Time Crime
"Barth, have the girl in the black cloak brought down to Number Four
Interview Room. Put the other two in separate detention cubicles;
we'll talk to them later." He broke the connection and got to his
feet. "Come on, Dalla. I want you to help me with the girl."
"Just try and stop me," Dalla told him. "Any interviews you have with
that little item, I want to sit in on."
* * * * *
The Proletarian girl, still guarded by a detective, had already been
placed in the interview room. The detective nodded to Vall, tried to
suppress a grin when he saw Dalla behind him, and went out. Vall saw
his wife and the prisoner seated, and produced his cigarette case,
handing it around.
"You're Zinganna; you're of the household of Councilman Salgath Trod,
aren't you?" he asked.
"Housekeeper and hostess," the girl replied. "I am also his mistress."
Vall nodded, smiling. "Which confirms my long-standing respect for
Councilman Salgath's exquisite taste."
"Why, thank you," she said. "But I doubt if I was brought here to
receive compliments. Or was I?"
"No, I'm afraid not. Have you heard the newscasts of the past few
hours concerning Councilman Salgath?"
She straightened in her seat, looking at him seriously.
"No. I and Nindrandigro and Calilla spent the evening on ServSec
One-Six-Five. Councilman Salgath told me that he had some business and
wanted them out of the apartment, and wanted me to keep an eye on
them. We didn't hear any news at all." She hesitated. "Has anything
... serious ... happened?"
Vall studied her for a moment, then glanced at Dalla. There existed
between himself and his wife a sort of vague, semitelepathic, rapport;
they had never been able to transmit definite and exact thoughts, but
they could clearly prehend one another's feelings and emotions. He was
conscious, now, of Dalla's sympathy for the Proletarian girl.
"Zinganna, I'm going to tell you something that is being kept from the
public," he said. "By doing so, I will make it necessary for us to
detain you, at least for a few days. I hope you will forgive me, but I
think you would forgive me less if I didn't tell you."
"Something's happened to him," she said, her eyes widening and her
body tensing.
"Yes, Zinganna. At about 2010, this evening," he said, "Councilman
Salgath was murdered."
"Oh!" She leaned back in the chair, closing her eyes. "He's dead?"
Then, again, statement instead of question: "He's dead!"
For a long moment, she lay back in the chair, as though trying to
reorient her mind to the fact of Salgath Trod's death, while Vall and
Dalla sat watching her. Then she stirred, opened her eyes, looked at
the cigarette in her fingers as though she had never seen it before,
and leaned forward to stuff it into an ash receiver.
"Who did it?" she asked, the Stone Age savage who had been her
ancestor not ten generations ago peeping out of her eyes.
"The men who actually used the needlers are dead," Vall told her. "I
killed a couple of them myself. We still have to find the men who
planned it. I'd hoped you'd want to help us do that, Zinganna."
He side-glanced to Dalla again; she nodded. The relationship between
Zinganna and Salgath Trod hadn't been purely business with her; there
had been some real affection. He told her what had happened, and when
he reached the point at which Salgath Trod had called Tortha Karf to
confess complicity in the slave trade, her lips tightened and she
nodded.
"I was afraid it was something like that," she said. "For the last few
days, well, ever since the news about the slave trade got out, he's
been worried about something. I've always thought somebody had some
kind of a hold over him. Different times in the past, he's done things
so far against his own political best interests that I've had to
believe he was being forced into them. Well, this time they tried to
force him too far. What then?"
Vall continued the story. "So we're keeping this hushed up, for a
while. The way we're letting it out, Salgath Trod is still alive, on
Police Terminal, talking under narco-hypnosis."
She smiled savagely. "And they'll get frightened, and frightened men
do foolish things," she finished. She hadn't been a politician's
mistress for nothing. "What can I do to help?"
"Tell us everything you can," he said. "Maybe we can be able to take
such actions as we would have taken if Salgath Trod had lived to talk
to us."
"Yes, of course." She got another cigarette from the case Vall had
laid on the table. "I think, though, that you'd better give me a
narco-hypnosis. You want to be able to depend on what I'm going to
tell you, and I want to be able to remember things exactly."
Vall nodded approvingly and turned to Dalla.
"Can you handle this, yourself?" he asked. "There's an audio-visual
recorder on now; here's everything you need." He opened the drawers in
the table to show her the narco-hypnotic equipment. "And the phone has
a whisper mouthpiece; you can call out without worrying about your
message getting into Zinganna's subconscious. Well, I'll see you when
you're through; you bring Zinganna to Police Terminal; I'll probably
be there."
He went out, closing the door behind him, and went down the hall,
meeting the officer who had taken charge of the butler and housemaid.
"We're having trouble with them, sir," he said. "Hostile. Yelling
about their rights, and demanding to see a representative of
Proletarian Protective League."
Vall mentioned the Proletarian Protective League with unflattering
vulgarity.
"If they don't cooeperate, drag them out and inject them and question
them anyhow," he said.
The detective-lieutenant looked worried. "We've been taking a pretty
high hand with them as it is," he protested. "It's safer to kill a
Citizen than bloody a Prole's nose; they have all sorts of laws to
protect them."
"There are all sorts of laws to protect the Paratime Secret," Vall
replied. "And I think there are one or two laws against murdering
members of the Executive Council. In case P.P.L. makes any trouble,
they aren't here; they have faithfully joined their beloved master in
his refuge on PolTerm. But one or both of them work for the
Organization."
"You're sure of that?"
"The Organization is too thorough not to have had a spy in Salgath's
household. It wasn't Zinganna, because she's volunteered to talk to us
under narco-hyp. So who does that leave?"
"Well, that's different; that makes them suspects." The lieutenant
seemed relieved. "We'll pump that pair out right away."
When he got back to Tortha Karf's office, the Chief was awake, and
doodling on his notepad with his multicolor pen. Vall looked at the
pad and winced; the Chief was doodling bugs again--red ants with black
legs, and blue-and-green beetles. Then he saw that the psychist,
Nentrov Dard, was drinking straight 150-proof palm-rum.
"Well, tell me the worst," he said.
"Our boy's memory-obliterated," Nentrov Dard said, draining his glass
and filling it again. "And he's plastered with pseudo-memories a foot
thick. It'll be five or six ten-days before we can get all that stuff
peeled off and get him unblocked. I put him to sleep and had him
transposed to Police Terminal. I'm going there, myself, tomorrow
morning, after I've had some sleep, and get to work on him. If you're
hoping to get anything useful out of him in time to head off this
Council crisis that's building up, just forget it."
"And that leaves us right back with our old friends, the Wizard
Traders," Tortha Karf added. "And if they've decided to suspend
activities on the Kholghoor Sector, too--" He began drawing a big blue
and black spider in the middle of the pad.
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 PolTerm, 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,
wide-jawed 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.