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  She wiggled a hand at him in greeting. “How did it go?” she asked.

  “So-so. I organized myself a sort of miniature police force within a police force and I have liaison officers in every organization down to Sector Regional so that I can be informed promptly in case anything new turns up anywhere. What’s been happening on Home Time Line? I picked up a news-summary at Paratime Police Headquarters; it seems that a lot more stuff has leaked out. Kholghoor Sector, Wizard Traders and all. How’d it happen?”

  Dalla rolled over to allow Rendarra to rub the blue-green grease on her back. “Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs let a gang of reporters in today. I think they’re afraid somebody will accuse them of complicity, and they want to get their side of it out before the public. All our crowd are off that time-line except a couple of detectives at the plantation.”

  “I know.” He smiled; Dalla was thinking of the Paratime Police as “our crowd” now. “How about this dinner at Dras’ place?”

  “Oh, that was easy.” She shifted position again. “I just called Dras up and told him that our vacation was off, and he invited us before I could begin hinting. What are you going to wear?”

  “Short-jacket greens; I can carry a needler with that uniform, even wear it at the table. I don’t think it’s smart for me to run around unarmed, even on Home Time Line. Especially on Home Time Line,” he amended. “When’s this affair going to start, and how long will Rendarra take to get that goo off you?”

  III

  Salgath Trod left his aircar at the top landing stage of his apartment building and sent it away to the hangars under robot control; he glanced about him as he went toward the antigrav shaft. There were a dozen vehicles in the air above; any of them might have followed him from the Paratime Building. He had no doubt that he had been under constant surveillance from the moment the nameless messenger had delivered the Organization’s ultimatum. Until he delivered that speech the next morning, or manifested an intention of refusing to do so, however, he would be safe. After that—

  Alone in his office, he had reviewed the situation point by point, and then gone back and reviewed it again; the conclusion was inescapable. The Organization had ordered him to make an accusation which he himself knew to be false; that was the first premise. The conclusion was that he would be killed as soon as he had made it. That was the trouble with being mixed up with those kind of people—you were expendable, and sooner or later, they would decide that they would have to expend you. And what could you do?

  To begin with, an accusation of criminal malfeasance made against a Management or Paratime Commission agency on the floor of Executive Council was tantamount to an accusation made in court; automatically, the accuser became a criminal prosecutor, and would have to repeat his accusation under narco-hypnosis. Then the whole story would come out, bit by bit, back to its beginning in that first illegal deal in Indo-Turanian opium, diverted from trade with the Khiftan Sector and sold on Second Level Luvarian Empire Sector, and the deals in radioactive poisons, and the slave trade. He would be able to name few names—the Organization kept its activities too well compartmentalized for that—but he could talk of things that had happened, and when, and where, and on what paratemporal areas.

  No. The Organization wouldn’t let that happen, and the only way it could be prevented would be by the death of Salgath Trod as soon as he had made his speech. All the talk of providing him with corroborative evidence was silly; it had been intended to lead him more trustingly to the slaughter. They’d kill him, of course, in some way that would be calculated to substantiate the story he would no longer be able to repudiate. The killer, who would be promptly rayed dead by somebody else, would wear a Paratime Police uniform or something like that. That was of no importance, however; by then, he’d be beyond caring.

  One of his three ServSec Prole servants—the slim brown girl who was his housekeeper and hostess, and also his mistress—admitted him to the apartment. He kissed her perfunctorily and closed the door behind him.

  “You’re tired,” she said. “Let me call Nindrandigro and have him bring you chilled wine; lie down and rest until dinner.”

  “No, no; I want brandy.” He went to a cellaret and got out a decanter and goblet, pouring himself a drink. “How soon will dinner be ready?”

  The brown girl squeezed a little golden globe that hung on a chain around her neck; a tiny voice, inside it, repeated: “Eighteen twenty-three ten, eighteen twentythree eleven, eighteen twenty-three twelve—”

  “In half an hour. It’s still in the robo-chef,” she told him.

  He downed half the goblet-full, set it down, and went to a painting, a brutal scarlet and apple-green abstraction, that hung on the wall. Swinging it aside and revealing the safe behind it, he used his identity-sigil, took out a wad of Paratemporal Exchange Bank notes and gave them to the girl.

  “Here, Zinganna; take these, and take Nindrandigro and Calilla out for the evening. Go where you can all have a good time, and don’t come back till after midnight. There will be some business transacted here and I want them out of this. Get them out of here as soon as you can; I’ll see to the dinner myself. Spend all of that you want to.”

  The girl riffled through the wad of banknotes. “Why, thank you, Trod!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him enthusiastically. “I’ll go tell them at once.”

  “And have a good time, Zinganna; have the best time you possibly can,” he told her, embracing and kissing her. “Now, get out of here; I have to keep my mind on business.”

  When she had gone, he finished his drink and poured another. He drew and checked his needler. Then, after checking the window-shielding and activating the outside viewscreens, he lit a cheroot and sat down at the desk, his goblet and his needler in front of him, to wait until the servants were gone.

  There was only one way out alive. He knew that, and yet he needed brandy, and a great deal of mental effort to steel himself for it. Psycho-rehabilitation was a dreadful thing to face. There would be almost a year of unremitting agony, physical and mental, worse than a Khiftan torture rack. There would be the shame of having his innermost secrets poured out of him by the psychotherapists, and, at the end, there would emerge someone who would not be Salgath Trod, or anybody like Salgath Trod, and he would have to learn to know this stranger and build a new life for him.

  In one of the viewscreens, he saw the door to the service hallway open. Zinganna, in a black evening gown and a black velvet cloak, and Calilla, the housemaid, in what she believed to be a reasonable facsimile of fashionable First Level dress, and Nindrandigro, in one of his master’s evening suits, emerged. Salgath Trod waited until they had gone down the hall to the antigrav shaft, and then he turned on the visiphone, checked the security, set it for sealed beam communication, and punched out a combination.

  A girl in a green tunic looked out of the screen. “Paratime Police,” she said. “Office of Chief Tortha.”

  “I am Executive Councilman Salgath Trod,” he told her. “I am, and for the past fifteen years have been, criminally involved with the organization responsible for the slave trade which recently came to light on Third Level Esaron. I give myself up unconditionally; I am willing to make full confession under narco-hypnosis, and will accept whatever disposition of my case is lawfully judged fit. You’ll have to send an escort for me; I might start from my apartment alone, but I’d be killed before I got to your headquarters—”

  The girl, who had begun to listen in the bored manner of public servant phone girls, was staring wide-eyed. “Just a moment, Councilman Salgath; I’ll put you through to Chief Tortha.”

  I

  The dinner lacked a half hour of being served; Thalvan Dras’ guests loitered about the drawing room, sampling appetizers and chilled drinks and chatting in groups. It wasn’t the artistic crowd usually at Thalvan Dras’ dinners; most of the guests seemed to be business or political people. Thalvan Dras had gotten Vall and Dalla into the small group around him, along with pudgy, infan
tile-faced Brogoth Zaln, his confidential secretary, and Javrath Brend, his financial attorney.

  “I don’t see why they’re making such a fuss about it,” one of the Banking Cartel people was saying. “Causing a lot of public excitement all out of proportion to the importance of the affair. After all, those people were slaves on their own timeline, and if anything, they’re much better off on the Esaron Sector than they would be as captives of the Croutha. As far as that goes, what’s the difference between that and the way we drag these Fourth Level Primitive Sector-Complex people off to Fifth Level Service Sector to work for us?”

  “Oh, there’s a big difference, Farn,” Javrath Brend said. “We recruit those Fourth Level Primitives out of probability worlds of Stone Age savagery and transpose them to our own Fifth Level time-lines, practically outtime extensions of the Home Time Line. There’s absolutely no question of the Paratime Secret being compromised.”

  “Besides, we need a certain amount of human labor for tasks requiring original thought and decisions that are beyond the ability of robots, and most of it is work our Citizens simply wouldn’t perform,” Thalvan Dras added.

  “Well, from a moral standpoint, wouldn’t these Esaron Sector people who buy the slaves justify slavery in the same terms?” a woman whom Vall had identified as a Left Moderate Council Member asked.

  “There’s still a big difference,” Dalla told her. “The ServSec Proles aren’t beaten or tortured or chained; we don’t breakup families or separate friends. When we recruit Fourth Level Primitives, we take whole tribes, and they come willingly. And—”

  One of Thalvan Dras’ black-liveried human servants, of the class under discussion, approached Vall. “A visiphone call for your lordship,” he whispered. “Chief Tortha Karf calling. If your lordship will come this way—”

  In a screen-booth outside, Vall found Tortha Karf looking out of the screen; he was seated at his desk, fiddling with a gold multicolor pen. “Oh, Vall; something interesting has just come up.” He spoke in a voice of forced calmness. “I can’t go into it now, but you’ll want to hear about it. I’m sending a car for you. Better bring Dalla along; she’ll want in on it, too.”

  “Right; we’ll be on the top south-west landing stage in a few minutes.”

  Dalla was still heatedly repudiating any resemblance between the normal First Level methods of labor-recruitment and the activities of the Wizard Traders; she had just finished the story of the woman whose child had been brained when Vall rejoined the group.

  “Dras, I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “This is the second time in succession that Dalla and I have had to bolt away from here, but policemen are like doctors—always on call, and consequently unreliable guests. While you’re feasting, think commiseratingly of Dalla and me; we’ll probably be having a sandwich and a cup of coffee somewhere.”

  “I’m terribly sorry.” Thalvan Dras replied. “We had all been looking forward— Well! Brogoth, have a car called for Vall and Dalla.”

  “Police car coming for us; it’s probably on the landing stage now,” Vall said. “Well, good-bye, everybody. Coming, Dalla?”

  II

  They had a few minutes to wait, under the marquee, before the green police aircar landed and came rolling across the rain-wet surface of the landing stage. Crossing to it and opening the rear door, he put Dalla in and climbed in after her, slamming the door. It was only then that he saw Tortha Karf hunched down in the rear seat. He motioned them to silence, and did not speak until the car was rising above the building.

  “I wanted to fill you in on this, as soon as possible,” he said. “Your hunch about Salgath Trod was good; just a few minutes before I called you, he called me. He says this slave trade is the work of something he calls the Organization; says he’s been taking orders from them for years. His attack on the Management and motion for a censure-vote were dictated from Organization top echelon. Now he’s convinced that they’re going to force him to make false accusations against the Paratime Police and then kill him before he’s compelled to repeat his charges under narco-hypnosis. So he’s offered to surrender and trade information for protection.”

  “How much does he know?” Vall asked.

  Tortha Karf shook his head. “Not as much as he claims to, I suppose; he wouldn’t want to reduce his own trade-in value. But he’s been involved in this thing for the last fifteen years, and with his political prominence, he’d know quite a lot.”

  “We can protect him from his own gang; can we protect him from psycho-rehabilitation?”

  “No, and he knows it. He’s willing to accept that. He seems to think that death at the hands of his own associates is the only other alternative. Probably right, too.”

  The floodlighted green towers of the Paratime Building were wheeling under them as they circled down.

  “Why would they sacrifice a valuable accomplice like Salgath Trod, in order to make a transparently false accusation against us?” Vall wondered.

  “Ha, that’s our new rookie cop’s idea!” Tortha Karf chuckled, nodding toward Dalla. “We got Zortan Harn to introduce an urgent-business motion to appoint a committee to investigate BuPsychHyg this morning. The motion passed, and this is the reaction to it. The Organization’s scared. Just as Dalla predicted, they don’t want us finding out how people with potentially criminal characteristics missed being spotted by psychotesting. Salgath Trod is being sacrificed to block or delay that.”

  Vall nodded as the wheels bumped on the landing stage and the antigrav field went off. That was the sort of thing that happened when you started on a really fruitful line of investigation. They got out and hurried over under the marquee, the car lifting and moving off toward the hangars. This was the real break; no matter how this Organization might be compartmented, a man like Salgath Trod would know a great deal. He would name names, and the bearers of those names, arrested and narco-hypnotized, would name other names, in a perfect chain reaction of confessions and betrayals.

  Another police car had landed just ahead of them, and three men were climbing out; two were in Paratime Police green, and the third, hand-cuffed, was in Service Sector Proletarian garb. At first, Vall though that Salgath Trod had been brought in disguised as a Prole prisoner, and then he saw that the prisoner was short and stocky, not at all like the slender and elegant politician. The two officers who had brought him in were talking to a lieutenant, Sothran Barth, outside the antigrav shaft kiosk. As Vall and Tortha Karf and Dalla walked over, the car which had brought them lifted out.

  “Something that just came in from Industrial Twenty-four, Chief,” Lieutenant Sothran said in answer to Tortha Karf ’s unasked question. “May be for Assistant Verkan’s desk.”

  “He’s a Prole named Yandragno, sir,” one of the policemen said. “Industrial Sector Constabulary grabbed him peddling Martian hellweed cigarettes to the girls in a textile mill at Kangabar Equivalent. Captain Jamzar thinks he may have gotten them from somebody in the Organization.”

  A little warning bell began ringing in the back of Verkan Vall’s mind, but at first he could not consciously identify the cause of his suspicions. He looked the two policemen and their prisoner over carefully, but could see nothing visibly wrong with them. Then another car came in for a landing and rolled over under the marquee; the door opened, and a police officer got out, followed by an elegantly dressed civilian whom he recognized at once as Salgath Trod. A second policeman was emerging from the car when Vall suddenly realized what it was that had disturbed him.

  It had been Salgath Trod, himself, less than half an hour ago, who had introduced the term, “the Organization,” to the Paratime Police. At that time, if these people were what they claimed to be, they would have been in transposition from Industrial Twenty-four on the Fifth Level. Immediately, he reached for his needler. He was clearing it out of the holster when things began happening.

  The handcuffs fell from the “prisoner’s” wrists; he jerked a neutron-disruption blaster from under his jacket. Vall, his needler alrea
dy drawn, rayed the fellow dead before he could aim it, then saw that the two pseudo-policemen had drawn their needlers and were aiming in the direction of Salgath Trod. There were no flashes or reports; only the spot of light that had winked on and off under Vall’s rear sight had told him that his weapon had been activated. He saw it appear again as the sights centered on one of the “policemen.” Then he saw the other imposter’s needler aimed at himself.

  That was the last thing he expected ever to see in that life; he tried to shift his own weapon, and time seemed frozen, with his arm barely moving. Then there was a white blur as Dalla’s cloak moved in front of him, and the needler dropped from the fingers of the disguised murderer. Time went back to normal for him; he safetied his own weapon and dropped it, jumping forward.

  He grabbed the fellow in the green uniform by the nose with his left hand, and punched him hard in the pit of the stomach with his right fist. The man’s mouth flew open, and a green capsule, the size and shape of a small bean, flew out. Pushing Dalla aside before she would step on it, he kicked the murderer in the stomach, doubling him over, and chopped him on the base of the skull with the edge of his hand. The pseudo-policeman dropped senseless.

  With a handful of handkerchief-tissue from his pocket, he picked up the disgorged capsule, wrapping it carefully after making sure that it was unbroken. Then he looked around. The other two assassins were dead. Tortha Karf, who had been looking at the man in Proletarian dress whom Vall had killed first, turned, looked in another direction, and then cursed. Vall followed his eyes and cursed also. One of the two policemen who had gotten out of the aircar was dead, too, and so was the all-important witness, Salgath Trod—as dead as Nebu-hin-Abenoz, a hundred thousand parayears away.

  The whole thing had ended within thirty seconds; for about half as long, everybody waited, poised in a sort of action-vacuum, for something else to happen. Dalla had dropped the shoulder-bag with which she had clubbed the prisoner’s needler out of his hand, and caught the fallen weapon. When she saw that the man was down and motionless, she laid it aside and began picking up the glittering or silken trifles that had spilled from the burst bag. Vall retrieved his own weapon, glanced over it, and holstered it. Sothran Barth, the lieutenant in charge of the landing stage, was bawling orders, and men were coming out of the ready-room and piling into vehicles to pursue the aircar which had brought the assassins.