Time Crime
"He wouldn't go." Tortha Karf replied. "Said it was just a trick to
get him off Home Time Line during the Council crisis."
Yandar Yadd had appeared on the screen as the pickup swung about.
"... Recording ostensibly made by Councilman Salgath on Police
Terminal Time Line, and telecast on Home Time Line an hour ago. Well,
I don't know who he was, but I now have positive proof that he
definitely was not Salgath Trod!"
"We're sunk!" Zostha Olv grunted. "He'd never make a statement like
that unless he could prove it."
"... Something suspicious about the whole thing, from the beginning,"
the newsman was saying. "So I checked. If you recall, the actor
impersonating Salgath gestured rather freely with his hands, in
imitation of a well-known mannerism of the real Salgath Trod; at one
point, the ball of his right thumb was presented directly to the
pickup. Here's a still of that scene."
He stepped aside, revealing a viewscreen behind him; when he pressed a
button, the screen lighted; on it was a stationary picture of Kostran
Galth as Salgath Trod, his right hand raised in front of him.
"Now watch this. I'm going to step up the magnification, slowly, so
that you can be sure there's no substitution. Camera a little closer,
Trath!"
The screen in the background seemed to advance, until it filled the
entire screen. Yandar Yadd was still talking, out of the picture; a
metal-tipped pointer came into the picture, touching the right thumb,
which grew larger and larger until it was the only thing visible.
"Now here," Yandar Yadd's voice continued. "Any of you who are
familiar with the ancient science of dactyloscopy will recognize this
thumb as having the ridge-pattern known as a 'twin loop.' Even with
the high degree of magnification possible with the microgrid screen,
we can't bring out the individual ridges, but the pattern is
unmistakable. I ask you to memorize that image, while I show you
another right thumb print, this time a certified photo-copy of the
thumb print of the real Salgath Trod." The magnification was reduced a
little, a card was moved into the picture, and it was stepped up
again. "See, this thumb print is of the type known as a 'tented arch.'
Observe the difference."
"That does it!" Zostha Olv cried. "Karf, for the first and last time,
let me remind you that I opposed this lunacy from the beginning. Now,
what are we going to do next?"
"I suggest that we get to Headquarters as soon as we can," Tortha Karf
said. "If we wait too long, we may not be able to get in."
Yandar Yadd was back on the screen, denouncing Tortha Karf
passionately. Tortha went over and snapped it off.
"I suggest we transpose to PolTerm," Lovranth Rolk said. "It won't be
so easy for them to serve a summons on us there."
"You can go to PolTerm if you want to," Tortha Karf retorted. "I'm
going to stay here and fight back, and if they try to serve me with a
summons, they'd better send a robot for a process server."
"Fight back!" Zostha Olv echoed. "You can't fight the Council and the
whole Management! They'll tear you into inch bits!"
"I can hold them off till Vall's able to raid those Abzar Sector
bases," Tortha Karf said. He thought for a moment. "Maybe this is all
for the best, after all. If it distracts the Organization's
attention--"
* * * * *
"I wish we could have made a boomerang-ball reconnaissance," Ranthar
Jard was saying, watching one of the viewscreens, in which a film,
taken from an airboat transposed to an adjoining Abzar sector time
line, was being shown. The boat had circled over the Ganges, a mere
trickle between wide, deeply cut banks, and was crossing a gullied
plain, sparsely grown with thornbush. "The base ought to be about
there, but we have no idea what sort of changes this gang has made."
"Well, we couldn't: we didn't dare take the chance of it being
spotted. This has to be a complete surprise. It'll be about like the
other place, the one the slaves described. There won't be any
permanent buildings. This operation only started a few months ago,
with the Croutha invasion; it may go on for four or five months, till
the Croutha have all their surplus captives sold off. That country,"
he added, gesturing at the screen, "will be flooded out when the rains
come. See how it's suffered from flood-erosion. There won't be a thing
there that can't be knocked down and transposed out in a day or so."
"I wish you'd let me go along," Ranthar Jard worried.
"We can't do that, either," Vall said. "Somebody's got to be in charge
here, and you know your own people better than I do. Beside, this
won't be the last operation like this. Next time, I'll have to stay on
Police Terminal and command from a desk; I want first-hand experience
with the outtime end of the job, and this is the only way I can get
it."
He watched the four police-girls who were working at the big terrain
board showing the area of the Police Terminal time line around them.
They had covered the miniature buildings and platforms and towers with
a fine mesh, at a scale-equivalent of fifty feet; each intersection
marked the location of a three-foot conveyer ball, loaded with a
sleep-gas bomb and rigged with an automatic detonator which would
explode it and release the gas as soon as it rematerialized on the
Abzar Sector. Higher, on stiff wires that raised them to what
represented three thousand feet, were the disks that stood for ten
hundred-foot conveyers; they would carry squads of Paratime Police in
aircars and thirty-foot air boats. There was a ring of big
two-hundred-foot conveyers a mile out; they would carry the armor and
the airborne infantry and the little two-man scooters of the
air-cavalry, from the Service and Industrial Sectors. Directly over
the spatial equivalent of the Kholghoor Sector Wizard Traders'
conveyers was the single disk of Verkan Vall's command conveyer, at a
represented five thousand feet, and in a half-mile circle around it
were the five news service conveyers.
"Where's the ship-conveyer?" he asked.
"Actually it's on antigrav about five miles north of here," one of the
girls said. "Representationally, about where Subchief Ranthar's
standing."
Another girl added a few more bits to the network that represented the
sleep-gas bombs and stepped back, taking off her earphones.
"Everything's in place, now, Assistant Verkan," she told him.
"Good. I'm going aboard, now," he said. "You can have it, Jard."
He shook hands with Ranthar Jard, who moved to the switch which would
activate all the conveyers simultaneously, and accepted the good
wishes of the girls at the terrain board. Then he walked to the
mesh-covered dome of the hundred-foot conveyer, with the five news
service conveyers surrounding it in as regular a circle as the
buildings and towers of the regular conveyer heads would permit. The
members of his own detail, smoking and chatting outside, saw him and
started moving inside; so did the news people. A public-address
speaker began yelping, in a hundred voices all over the area, warning
those who were going with the conveyers to get aboard. He went in
through a door, between two aircars, and on to the central
control-desks, going up to a visiscreen over which somebody had
crayoned "Novilan EQ." It gave him a view, over the shoulder of a man
in the uniform of a field agent third class, of the interior of a
conveyer like his own.
* * * * *
"Hello, Assistant Verkan," a voice came out of the speaker under the
screen, as the man moved his lips. "Deputy Skordran! Here's Chief's
Assistant Verkan, now!"
Skordran Kirv moved in front of the screen as the operator got up from
his stool.
"Hello, Vall; we're all set to move out as soon as you give the word,"
he said. "We're all in position on antigrav."
"That's smart work. We've just finished our gas-bomb net," Vall said.
"Going on antigrav now," he added, as he felt the dome lift. "I hope
you won't be too disappointed if you draw a blank on your end."
"We realize that they've closed out the whole Esaron Sector," Skordran
Kirv, eight thousand odd miles away, replied. "We're taking in a
couple of ships; we're going to make a survey all up the coast. There
are a lot of other sectors where slaves can be sold in this area."
In the outside viewscreen, tuned to a slowly rotating pickup on the
top of a tower spatially equivalent with a room in a tall building on
Second Level Triplanetary Empire Sector, he could see his own conveyer
rising vertically, with the news conveyers following, and the troop
conveyers, several miles away, coming into position. Finally, they
were all placed; he reported the fact to Skordran Kirv and then picked
up a hand-phone.
"Everybody ready for transposition?" he called. "On my count. Thirty
seconds ... Twenty seconds ... Fifteen seconds ... Five seconds ...
Four seconds ... Three seconds ... Two seconds ... One second, _out!_"
All the screens went gray. The inside of the dome passed into another
space-time continuum, even into another kind of space-time. The
transposition would take half an hour; that seemed to be the time
needed to build up and collapse the transposition field, regardless of
the paratemporal distance covered. The dome above and around them
vanished; the bare, tower-forested, building-dotted world of Police
Terminal vanished, too, into the uniform green of the uninhabited
Fifth Level. A planet could take pretty good care of itself, he
thought, if people would only leave it alone. Then he began to see the
fields and villages of Fourth Level. Cities appeared and vanished,
growing higher and vaster as they went across the more civilized Third
Level. One was under air attack--there was almost never a paratemporal
transposition which did not run through some scene of battle.
He unbuckled his belt and took off his boots and tunic; all around
him, the others were doing the same. Sleep-gas didn't have to be
breathed; it could enter the nervous system by any orifice or lesion,
even a pore or a scratch. A spacesuit was the only protection. One of
the detectives helped him on with his metal and plastic armor; before
sealing his gauntlets, he reciprocated the assistance, then checked
the needler and blaster and the long batonlike ultrasonic paralyzer on
his belt and made sure that the radio and sound-phones in his helmet
were working. He hoped that the frantic efforts to gather several
thousand spacesuits onto Police Terminal from the Industrial and
Commercial and Interplanetary Sectors hadn't started rumors which had
gotten to the ears of some of the Organization's ubiquitous agents.
* * * * *
The country below was already turning to the parched browns and
yellows of the Abzar Sector. There was not another of the conveyers in
sight, but electronic and mechanical lag in the individual controls
and even the distance-difference between them and the central radio
control would have prevented them from going into transposition at the
same fractional microsecond. The recon-details began piling into their
cars. Then the red light overhead winked to green, and the dome
flickered and solidified into cold, inert metal. The screens lighted
up again, and Vall could see Skordran Kirv, across Asia and the
Pacific, getting into his helmet. A dot of light in the center of the
underview screen widened as the mesh under the conveyer irised open
around the pickup.
Below, the Organization base--big rectangles of fenced slave pens,
with metal barracks inside; the huge circle of the Kholghoor Sector
conveyer-head building, and a smaller structure that must house
conveyers to other Abzar Sector time lines; the work-shops and living
quarters and hangars and warehouses and docks--was wreathed in