and filling it again. "And he's plastered with pseudo-memories a foot
thick. It'll be five or six ten-days before we can get all that stuff
peeled off and get him unblocked. I put him to sleep and had him
transposed to Police Terminal. I'm going there, myself, tomorrow
morning, after I've had some sleep, and get to work on him. If you're
hoping to get anything useful out of him in time to head off this
Council crisis that's building up, just forget it."
"And that leaves us right back with our old friends, the Wizard
Traders," Tortha Karf added. "And if they've decided to suspend
activities on the Kholghoor Sector, too--" He began drawing a big blue
and black spider in the middle of the pad.
Nentrov Dard crushed out his cigar, drank his rum, and got to his
feet.
"Well, good night, Chief; Vall. If you decide to wake me up before
1000, send somebody you want to get rid of in a hurry." He walked
around the deck and out the side door.
"I hope they don't," Vall said to Tortha Karf. "Really, though, I
doubt if they do. This is their chance to pick up a lot of slaves
cheaply; the Croutha are too busy to bother haggling. I'm going
through to PolTerm, now; when Dalla and Zinganna get through, tell
them to join me there."
* * * * *
On Police Terminal, he found Kostran Galth, the agent who had been
selected to impersonate Salgath Trod. After calling Zulthran Torv, the
mathematician in charge of the Computer Office and giving him the
Esaron time-line designations and Nentrov Dard's ideas about them, he
spent about an hour briefing Kostran Galth on the role he was to play.
Finally, he undressed and went to bed on a couch in the rest room
behind the office.
It was noon when he woke. After showering, shaving and dressing
hastily, he went out to the desk for breakfast, which arrived while he
was putting a call through to Ranthar Jard, at Nharkan Equivalent.
"Your idea paid off, Chief's Assistant," the Kholghoor SecReg Subchief
told him. "The slaves gave us a lot of physical description data on
the estate, and told us about new fields that had been cleared, and a
dam this Lord Ghromdour was building to flood some new rice-paddies.
We located a belt of about five parayears where these improvements had
been made: we started boomeranging the whole belt, time line by time
line. So far, we have ten or fifteen pictures of the main square at
Sohram showing Croutha with firearms, and pictures of Wizard Trader
camps and conveyer heads on the same time lines. Here, let me show
you; this is from an airboat over the forest outside the equivalent of
Sohram."
There was no jungle visible when the view changed; nothing but
clusters of steel towers and platforms and buildings that marked
conveyer heads, and a large rectangle of red-and-white antigrav-buoys
moored to warn air traffic out of the area being boomeranged. The
pickup seemed to be pointed downward from the bow of an airboat
circling at about ten thousand feet.
"Balls ready to go," a voice called, and then repeated a string of
time-line designations. "Estimated return, 1820, give or take four
minutes."
"Varth," Ranthar Jard said, evidently out of the boat's radio. "Your
telecast is being beamed on Dhergabar Equivalent; Chief's Assistant
Verkan is watching. When do you estimate your next return?"
"Any moment, now, sir; we're holding this drop till they
rematerialize."
Vall watched unblinkingly, his fork poised halfway to his mouth.
Suddenly, about a thousand feet below the eye of the pickup, there was
a series of blue flashes, and, an instant later, a blossoming of
red-and-white parachutes, ejected from the photo-reconnaissance balls
that had returned from the Kholghoor Sector.
"All right; drop away," the boat captain called. There was a gush,
from underneath, of eight-inch spheres, their conductor-mesh twinkling
golden-bright in the sunlight. They dropped in a tight cluster for a
thousand or so feet and then flashed and vanished. From the ground,
six or eight aircars rose to meet the descending parachutes and catch
them.
The screen went cubist for a moment, and then Ranthar Jard's swarthy,
wide-jawed face looked out of it again. He took his pipe from his
mouth.
"We'll probably get a positive out of the batch you just saw coming
in," he said. "We get one out of about every two drops."
"Message a list of the time-line designations you've gotten so far to
Zulthran Torv, at Computer Office here," Vall said. "He's working on
the Esaron Sector dope; we think a pattern can be established. I'll be
seeing you in about five hours; I'm rocketing out of here as soon as I
get a few more things cleared up here."
Zulthran Torv, normally cautious to the degree of pessimism, was
jubilant when Vall called him.
"We have something, Vall," he said. "It is, roughly, what Dr. Nentrov
suggested--each of the intervals between the designations is a very
minute but very exact fraction of the difference between lesser
designation and the base-line designation."
"You have the base-line designation?" Vall demanded.
"Oh, yes. That's what I was telling you. We worked that out from the
designations you gave me." He recited it. "All the designations you
gave me are--"
Vall wasn't listening to him. He frowned in puzzlement.
"That's not a Fifth Level designation," he said. "That's First Level!"
"That's correct. First Level Abzar Sector."
"Now why in blazes didn't anybody think of that before?" he marveled,
and as he did, he knew the answer. Nobody ever thought of the Abzar
sector.
[Illustration:]
Twelve millennia ago, the world of the First Level had been
exhausted; having used up the resources of their home planet, Mars, a
hundred thousand years before, the descendants of the population that
had migrated across space had repeated on the third planet the
devastation of the fourth. The ancestors of Verkan Vall's people had
discovered the principle of paratime transposition and had begun to
exploit an infinity of worlds on other lines of probability. The
people of the First Level Dwarma Sector, reduced by sheer starvation
to a tiny handful, had abandoned their cities and renounced their
technologies and created for themselves a farm-and-village culture
without progress or change or curiosity or struggle or ambition, and a
way of life in which every day was like every other day that had been
or that would come.
The Abzar people had done neither. They had wasted their resources to
the last, fighting bitterly over the ultimate crumbs, with fission
bombs, and with muskets, and with swords, and with spears and clubs,
and finally they had died out, leaving a planet of almost uniform
desert dotted with vast empty cities which even twelve thousand years
had hardly begun to obliterate.
So nobody on the Paratime Sector went to the Abzar Sector. There was
nothing there--except a hiding-place.
"Well, message that to Subchief Ranthar Jard, Kholghoor Sector at
Nharkan Equivalent, and to Subchief Vulthor, Esaron Sector, Novilan
Equivalent," Vall said. "And be sure to mark what you send Vulthor,
'Immediate attention Deputy Subchief Skordran.'"
That reminded him of something; as soon as he was through with
Zulthran, he got out an order in the name of Tortha Karf authorizing
Skordran Kirv's promotion on a permanent basis and messaged it out.
Something was going to have to be done with Vulthor Tharn, too. A
promotion of course--say Deputy Bureau Chief. Hypno-Mech Tape Library
at Dhergabar Home Time Line; there Vulthor's passion for procedure and
his caution would be assets instead of liabilities. He called Vlasthor
Arph, the Chief's Deputy assigned to him as adjutant.
"I want more troops from ServSec and IndSec," he said. "Go over the
TO's and see what can be spared from where; don't strip any time line,
but get a force of the order of about three divisions. And locate all
the big antigrav-equipped ship transposition docks on Commercial and
Passenger Sectors, and a list of freighters and passenger ships that
can be commandeered in a hurry. We think we've spotted the time line
the Organization's using as a base. As soon as we raid a couple of
places near Nharkan and Novilan Equivalents, we're going to move in
for a planet-wide cleanup."
"I get it, Chief's Assistant. I do everything I can to get ready for a
big move, without letting anything leak out. After you strike the
first blow, there won't be any security problem, and the lid will be
off. In the meantime, I make up a general plan, and alert all our own
people. Right?"
"Right. And for your information, the base isn't Fifth Level; it's
First Level Abzar." He gave the designation.
Vlasthor Arph chuckled. "Well, think of that! I'd even forgotten there
was an Abzar Sector. Shall I tell the reporters that?"
"Fangs of Fasif, no!" Vall fairly howled. Then, curiously: "What
reporters? How'd they get onto PolTerm?"
"About fifty or sixty news-service people Chief Tortha sent down here,
this morning, with orders to prevent them from filing any stories from
here but to let them cover the raids, when they come off. We were
instructed to furnish them weapons and audio-visual equipment and
vocowriters and anything else they needed, and--"
Vall grinned. "That was one I'd never thought of," he admitted. "The
old fox is still the old fox. No, tell them nothing; we'll just take
them along and show them. Oh, and where are Dr. Hadron Dalla and that
girl of Salgath Trod's?"
"They're sleeping, now. Rest Room Eighteen."
* * * * *
Dalla and Zinganna were asleep on a big mound of silk cushions in one
corner, their glossy black heads close together and Zinganna's brown
arm around Dalla's white shoulder. Their faces were calmly beautiful
in repose, and they smiled slightly, as though they were wandering
through a happy dream. For a little while, Vall stood looking at them,
then he began whistling softly. On the third or fourth bar, Dalla
woke and sat up, waking Zinganna, and blinked at him perplexedly.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"About 1245," he told her.
"Ohhh! We just got to sleep," she said. "We're both bushed!"
"You had a hard time. Feel all right after your narco-hyp, Zinganna?"
"It wasn't so bad, and I had a nice sleep. And Dalla ... Dr. Hadron, I
mean--"
"Dalla," Vall's wife corrected. "Remember what I told you?"
"Dalla, then," Zinganna smiled. "Dalla gave me some hypno-treatment,
too. I don't feel so badly about Trod, any more."
"Well, look, Zinganna. We're going to have a man impersonate
Councilman Salgath on a telecast. The cosmeticians are making him over
now. Would you find it too painful to meet him, and talk to him?"
"No, I wouldn't mind. I can criticize the impersonation; remember, I
knew Trod very well. You know, I was his hostess, too. I met many of
the people with whom he was associated, and they know me. Would things
look more convincing if I appeared on the telecast with your man?"
"It certainly would; it would be a great help!" he told her
enthusiastically. "Maybe you girls ought to get up, now. The telecast
isn't till 1930, but there's a lot to be done getting ready."
Dalla yawned. "What I get, trying to be a cop," she said, then caught
the other girl's hands and rose, pulling her up. "Come on, Zinna; we
have to get to work!"
* * * * *
Vall rose from behind the reading-screen in Ranthar Jard's office,
stretching his arms over his head. For almost an hour, he had sat there
pushing buttons and twiddling selector and magnification-adjustment
knobs, looking at the pictures the Kholghoor-Nharkan cops had taken with
auto-return balls dropped over the spatial equivalent of Sohram. One set
of pictures, taken at two thousand feet, showed the central square of
the city. The effects of the Croutha sack were plainly visible; so were
the captives herded together under guard like cattle. By increasing
magnification, he looked at groups of the barbarian conquerors, big men
with blond or reddish-brown hair, in loose shirts and baggy trousers and
rough cowhide buskins. Many of them wore bowl-shaped helmets, some had
shirts of ring-mail, all of them carried long straight swords with
cross-hilts, and about half of them had pistols thrust through their
belts or muskets slung from their shoulders.
The other set of pictures showed the Wizard Trader camps and conveyer
heads. In each case, a wide oval had been burned out in the jungle,
probably with heavy-duty heat guns. The camps were surrounded with
stout wire-mesh fence: in each there were a number of metal
prefab-huts, and an inner fenced slave-pen. A trail had been cut from
each to a similarly cleared circle farther back in the forest, and in
the centers of one or two of these circles he saw the actual conveyer
domes. There was a great deal of activity in all of them, and he
screwed the magnification-adjustment to the limit to scrutinize each
human figure in turn. A few of the men, he was sure, were First Level
Citizens; more were either Proles or outtimers. Quite a few of them
were of a dark, heavy-featured, black-bearded type.
"Some of these fellows look like Second Level Khiftans," he said.
"Rush an individual picture of each one, maximum magnification
consistent with clarity, to Dhergabar Equivalent to be transposed to
Home Time Line. You get all the dope from Zulthran Torv?"
"Yes; Abzar Sector," Ranthar Jard said. "I'd never have thought of
that. Wonder why they used that series system, though. I'd have tried
to spot my operations as completely at random as possible."
"Only thing they could have done," Vall said. "When we get hold of one
of their conveyers, we're going to find the control panel's just a
mess of arbitrary symbols, and there'll be something like a
computer-machine built into the control cabinet, to select the right
time line whenever a dial's set or a button pushed, and the only way
that could be done would be by establishing some kind of a numerical
series. And we were trustingly expecting to locate their base from one
of their conveyers! Why, if we give all those people in the pictures
narco-hyps, we won't learn the base-line designation; none of them
will know it. They just go where the conveyers take them."
"Well, we're all set now," Ranthar Jard said. "I have a plan of attack
worked out; subject to your approval, I'm ready to start implementing
it now." He glanced at his watch. "The Salgath telecast is over, on
Home Time Line, and in a little while, a transcript will be on this
time line. Want to watch it here, sir?"
* * * * *
The telecast screen in the living room of Tortha Karf's town apartment
was still on; in it, a girl with bright red hair danced slowly to soft
music against a background of shifting color. The four men who sat in
a semicircle facing it sipped their drinks and watched idly.
"Ought to be getting some sort of public reaction soon," Tortha Karf
said, glancing at his watch.
"Well, I'll have to admit, it was done convincingly," Zostha Olv, the
Chief Interoffice Coördinator, admitted grudgingly. "I'd have believed
it, if I hadn't known the real facts."
"Shooting it against the background of those wide windows was smart,"
Lovranth Rolk said. "Every schoolchild would recognize that view of
the rocketport as being on Police Terminal. And including that girl
Zinganna; that was a real masterpiece!"
"I've met her, a few times," Elbraz Vark, the Political Liaison
Assistant, said. "Isn't she lovely!"
"Good actress, too," Tortha Karf said. "It's not easy to impersonate
yourself."
"Well, Kostran Galth did a fine job of acting, too," Lovranth Rolk
said. "That was done to perfection--the distinguished politician,
supported by his loyal mistress, bravely facing the disgraceful end of
his public career."
"You know, I believe I could get that girl a booking with one of the
big theatrical companies. Now that Salgath's dead, she'll need
somebody to look after her."
"What sharp, furry ears you have, Mr. Elbraz!" Zostha Olv grunted.
The music stopped as though cut off with a knife, and the slim girl
with the red hair vanished in a shatter of many colors. When the
screen cleared, one of the announcers was looking out of it.
"We interrupt the program for an important newscast of a sensational
development in the Salgath affair," he said. "Your next speaker will
be Yandar Yadd--"
"I thought you'd managed to get that blabbermouth transposed to
PolTerm," Zostha said.
"He wouldn't go." Tortha Karf replied. "Said it was just a trick to
get him off Home Time Line during the Council crisis."
Yandar Yadd had appeared on the screen as the pickup swung about.
"... Recording ostensibly made by Councilman Salgath on Police
Terminal Time Line, and telecast on Home Time Line an hour ago. Well,
I don't know who he was, but I now have positive proof that he
definitely was not Salgath Trod!"
"We're sunk!" Zostha Olv grunted. "He'd never make a statement like
that unless he could prove it."
"... Something suspicious about the whole thing, from the beginning,"
the newsman was saying. "So I checked. If you recall, the actor
impersonating Salgath gestured rather freely with his hands, in
imitation of a well-known mannerism of the real Salgath Trod; at one
point, the ball of his right thumb was presented directly to the
pickup. Here's a still of that scene."
He stepped aside, revealing a viewscreen behind him; when he pressed a
button, the screen lighted; on it was a stationary picture of Kostran
Galth as Salgath Trod, his right hand raised in front of him.
"Now watch this. I'm going to step up the magnification, slowly, so
that you can be sure there's no substitution. Camera a little closer,
Trath!"
The screen in the background seemed to advance, until it filled the
entire screen. Yandar Yadd was still talking, out of the picture; a
metal-tipped pointer came into the picture, touching the right thumb,
which grew larger and larger until it was the only thing visible.
"Now here," Yandar Yadd's voice continued. "Any of you who are
familiar with the ancient science of dactyloscopy will recognize this
thumb as having the ridge-pattern known as a 'twin loop.' Even with
the high degree of magnification possible with the microgrid screen,
we can't bring out the individual ridges, but the pattern is
unmistakable. I ask you to memorize that image, while I show you
another right thumb print, this time a certified photo-copy of the
thumb print of the real Salgath Trod." The magnification was reduced a
little, a card was moved into the picture, and it was stepped up
again. "See, this thumb print is of the type known as a 'tented arch.'
Observe the difference."
"That does it!" Zostha Olv cried. "Karf, for the first and last time,
let me remind you that I opposed this lunacy from the beginning. Now,
what are we going to do next?"
"I suggest that we get to Headquarters as soon as we can," Tortha Karf
said. "If we wait too long, we may not be able to get in."
Yandar Yadd was back on the screen, denouncing Tortha Karf
passionately. Tortha went over and snapped it off.
"I suggest we transpose to PolTerm," Lovranth Rolk said. "It won't be
so easy for them to serve a summons on us there."
"You can go to PolTerm if you want to," Tortha Karf retorted. "I'm
going to stay here and fight back, and if they try to serve me with a
summons, they'd better send a robot for a process server."
"Fight back!" Zostha Olv echoed. "You can't fight the Council and the
whole Management! They'll tear you into inch bits!"
"I can hold them off till Vall's able to raid those Abzar Sector
bases," Tortha Karf said. He thought for a moment. "Maybe this is all
for the best, after all. If it distracts the Organization's
attention--"
* * * * *
"I wish we could have made a boomerang-ball reconnaissance," Ranthar
Jard was saying, watching one of the viewscreens, in which a film,
taken from an airboat transposed to an adjoining Abzar sector time
line, was being shown. The boat had circled over the Ganges, a mere
trickle between wide, deeply cut banks, and was crossing a gullied
plain, sparsely grown with thornbush. "The base ought to be about
there, but we have no idea what sort of changes this gang has made."
"Well, we couldn't: we didn't dare take the chance of it being
spotted. This has to be a complete surprise. It'll be about like the
other place, the one the slaves described. There won't be any
permanent buildings. This operation only started a few months ago,
with the Croutha invasion; it may go on for four or five months, till
the Croutha have all their surplus captives sold off. That country,"
he added, gesturing at the screen, "will be flooded out when the rains
come. See how it's suffered from flood-erosion. There won't be a thing
there that can't be knocked down and transposed out in a day or so."
"I wish you'd let me go along," Ranthar Jard worried.
"We can't do that, either," Vall said. "Somebody's got to be in charge
here, and you know your own people better than I do. Beside, this
won't be the last operation like this. Next time, I'll have to stay on
Police Terminal and command from a desk; I want first-hand experience
with the outtime end of the job, and this is the only way I can get
it."
He watched the four police-girls who were working at the big terrain
board showing the area of the Police Terminal time line around them.
They had covered the miniature buildings and platforms and towers with
a fine mesh, at a scale-equivalent of fifty feet; each intersection
marked the location of a three-foot conveyer ball, loaded with a
sleep-gas bomb and rigged with an automatic detonator which would
explode it and release the gas as soon as it rematerialized on the
Abzar Sector. Higher, on stiff wires that raised them to what
represented three thousand feet, were the disks that stood for ten
hundred-foot conveyers; they would carry squads of Paratime Police in
aircars and thirty-foot air boats. There was a ring of big
two-hundred-foot conveyers a mile out; they would carry the armor and
the airborne infantry and the little two-man scooters of the
air-cavalry, from the Service and Industrial Sectors. Directly over
the spatial equivalent of the Kholghoor Sector Wizard Traders'
conveyers was the single disk of Verkan Vall's command conveyer, at a
represented five thousand feet, and in a half-mile circle around it
were the five news service conveyers.
"Where's the ship-conveyer?" he asked.
"Actually it's on antigrav about five miles north of here," one of the
girls said. "Representationally, about where Subchief Ranthar's
standing."
Another girl added a few more bits to the network that represented the
sleep-gas bombs and stepped back, taking off her earphones.
"Everything's in place, now, Assistant Verkan," she told him.
"Good. I'm going aboard, now," he said. "You can have it, Jard."
He shook hands with Ranthar Jard, who moved to the switch which would
activate all the conveyers simultaneously, and accepted the good
wishes of the girls at the terrain board. Then he walked to the
mesh-covered dome of the hundred-foot conveyer, with the five news
service conveyers surrounding it in as regular a circle as the
buildings and towers of the regular conveyer heads would permit. The
members of his own detail, smoking and chatting outside, saw him and
started moving inside; so did the news people. A public-address
speaker began yelping, in a hundred voices all over the area, warning
those who were going with the conveyers to get aboard. He went in
through a door, between two aircars, and on to the central
control-desks, going up to a visiscreen over which somebody had
crayoned "Novilan EQ." It gave him a view, over the shoulder of a man
in the uniform of a field agent third class, of the interior of a
conveyer like his own.
* * * * *
"Hello, Assistant Verkan," a voice came out of the speaker under the
screen, as the man moved his lips. "Deputy Skordran! Here's Chief's
Assistant Verkan, now!"
Skordran Kirv moved in front of the screen as the operator got up from
his stool.
"Hello, Vall; we're all set to move out as soon as you give the word,"
he said. "We're all in position on antigrav."
"That's smart work. We've just finished our gas-bomb net," Vall said.
"Going on antigrav now," he added, as he felt the dome lift. "I hope
you won't be too disappointed if you draw a blank on your end."