TIME PRIME (17 page)

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 Pol-Term 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, widejawed 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 the 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. 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 on 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 Pol-Term?”

“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.

“Oh! 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 heavyduty 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?”