Time Crime
orchestra and a comedy show, she got the image of an angry-faced man
in evening clothes.
"... And I'm going to demand a full investigation, as soon as Council
convenes tomorrow morning!" he was shouting. "This whole story is a
preposterous insult to the integrity of the entire Executive Council,
your elected representatives, and it shows the criminal lengths to
which this would-be dictator, Tortha Karf, and his jackal Verkan Vall
will go--"
"So long, jackal." Dalla called to him as he went out.
* * * * *
He spent the half-hour transposition to Police Terminal sleeping.
Paratime-transpositions and rocket-flights seemed to be his only
chance to get any sleep. He was still sleepy when he sat down in front
of the radio telescreen behind his duplicate of Tortha Karf's desk and
put through a call to Nharkan Equivalent. It was 0600 in India; the
Sector Regional Deputy Subchief who was holding down Ranthar Jard's
desk looked equally sleepy; he had a mug of coffee in front of him,
and a brown-paper cigarette in his mouth.
"Oh, hello, Assistant Verkan. Want me to call Subchief Ranthar?"
"Is he sleeping? Then for mercy's sake don't. What's the present
status of the investigation?"
"Well, we were dropping boomerang balls yesterday, while we had sun to
mask the return-flashes. Nothing. The Croutha have taken the city of
Sohram, just below the big bend of the river. Tomorrow, when we have
sunlight, we're going to start boomerang-balling the central square.
We may get something."
"The Wizard Traders'll be moving in near there, about now," Vall said.
"The Croutha ought to have plenty of merchandise for them. Have you
gotten anything more done on narrowing down the possible area?"
The deputy bit back a yawn and reached for his coffee mug.
"The experts have just about pumped these slaves empty," he said. "The
local religion is a mess. Seems to have started out as a Great Mother
cult; then it picked up a lot of gods borrowed from other peoples;
then it turned into a dualistic monotheism; then it picked up a lot of
minor gods and devils--new devils usually gods of the older pantheon.
And we got a lot of gossip about the feudal wars and faction-fights
among the nobility, and so on, all garbled, because these people are
peasants who only knew what went on on the estate of their own lord."
"What did go on there?" Vall asked. "Ask them about recent
improvements, new buildings, new fields cleared, new paddies flooded,
that sort of thing. And pick out a few of the highest IQ's from both
time lines, and have them locate this estate on a large-scale map, and
draw plans showing the location of buildings, fields and other visible
features. If you have to, teach them mapping and sketching by
hypno-mech. And then drop about five hundred to a thousand boomerang
balls, at regular intervals, over the whole paratemporal area. When
you locate a time line that gives you a picture to correspond to their
description, boomerang the main square in Sohram over the whole belt
around it, to find Croutha with firearms."
The deputy looked at him for a moment then gulped more coffee.
"Can do, Assistant Verkan. I think I'll send somebody to wake up
Subchief Ranthar, right now. Want to talk to him."
"Won't be necessary. You're recording this call, of course? Then play
it back to him. And get cracking with the slaves; you want enough
information out of them to enable you to start boomerang balling as
soon as the sun's high enough."
* * * * *
He broke off the connection and sent out for coffee for himself. Then
he put through a call to Novilan Equivalent, in western North America.
It was 1530, there, when he got Vulthor Tharn on the screen.
"Good afternoon. Assistant Verkan. I suppose you're calling about the
slave business. I've turned the entire matter over to Field Agent
Skordran; gave him a temporary rank of Deputy Subchief. That's subject
to your approval and Chief Tortha's, of course--"
"Make the appointment permanent," Vall said. "I'll have a confirmation
along from Chief Tortha directly. And let me talk to him now, if you
please. Subchief Vulthor."
"Yes, sir. Switching you over now." The screen went into a beautiful
burst of abstract art, and cleared, after a while, with Skordran Kirv
looking out of it.
"Hello, Deputy Skordran, and congratulations. What's come up since we
had Nebu-hin-Abenoz cut out from under us?"
"We went in on that time line, that same night, with an airboat and
made a recon in the hills back of Careba. Scared the fear of Safar
into a party of Caleras while we were working at low altitude, by the
way. We found the conveyer-head site: hundred-foot circle with all the
grass and loose dirt transposed off it and a pole pen, very unsanitary
where about two-three hundred slaves would be kept at a time. No
indications of use in the last ten days. We did some pretty thorough
boomeranging on that spatial equivalent over a couple of thousand time
lines and found thirty more of them. I believe the slavers have closed
out the whole Esaron Sector operation, at least temporarily."
That was what he'd been afraid of; he hoped they wouldn't do the same
thing on the Kholghoor Sector.
"Let me have the designations of the time lines on which you found
conveyer heads," he said.
"Just a moment, Chief's Assistant; I'll photoprint them to you. Set
for reception?"
Vall opened a slide under the screen and saw that the photoprint film
was in place, then closed it again, nodding. Skordran Kirv fed a sheet
of paper into his screen cabinet and his arm moved forward out of the
picture.
"On, sir," he said. He and Vall counted ten seconds together, and then
Skordran Kirv said: "Through to you." Vall pressed a lever under his
screen, and a rectangle of microcopy print popped out.
"That's about all I have, sir. Want me to keep my troops ready here,
or shall I send them somewhere else?"
"Keep them ready, Kirv," Vall told him. "You may need them before
long. Call you later."
He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged print
with him to the conveyer room. There was something odd about the list
of time line designations. They were expressed numerically, in First
Level notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exact
expression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers. Vall had only a
general-education smattering of mathematics--enough to qualify him for
the chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the Fourth
Level Europo-American Sector--and he could not identify the
peculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort of
pattern. Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of the
chairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him,
and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished. He
woke, the list of time line designations in his hand, when the
conveyor rematerialized on Home Time Line. Putting it in his pocket,
he hurried to an antigrav shaft and floated up to the floor on which
Tortha Karf's office was.
* * * * *
Tortha Karf was asleep in his chair; Dalla was eating a dinner that
had been brought in to her--something better than the sandwich and mug
of coffee Vall had mentioned to Thalvan Dras. Several of the bureau
chiefs who had been there when he had gone out had left, and the
psychist who had taken charge of the prisoner was there.
"I think he's coming out of the drug, now," he reported. "Still
asleep, though. We want him to waken naturally before we start on him.
They'll call me as soon as he shows signs of stirring."
"The Opposition's claiming, now, that we drugged and hypnotized
Salgath into making that visiscreen confession," Dalla said. "Can you
think of any way you could do that without making the subject
incapable of lying?"
"Pseudo-memories," the psychist said. "It would take about three times
as long as the time between Salgath Trod's departure from his
apartment and the time of the telecast, though--"
"You know much higher math?" Vall asked the psychist.
"Well, enough to handle my job. Neuron-synapse inter-relations,
memory-and-association patterns, that kind of thing, all have to be
expressed mathematically."
Vall nodded and handed him the time-line designation list.
"See any kind of a pattern there?" he asked.
The psychist looked at the paper and blanked his face as he drew on
hypnotically-acquired information.
"Yes. I'd say that all the numbers are related in some kind of a
series to some other number. Simplified down to kindergarten level,
say the difference between A and B is, maybe, one-decillionth of the
difference between X and A, and the difference between B and C is
one-decillionth of the difference between X and B, and so on--"
A voice came out of one of the communication boxes:
"Dr. Nentrov; the patient's out of the drug, and he's beginning to
stir about."
"That's it," the psychist said. "I have to run." He handed the sheet
back to Vall, took a last drink from his coffee cup, and bolted out of
the room.
Dalla picked up the sheet of paper and looked at it. Vall told her
what it was.
"If those time lines are in regular series, they relate to the base
line of operations," she said. "Maybe you can have that worked out. I
can see how it would be; a stated interval between the Esaron Sector
lines, to simplify transposition control settings."
"That was what I was thinking. It's not quite as simple as Dr. Nentrov
expressed it, but that could be the general idea. We might be able to
work out the location of the base line from that. There seems to be a
break in the number sequence in here; that would be the time line
Skordran Kirv found those slaves on." He reached for the pipe he had
left on the desk when he had gone to Police Terminal and began filling
it.
A little later, a buzzer sounded and a light came on on one of the
communication boxes. He flipped the switch and said, "Verkan Vall
here." Sothran Barth's voice came cut of the box.
"They've just brought in Salgath Trod's servants. Picked them up as
they came out of the house conveyer at the apartment building. I don't
believe they know what's happened."
Vall flipped a switch and twiddled a dial; a viewscreen lit up,
showing the landing stage. The police car had just landed: one
detective had gotten out, and was helping the girl, Zinganna, who had
been Salgath Trod's housekeeper and mistress, to descend. She was
really beautiful. Vall thought: rather tall, slender, with dark eyes
and a creamy light-brown skin. She wore a black cloak, and, under it,
a black and silver evening gown. A single jewel twinkled in her black
hair. She could have very easily passed for a woman of his own race.
The housemaid and the butler were a couple of entirely different
articles. Both were about four or five generations from Fourth Level
Primitive savagery. The maid, in garishly cheap finery, was big-boned
and heavy-bodied, with red-brown hair; she looked like a member of one
of the northern European reindeer-herding peoples who had barely
managed to progress as far as the bow and arrow. The butler was
probably a mixture of half a dozen primitive races; he was wearing one
of his late master's evening suits, a bright mellow-pink, which was
distinctly unflattering to his complexion.
The sound-pickup was too far away to give him what they were saying,
but the butler and maid were waving their arms and protesting
vehemently. One of the detectives took the woman by the arm; she
jerked it loose and aimed a backhand slap at him. He blocked it on his
forearm. Immediately, the girl in black turned and said something to
her, and she subsided. Vall said, into the box: