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  One of Thalvan Dras’ human servants came into the room, coughed apologetically, and said: “A visiphone-call for His Valor, the Mavrad of Nerros.”

  Vall went on nibbling his ham with wine sauce; the servant repeated the announcement a trifle more loudly.

  “Vall, you’re being paged!” Thalvan Dras told him, with a touch of impatience.

  Verkan Vall looked blank for an instant, then grinned. It had been so long since he had even bothered to think about that antiquated title of nobility—

  “Vall’s probably forgotten that he has a title,” a girl across the table, wearing an almost transparent gown and nothing else, laughed.

  “That’s something the Mavrad of Mnirna and Thalvabar never forgets,” Jandar Jard drawled, with what, in a woman, would have been cattishness. Thalvan Dras gave him a hastily repressed look of venomous anger, then said something, more to Verkan Vall than to Jandar Jard, about titles of nobility being the marks of social position and responsibility which their bearers should never forget.

  That jab, Vall thought, following the servant out of the room, had been a mistake on Jard’s part. A music-drama, for which he had designed the settings, was due to open here in Dhergabar in another ten days. Thalvan Dras would cherish spite, and a word from the Mavrad of Mnirna and Thalvabar would set a dozen critics to disparaging Jandar’s work. On the other hand, maybe it had been smart of Jandar Jard to antagonize Thalvan Dras; for every critic who bowed slavishly to the wealthy nobleman, there were at least two more who detested him unutterably, and they would rush to Jandar Jard’s defense, and in the ensuing uproar, the settings would get more publicity than the drama itself.

  II

  In the visiphone booth, Vall found a girl in a green blouse, with the Paratime Police insignia on her shoulder, looking out of the screen. The wall behind her was pale green striped in gold and black.

  “Hello, Eldra,” he greeted her.

  “Hello, Chief ’s Assistant: I’m sorry to bother you, but the Chief wants to talk to you. Just a moment, please.”

  The screen exploded into a kaleidoscopic flash of lights and colors, then cleared again. This time, a man looked out of it. He was well into middle age, close to his three hundredth year. His hair, a uniform iron-gray, was beginning to thin in front, and he was acquiring the beginnings of a double chin. His name was Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, and Verkan Vall’s superior.

  “Hello, Vall. Glad I was able to locate you. When are you and Dalla leaving?”

  “As soon as we can get away from this luncheon, here. Oh, say an hour. We’re taking a rocket to Zarabar, and transposing from there to Passenger Terminal Sixteen, and from there to the Dwarma Sector.”

  “Well, Vall, I hate to bother you like this,” Tortha Karf said, “but I wish you’d stop by Headquarters on your way to the rocketport. Something’s come up—it may be a very nasty business—and I’d like to talk to you about it.”

  “Well, Chief, let me remind you that this vacation, which I’ve had to postpone four times already, has been overdue for four years,” Vall said.

  “Yes, Vall, I know. You’ve been working very hard, and you and Dalla are entitled to a little time together. I just want you to look into something, before you leave.”

  “It’ll have to take some fast looking. Our rocket blasts off in two hours.”

  “It may take a little longer; if it does, you and Dalla can transpose to Police Terminal and take a rocket for Zarabar Equivalent, and transpose from there to Passenger Sixteen. It would save time if you brought Dalla with you to Headquarters.”

  “Dalla won’t like this,” Vall understated.

  “No. I’m afraid not.” Tortha Karf looked around apprehensively, as though estimating the damage an enraged Hadron Dalla could do to his office furnishings. “Well, try to get here as soon as you can.”

  Thalvan Dras was holding forth, when Vall returned, on one of his favorite preoccupations. “... Reason I’m taking such an especially active interest in this year’s Arts Exhibitions; I’ve become disturbed at the extent to which so many of our artists have been content to derive their motifs, even their techniques, from outtime art.” He was using his vocowriter, rather than his conversational, voice. “I yield to no one in my appreciation of outtime art—you all know how devotedly I collect objects of art from all over paratime—but our own artists should endeavor to express their artistic values in our own artistic idioms.”

  Vall bent over his wife’s shoulder.

  “We have to leave, right away,” he whispered.

  “But our rocket doesn’t blast off for two hours—”

  Thalvan Dras had stopped talking and was looking at them in annoyance.

  “I have to go to Headquarters before we leave. It’ll save time if you come along.”

  “Oh, no, Vall!” She looked at him in consternation. “Was that Tortha Karf calling?” She replaced her plate on the table and got to her feet.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry, Dras,” he addressed their host. “I just had a call from Tortha Karf. A few minor details that must be cleared up, before I leave Home Time Line. If you’ll accept our thanks for a wonderful luncheon—”

  “Why, certainly, Vall. Brogoth, will you call—” He gave a slight chuckle. “I’m so used to having Brogoth Zaln at my elbow that I’d forgotten he wasn’t here. Wait. I’ll call one of the servants to have a car for you.”

  “Don’t bother; we’ll take an air-cab,” Vall told him.

  “But you simply can’t take a public cab!” The black-bearded nobleman was shocked at such an obscene idea. “I will have a car ready for you in a few minutes.”

  “Sorry, Dras; we have to hurry. We’ll get a cab on the roof. Good-bye, everybody; sorry to have to break away like this. See you all when we get back.”

  III

  Hadron Dalla watched dejectedly as the green crags and escarpments of the Paratime Building loomed above the city in front of them, and began slipping under the air-cab. She felt like a prisoner recaptured at the moment when attempted escape was about to succeed.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I knew he’d find something. He’s trying to break things up between us, the way he did twenty years ago.”

  Vall crushed out his cigarette and said nothing. That hadn’t been true, and she knew it as well as he did. There had been many other factors involved in the disintegration of their previous marriage, most of them of her own contribution. But that had been twenty years ago, she told herself. This time it would be different, if only—

  “Really, Vall, he’s never liked me,” she went on. “He’s jealous of me, I think. You’re to be his successor when he retires, and he thinks I’m not a good influence—”

  “Oh, rubbish, Dalla! The Chief has always liked you,” Vall replied. “If he didn’t, do you think he’d always be inviting us to that farm of his on Fifth Level Sicily? It’s just that this job of ours has no end; something’s always turning up outtime.”

  The music that the cab had been playing died away. “Paratime Building, just below,” it said in a light feminine voice. “Which landing stage, please?”

  Vall leaned forward and punched at the buttons in front of him. Something in the cab’s electronic brain gave a rapid series of clicks as it shifted from the general Paratime Building beam to the beam of the Paratime Police landing stage, then it said, “Thank you.” The building below seemed to rotate upward toward them as it settled down. Then the antigrav-field snapped off, the cab door popped open, and the cab said: “Good-bye, now. Ride with me again sometime.”

  They crossed the landing stage, entered the antigrav shaft, and floated downward; at the end of a hallway below, Vall opened the door of Tortha Karf ’s office and ushered her through ahead of him. Tortha Karf, inside the semicircle of his desk, was speaking into a recording phone as they approached. He shut off the machine and waved, a cigarette in his hand.

  “Come on back and sit down,” he invited. “Be with you in a moment.” Then he switched on the p
hone again and went on talking—something about prompter evaluation and transmission of reports and less reliance on robot equipment. “Sign that up, my personal order, and see it’s transmitted to everybody down to and including Sector Regional Subchief level,” he finished, then hung up the phone and turned to them.

  “Sorry about this,” he said. “Sit down, if you please. Cigarette?”

  Dalla shook her head and sat down in one of the chairs behind the desk; she started to relax and then caught herself and sat erect, her hands on her lap.

  “This won’t interfere with your vacation, Vall,” Tortha Karf was saying. “I just need a little help before you transpose out.”

  “We have to catch the rocket for Zarabar in an hour and a half,” Dalla reminded him.

  “Don’t worry about that; if you miss the commercial rocket, our police rockets can give it an hour’s start and pass it before it gets to Zarabar,” Tortha Karf said. Then he turned to Vall.

  “Here’s what’s happened,” he said. “One of our field agents on detached duty as guard captain for Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs on a fruit plantation in western North America, Third Level Esaron Sector, was looking over a lot of slaves who had been sold to the plantation by a local slave dealer. He heard them talking among themselves—in Kharanda.”

  Dalla caught the significance of that before Vall did. At first, she was puzzled; then, in spite of herself, she was horrified and angry. Tortha Karf was explaining to Vall just where and on what paratemporal sector Kharanda was spoken.

  “No possibility that this agent, Skordran Kirv, could have been mistaken. He worked for a while on Kholghoor Sector himself; knew the language by hypnomech and by two years’ use,” Tortha Karf was saying. “So he ordered himself back on duty, had the slaves isolated and the slave dealers arrested, and then transposed to Police Terminal to report. The SecReg Subchief, old Vulthor Tharn, confirmed him in charge at this Esaron Sector plantation, and assigned him a couple of detectives and a psychist.”

  “When was this?” Vall asked.

  “Yesterday. One-Five-Nine Day. About 1500 local time.”

  “Twenty-three hundred Dhergabar time,” Vall commented.

  “Yes. And I just found out about it. Came in with the late morning generalized report-digest; very inconspicuous item, no special urgency symbol or anything. Fortunately, one of the report editors spotted it and messaged Police Terminal for a copy of the original report.”

  “It’s been a long time since we had anything like that,” Vall said, studying the glowing tip of his cigarette, his face wearing the curiously withdrawn expression of a conscious memory recall. “Fifty years ago; the time that gang kidnapped some girls from Second Level Triplanetary Empire Sector and sold them into the harem of some Fourth Level Indo-Turanian sultan.”

  “Yes. That was your first independent case, Vall. That was when I began to think you’d really make a cop. One renegade First Level citizen and four or five ServSec Prole hoodlums with a stolen fifty-foot conveyer. This looks like a rather more ambitious operation.”

  Dalla got one of her own cigarettes out and lit it. Vall and Tortha Karf were talking cop talk about method of operation and possible size of the gang involved, and why the slaves had been shipped all the way from India to the west coast of North America.

  “Always ready sale for slaves on the Esaron Sector,” Vall was saying. “And so many small independent states and different languages that outtimers wouldn’t be particularly conspicuous.”

  “And with this barbarian invasion going on the Kholghoor Sector, slaves could be picked up cheaply,” Tortha Karf added.

  In spite of her determination to boycott the conversation, curiosity began to get the better of her. She had spent a year and a half on the Kholghoor Sector, investigating alleged psychic powers of the local priests. There’d been nothing to it—the prophecies weren’t precognition, they were shrewd inferences, and the miracles weren’t psychokinesis, they were sleight-of-hand. She found herself asking: “What barbarian invasion’s this?”

  “Oh, Central Asian nomadic people, the Croutha,” Tortha Karf told her. “They came down through Khyber Pass about three months ago, turned east, and hit the headwaters of the Ganges. Without punching a lot of buttons to find out exactly, I’d say they’re halfway to the delta country by now. Leader seems to be a chieftain called Llamh Droogh the Red. A lot of paratime trading companies are yelling for permits to introduce firearms in the Kholghoor Sector to protect their holdings there.”

  She nodded. The Fourth Level Kholghoor Sector belonged to what was known as Indus-Ganges-Irrawaddy Basic Sector-Grouping—probability of civilization having developed late on the Indian subcontinent, with the rest of the world, including Europe, in Stone Age savagery or early Bronze Age barbarism. The Kharandas, the people among whom she had once done field-research work, had developed a pre-mechanical, animal-power, handcraft, edge-weapon culture. She could imagine the roads jammed with fugitives from the barbarian invaders, the conveyer hidden among the trees, the lurking slavers—

  Watch it, Dalla! Don’t let the old scoundrel play on your feelings!

  “Well, what do you want me to do, Chief?” Vall was asking.

  “Well, I have to know just what this situation’s likely to develop into, and I want to know why Vulthor Tharn’s been sitting on this ever since Skordran Kirv reported it to him—”

  “I can answer the second one now,” Vall replied. “Vulthor Tharn is due to retire in a few years. He has a negatively good, undistinguished record. He’s trying to play it safe.”

  Tortha Karf nodded. “That’s what I thought. Look, Vall; suppose you and Dalla transpose from here to Police Terminal, and go to Novilan Equivalent, and give this a quick look-over and report to me, and then rocket to Zarabar Equivalent and go on with your trip to the Dwarma Sector. It may delay you eight or ten hours, but—”

  “Closer to twenty-four,” Vall said. “I’d have to transpose to this plantation on the Esaron Sector. How about it, Dalla? Would you want to do that?”

  She hesitated for a moment, angry with him. He didn’t want to refuse, and he was trying to make her do it for him.

  “I know, it’s a confounded imposition, Dalla,” Tortha Karf told her. “But it’s important that I get a prompt and full estimate of the situation. This may be something very serious. If it’s an isolated incident, it can be handled in a routine manner, but I’m afraid it’s not. It has all the marks of a large-scale operation, and if this is a matter of mass kidnappings from one sector and transpositions to another, you can see what a threat this is to the Paratime Secret.”

  “Moral considerations entirely aside,” Vall said. “We don’t need to discuss them; they’re too obvious.”

  She nodded. For over twelve millennia, the people of her race and Vall’s and Tortha Karf ’s had been existing as parasites on all the innumerable other worlds of alternate probability on the lateral dimension of time. Smart parasites never injure their hosts, and try never to reveal their existence.

  “We could do that, couldn’t we, Vall?” she asked, angry at herself now for giving in. “And if you want to question these slaves, I speak Kharanda, and I know how they think. And I’m a qualified and licensed narco-hypnotic technician.”

  “Well, that’s splendid, Dalla!” Tortha Karf enthused. “Wait a moment; I’ll message Police Terminal to have a rocket ready for you.”

  “I’ll need a hypno-mech for Kharanda myself,” Vall said. “Dalla, do you know Acalan?”

  When she shook her head, he turned back to Tortha Karf. “Look; it’s about a four-hour rocket hop to Novilan Equivalent. Say we have the hypno-mech machines installed in the rocket; Dalla and I can take our language lessons on the way, and be ready to go to work as soon as we land.”

  “Good idea,” Tortha Karf approved. “I’ll order that done, right away. Now—”

  Oddly enough, she wasn’t feeling so angry now that she had committed herself and Vall. Come to think of it, she had never been
on Police Terminal Time Line; very few people, outside the Paratime Police, ever had. And, she had always wanted to learn more about Vall’s work, and participate in it with him. And if she made him refuse, it would be something ugly between them all the time they spent on the Dwarma Sector. But this way—

  I

  The big circular conveyer room was crowded, as it had been every minute of every day for the past ten thousand years. At the great circular desk in the center, departing or returning police officers were checking in or out with the flat-topped cylindrical robot clerks, or talking to human attendants. Some were in the regulation green uniform; others, like himself, were in civilian clothes; more were in outtime costumes from all over paratime. Fringed robes and cloth-of-gold sashes and conical caps from the Second Level Khiftan Sector; Fourth Level Proto-Aryan mail and helmets; the short tunics and kilts of Fourth Level Alexandrian-Roman Sector; the Zarkantha loincloth and felt cap and daggers; there were priestly vestments stiff with gold, and military uniforms; there were trousers and jackboots and bare legs; blasters, and swords, and pistols, and bows and quivers, and spears. And the place was loud with a babel of voices and the clatter of teleprinters.

  Dalla was looking about her in surprised delight; for her, the vacation had already begun. Verkan was glad; for a while, he had been afraid that she would be unhappy about it. He guided her through the crowd to the desk, spoke for a while to one of the human attendants, and found out which was their conveyer. It was a fixed-destination shuttler, operative only between Home Time Line and Police Terminal, from which most of the Paratime Police operations were routed. He put Dalla in through the sliding door, followed, and closed it behind him, locking it. Then, before he closed the starting switch, he drew a pistol-like weapon and checked it.

  In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal transposition field was uninfluenced by material objects outside it. In practice, however, such objects occasionally intruded, and sometimes they were alive and hostile. The last time he had been in this conveyer room, he had seen a quartet of returning officers emerge from a conveyer dome dragging a dead lion by the tail. The sigma-ray needler, which he carried, was the only weapon which could be used under the circumstances. It had no effect whatever on any material structure and could be used inside an activated conveyer without deranging the conductor-mesh, as, say, a bullet or the vibration of an ultrasonic paralyzer would do, and it was instantly fatal to anything having a central nervous system. It was a good weapon to use outtime for that reason; also; even on the most civilized time-line, the most elaborate autopsy would reveal no specific cause of death.