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  “A few times,” Skordran Kirv said. “Nothing suspicious; all local stuff. We questioned Coru-hin-Irigod pretty closely on that point, and he says that this is the first time he ever brought a batch of Nebu-hin-Abenoz’s outlanders this far west.”

  I

  The interrogations were being conducted inside the plantation house, in the secret central rooms where the paratimers lived. Skordran Kirv used a door-activator to slide open a hidden door.

  “I suppose I don’t have to warn either of you that any positive statement made in the hearing of a narco-hypnotized subject—” he began.

  “... Has the effect of hypnotic suggestion—” Vall picked up after him.

  “... And should be avoided unless such suggestion is intended,” Dalla finished.

  Skordran Kirv laughed, opening another, inner door, and stood aside. In what had been the paratimers’ recreation room, most of the furniture had been shoved into the corners. Four small tables had been set up, widely spaced and with screens between; across each of them, with an electric recorder between, an almost naked Kharanda slave faced a Paratime Police psychist. At a long table at the far side of the room, four men and two girls were working over stacks of cards and two big charts.

  “Phrakor Vuln,” the man who was working on the charts introduced himself. “Synthesist.” He introduced the others.

  Vall made a point of the fact that Dalla was his wife, in case any of the cops began to get ideas, and mentioned that she spoke Kharanda, had spent some time on the Fourth Level Kholghoor and was a qualified psychist.

  “What have you got, so far?” Vall asked.

  “Two different time-lines and two different gangs of Wizard Traders,” Phrakor Vuln said. “We’ve established the latter from physical descriptions and because both batches were sold by the Croutha at equivalent periods of elapsed time.”

  Vall picked up one of the kidnap-story cards and glanced at it. “I notice there’s a fair verbal description of these firearms and mention of electric whips,” he said. “I’m curious about where they came from.”

  “Well, this is how we reconstructed them, Chief ’s Assistant,” one of the girls said, handing him a couple of sheets of white drawing paper.

  The sketches had been done with soft pencil; they bore repeated erasures and corrections. That of the whip showed a cylindrical handle, indicated as twelve inches in length and one in diameter, fitted with a thumb-switch.

  “That’s definitely Second Level Khiftan,” Vall said, handing it back. “Made of braided copper or silver wire and powered with a little nuclear-conversion battery in the grip. They heat up to about two hundred centigrade; produce really painful burns.”

  “Why, that’s beastly!” Dalla exclaimed. “Anything on the Khiftan Sector is.”

  Skordran Kirv looked at the four slaves at the tables. “We don’t have a really bad case here now. A few of these people were lash-burned horribly, though.”

  Vall was looking at the other sketches. One was a musket, with a wide butt and a band-fastened stock; the lock-mechanism, vaguely flintlock, had been dotted in tentatively. The other was a long pistol, similarly definite in outline and vague in mechanical detail; it was merely a knob-butted miniature of the musket.

  “I’ve seen firearms like these; have a lot of them in my collection,” he said, handing back the sketches. “Low-order mechanical or high-order pre-mechanical cultures. Fact is, things like those could have been made on the Kholghoor Sector, if the Kharandas had learned to combine sulfur, carbon and nitrates to make powder.”

  The interrogator at one of the tables had evidently heard all his subject could tell him. He rose, motioning the slave to stand. “Now, go with that man,” he said in Kharanda, motioning to one of the detectives in native guard uniform. “You will trust him; he is your friend and will not harm you. When you have left this room, you will forget everything that has happened here, except that you were kindly treated and that you were given wine to drink and your hurts were anointed. You will tell the others that we are their friends and that they have nothing to fear from us. And you will not try to remove the mark from the back of your left hand.”

  As the detective led the slave out a door at the other side of the room, the psychist came over to the long table, handing over a card and lighting a cigarette. “Suicide story,” he said to one of the girls, who took the card.

  “Anything new?”

  “Some minor details about the sale to the Caleras on this time-line. I think we’ve about scraped bottom.”

  “You can’t say that,” Phrakor Vuln objected. “The very last one may give us something nobody else had noticed.”

  Another subject was sent out. The interrogator came over to the table.

  “One of the kidnap-story crowd,” he said. “This one was right beside that Croutha who took the shot at the wild pig or whatever it was on the way to the Wizard Traders’ camp. Best description of the guns we’ve gotten so far. No question that they’re flintlocks.” He saw Verkan Vall. “Oh, hello, Assistant Verkan. What do you make of them? You’re an authority on outtime weapons, I understand.”

  “I’d have to see them. These people simply don’t think mechanically enough to give a good description. A lot of peoples make flintlock firearms.”

  He started running over in his mind the paratemporal areas in which gunpowder but not the percussion-cap was known. Expanding cultures, which had progressed as far as the former but not the latter. Static cultures, in which an accidental discovery of gunpowder had never been followed up by further research. Post-debacle cultures, in which a few stray bits of ancient knowledge had survived.

  Another interrogator came over, and then the fourth. For a while they sat and talked and drank coffee, and then the next quartet of slaves, two men and two women, were brought in. One of the women had been badly blistered by the electric whips of the Wizard Traders; in spite of reassurances, all were visibly apprehensive.

  “We will not harm you,” one of the psychists told them. “Here; here is medicine for your hurts. At first, it will sting, as good medicines will, but soon it will take away all pain. And here is wine for you to drink.”

  A couple of detectives approached, making a great show of pouring wine and applying ointment; under cover of the medication, they jabbed each slave with a hypodermic needle, and then guided them to seats at the four tables. Vall and Dalla went over and stood behind one of the psychists, who had a small flashlight in his hand.

  “Now, rest for a while,” the psychist was saying. “Rest and let the good medicine do its work. You are tired and sleepy. Look at this magic light, which brings comfort to the troubled. Look at the light. Look...at...the...Light.”

  They moved to the next table. “Did you have a hand in the fighting?”

  “No, lord. We were peasant folk, not fighting people. We had no weapons, nor weapon-skills. Those who fought were all killed; we held up empty hands and were spared to be captives of the Croutha.”

  “What happened to your master, the Lord Ghromdour, and to his lady?”

  “One of the Croutha threw a hatchet and killed our master, and then his lady drew a dagger and killed herself.”

  The psychist made a red mark on the card in front of him, and circled the number on the back of the slave’s hand with red indelible crayon.

  Vall and Dalla went to the third table.

  “They had the common weapons of the Croutha, lord, and they also had the weapons of the Wizard Traders. Of these, they carried the long weapons slung across their backs, and the short weapons thrust through their belts.”

  A blue mark on the card; a blue circle on the back of the slave’s hand. They listened to both versions of what had happened at the sack of the Lord Ghromdour’s estate, and the march into the captured city of Jhirda, and the second march into the forest to the camp of the Wizard Traders.

  “The servants of the Wizard Traders did not appear until after the Croutha had gone away; they wore different garb. They wore short ja
ckets, and trousers, and short boots, and they carried small weapons on their belts—”

  “They had whips of great cruelty that burned like fire; we were all lashed with these whips, as you may see, lord—”

  “The Croutha had bound us two and two with neck-yokes; these the servants of the Wizard Traders took off from us, and they chained us together by tens with the chains we still wore when we came to this place—”

  “They killed my child, my little Zhouzha!” the woman with the horribly blistered back was wailing. “They tore her out of my arms, and one of the servants of the Wizard Traders—may Khokhaat devour his soul forever!—dashed out her brains. And when I struggled to save her. I was thrown on the ground and beaten with the fire-whips until I fainted. Then I was dragged into the forest along with the others who were chained with me.” She buried her head in her arms, sobbing bitterly.

  Dalla stepped forward, taking the flashlight from the interrogator with one hand and lifting the woman’s head with the other. She flashed the light quickly in the woman’s eyes.

  “You will grieve no more for your child,” she said. “Already, you are forgetting what happened at the Wizard Traders’ camp, and remembering only that your child is safe from harm. Soon you will remember her only as a dream of the child you hope to have some day.”

  She flashed the light again, then handed it back to the psychist.

  “Now, tell us what happened when you were taken into the forest; what did you see there?”

  The psychist nodded approvingly, made a note on the card, and listened while the woman spoke. She had stopped sobbing, now and her voice was clear and cheerful.

  II

  Vall went over to the long table.

  “Those slaves were still shackled with the Wizard Traders’ chains when they were delivered here. Where are the chains?” he asked Skordran Kirv.

  “In the permanent conveyer room,” Skordran Kirv said. “You can look at them there; we didn’t want to bring them in here for fear these poor devils would think we were going to chain them again. They’re very light, very strong; some kind of alloy steel. Files and power saws only polish them; it takes fifteen seconds to cut a link with an atomic torch. One long chain, and short lengths, fifteen inches long, staggered every three feet, with a single hinge-shackle for the ankle. The shackles were riveted with soft wrought-iron rivets, evidently made with some sort of a power riveting-machine. We cut them easily with a cold chisel.”

  “They ought to be sent to Dhergabar Equivalent, Police Terminal, for study of material and workmanship. Now, you mentioned some scheme you had for capturing this conveyer that brings in the slaves for Nebu-hin-Abenoz. What have you in mind?”

  “We still have Coru-hin-Irigod and all his gang under hypno. I’d thought of giving them hypnotic conditioning and sending them back to Careba with orders to put out some kind of signal the next time Nebu-hin-Abenoz starts out on a buying trip. We could have a couple of men posted in the hills overlooking Careba, and they could send a message-ball through to Police Terminal. Then, a party could be sent with a mobile conveyer to ambush Nebu-hin-Abenoz on the way, and wipe out his party. Our people could take their horses and clothing and go on to take the conveyer by surprise.”

  “I’d suggest one change. Instead of relying on visual signals by the hypno-conditioned Coru-hin-Irigod, send a couple of our men to Careba with midget radios.”

  Skordran Kirv nodded. “Sure. We can condition Coru-hin-Irigod to accept them as friends and vouch for them at Careba. Our boys can be traders and slave buyers. Careba’s a market town; traders are always welcome. They can have firearms to sell—revolvers and repeating rifles. Any Calera will buy any firearm that’s better than the one he’s carrying; they’ll always buy revolvers and repeaters. We can get what we want from Commercial Four-Oh-Seven; we can get riding and pack horses here.”

  Vall nodded. “And the post overlooking or in radio range of Careba on this time-line, and another on Pol-Term. For the ambush of Nebu-hin-Abenoz’s gang and the capture of the conveyer, use anything you want to—sleep-gas, paralyzers, energy-weapons, antigrav-equipment, anything. As far as regulations about using only equipment appropriate to local culture-levels, forget them entirely. But take that conveyer intact. You can locate the base time-line from the settings of the instrument panel, and that’s what we want most of all.”

  Dalla and the police psychist, having finished with and dismissed their subject, came over to the long table.

  “...That poor creature,” Dalla was saying. “What sort of fiends are they?”

  “If that made you sick, remember we’ve been listening to things like that for the last eight hours. Some of the stories were even worse than that one.”

  “Well, I’d like to use a heat-gun on the whole lot of them, turned down to where it’d just fry them medium-rare,” Dalla said. “And for whoever’s back of this, take him to Second Level Khiftan and sell him to the priests of Fasif.”

  “Too bad you’re not coming back from your vacation instead of starting out, Chief ’s Assistant Verkan,” Skordran Kirv said. “This is too big for me to handle alone, and I’d sooner work under you than anybody else Chief Tortha sends in.”

  “Vall!” Dalla cried in indignation. “You’re not going to just report on this and then walk away from it, are you?”

  “But, darling,” Vall replied, in what he hoped was a convincing show of surprise. “You don’t want our vacation postponed again, do you? If I get mixed up in this, there’s no telling when I can get away, and by the time I’m free, something may come up at Rhogom Institute that you won’t want to drop—”

  “Vall, you know perfectly well that I wouldn’t be happy for an instant on the Dwarma Sector, thinking about this—”

  “All right, then; let’s forget about the vacation. You want to stay on for a while and help me with this? It’ll be a lot of hard work, but we’ll be together.”

  “Yes, of course. I want to do something to smash those devils. Vall, if you’d heard some of the things they did to those poor people—”

  “Well, I’ll have to go back to Pol-Term, as soon as I’m reasonably well filled in on this, and report to Tortha Karf and tell him I’ve taken charge. You can stay here and help with these interrogations; I’ll be back in about ten hours. Then, we can go to Kholghoor East India SecReg HQ to talk to Ranthar Jard. We may be able to get something that’ll help us on that end—”

  “You may be able to have your vacation before too long, Dr. Hadron,” Skordran Kirv told her. “Once we capture one of their conveyers, the instrument panel will tell us what time-line they’re working from, and then we’ll have them.”

  “There’s an Indo-Turanian Sector parable about a snake charmer who thought he was picking up his snake and found that he had hold of an elephant’s tail,” Vall said. “That might be a good thing to bear in mind till we find out just what we have picked up.”

  I

  Coming down a hallway on the hundred and seventh floor of the Management wing of the Paratime Building, Yandar Yadd paused to admire, in the green mirror of the glassoid wall, the jaunty angle of his silver-feathered cap, the fit of his short jacket, and the way his weapon hung at his side. This last was not instantly recognizable as a weapon; it looked more like a portable radio, which indeed it was. It was, nonetheless, a potent weapon. One flick of his finger could connect that radio with one at Tri-Planet News Service, and within the hour anything he said into it would be heard by all Terra, Mars and Venus. In consequence, there existed around the Paratime Building a marked and understandable reluctance to antagonize Yandar Yadd.

  He glanced at his watch. It was twenty minutes short of 1000, when he had an appointment with Baltan Vrath, the comptroller general. Glancing about, he saw that he was directly in front of the doorway of the Outtime Claims Bureau, and he strolled in, walking through the waiting room and into the claims-presentation office. At once, he stiffened like a bird dog at point.

  Sphabron Larv, one of his you
ng legmen, was in an altercation across the counter-desk with Varkar Klav, the Deputy Claims Agent on duty at the time. Varkar was trying to be icily dignified; Sphabron Larv’s black hair was in disarray and his face was suffused with anger. He was pounding with his fist on the plastic counter-top.

  “You have to!” he was yelling in the older man’s face. “That’s a public document, and I have a right to see it. You want me to go into Tribunes’ Court and get an order? If I do, there’ll be a Question in Council about why I had to before the day’s out!”

  “What’s the matter, Larv?” Yandar Yadd asked lazily. “He trying to hold something out on you?”

  Sphabron Larv turned; his eyes lit happily when he saw his boss, and then his anger returned.

  “I want to see a copy of an indemnity claim that was filed this morning,” he said. “Varkar, here, won’t show it to me. What does he think this is, a Fourth Level dictatorship?”

  “What kind of a claim, now?” Yandar Yadd addressed Larv, ignoring Varkar Klav.

  “Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs—one of the Thalvan Interests companies— just claimed forty thousand P.E.U. for a hundred slaves bought by one of their plantation managers on Third Level Esaron from a local slave dealer. The Paratime Police impounded the slaves for narco-hypnotic interrogation and then transposed the lot of them to Police Terminal.”

  Yandar Yadd still held his affectation of sleepy indolence. “Now why would the Paracops do that, I wonder? Slavery’s an established local practice on Esaron Sector; our people have to buy slaves if they want to run a plantation.”

  “I know that.” Sphabron Larv replied. “That’s what I want to find out. There must be something wrong, either with the slaves, or the treatment our people were giving them, or the Paratime Police, and I want to find out which.”

  “To tell the truth, Larv, so do I.” Yandar Yadd said. He turned to the man behind the counter. “Varkar, do we see that claim, or do I make a story out of your refusal to show it?” he asked.