations ago peeping out of her eyes.
"The men who actually used the needlers are dead," Vall told her. "I
killed a couple of them myself. We still have to find the men who
planned it. I'd hoped you'd want to help us do that, Zinganna."
He side-glanced to Dalla again; she nodded. The relationship between
Zinganna and Salgath Trod hadn't been purely business with her; there
had been some real affection. He told her what had happened, and when
he reached the point at which Salgath Trod had called Tortha Karf to
confess complicity in the slave trade, her lips tightened and she
nodded.
"I was afraid it was something like that," she said. "For the last few
days, well, ever since the news about the slave trade got out, he's
been worried about something. I've always thought somebody had some
kind of a hold over him. Different times in the past, he's done things
so far against his own political best interests that I've had to
believe he was being forced into them. Well, this time they tried to
force him too far. What then?"
Vall continued the story. "So we're keeping this hushed up, for a
while. The way we're letting it out, Salgath Trod is still alive, on
Police Terminal, talking under narco-hypnosis."
She smiled savagely. "And they'll get frightened, and frightened men
do foolish things," she finished. She hadn't been a politician's
mistress for nothing. "What can I do to help?"
"Tell us everything you can," he said. "Maybe we can be able to take
such actions as we would have taken if Salgath Trod had lived to talk
to us."
"Yes, of course." She got another cigarette from the case Vall had
laid on the table. "I think, though, that you'd better give me a
narco-hypnosis. You want to be able to depend on what I'm going to
tell you, and I want to be able to remember things exactly."
Vall nodded approvingly and turned to Dalla.
"Can you handle this, yourself?" he asked. "There's an audio-visual
recorder on now; here's everything you need." He opened the drawers in
the table to show her the narco-hypnotic equipment. "And the phone has
a whisper mouthpiece; you can call out without worrying about your
message getting into Zinganna's subconscious. Well, I'll see you when
you're through; you bring Zinganna to Police Terminal; I'll probably
be there."
He went out, closing the door behind him, and went down the hall,
meeting the officer who had taken charge of the butler and housemaid.
"We're having trouble with them, sir," he said. "Hostile. Yelling
about their rights, and demanding to see a representative of
Proletarian Protective League."
Vall mentioned the Proletarian Protective League with unflattering
vulgarity.
"If they don't coöperate, drag them out and inject them and question
them anyhow," he said.
The detective-lieutenant looked worried. "We've been taking a pretty
high hand with them as it is," he protested. "It's safer to kill a
Citizen than bloody a Prole's nose; they have all sorts of laws to
protect them."
"There are all sorts of laws to protect the Paratime Secret," Vall
replied. "And I think there are one or two laws against murdering
members of the Executive Council. In case P.P.L. makes any trouble,
they aren't here; they have faithfully joined their beloved master in
his refuge on PolTerm. But one or both of them work for the
Organization."
"You're sure of that?"
"The Organization is too thorough not to have had a spy in Salgath's
household. It wasn't Zinganna, because she's volunteered to talk to us
under narco-hyp. So who does that leave?"
"Well, that's different; that makes them suspects." The lieutenant
seemed relieved. "We'll pump that pair out right away."
When he got back to Tortha Karf's office, the Chief was awake, and
doodling on his notepad with his multicolor pen. Vall looked at the
pad and winced; the Chief was doodling bugs again--red ants with black
legs, and blue-and-green beetles. Then he saw that the psychist,
Nentrov Dard, was drinking straight 150-proof palm-rum.
"Well, tell me the worst," he said.