Time Crime
with nuclear energy and developed reaction-drive spaceships. But
they'd concentrated so on the inorganic sciences, and so far neglected
the bio-sciences, that when they launched their first ship for Venus
they hadn't yet developed a germ theory of disease."
"What happened when they ran into the green-vomit fever?" Dalla asked.
"About what you could expect. The first--and only--ship to return
brought it back to Terra. Of course, nobody knew what it was, and
before the epidemic ended, it had almost depopulated this planet.
Since the survivors knew nothing about germs, they blamed it on the
anger of the gods--the old story of recourse to supernaturalism in the
absence of a known explanation--and a fanatically anti-scientific cult
got control. Of course, space travel was taboo; so was nuclear and
even electric power. For some reason, steam power and gunpowder
weren't offensive to the gods. They went back to a low-order
steam-power, black-powder, culture, and haven't gotten beyond that to
this day. The relatively civilized regions are on the east coast of
Asia and the west coast of North America; civilized race more or less
Caucasian. Political organization just barely above the tribal
level--thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities
and feudal holdings and robbers' roosts. The principal industries are
brigandage, piracy, slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercommunal
warfare. They have a few ramshackle steam railways, and some
steamboats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured goods,
mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and tobacco. Consolidated Outtime
Foodstuffs has the sector franchise. That's one of the companies
Thalvan Dras gets his money from."
They had run down through the civilized Second and Third Levels and
were leaving the Fourth behind and entering the Fifth, existing in the
probability of a world without human population. Once in a while,
around them, they caught brief flashes of buildings and rocketports
and spaceports and landing stages, as the conveyer took them through
narrow paratime belts on which their own civilization had established
outposts--Fifth Level Commercial, Fifth Level Passenger, Industrial
Sector, Service Sector.
Finally the conveyer dome around them shimmered into visibility and
materialized; when they emerged, there were policemen in green
uniforms who entered to search the dome with drawn needlers to make
sure they had picked up nothing dangerous on the way. The room outside
was similar to the one they had left on Home Time Line, even to the
shifting, noisy crowd in incongruously-mixed costumes.
* * * * *
The rocketport was a ten minutes' trip by aircar from the conveyer
head; when they boarded the stubby-winged strato-rocket, Vall saw that
two of the passenger-seats had square metal cabinets bolted in place
behind them and blue plastic helmets on swinging arms mounted above
them.
"Everything's set up," the pilot told them. "Dr. Hadron, you sit on
the left; that cabinet's loaded with language tape for Acalan. Yours
is loaded with a tape of Kharanda; that's the Fourth Level Kholghoor
language you wanted, Chief's Assistant. Shall I help you get fixed in
your seats?"
"Yes, if you please. Here, Dalla, I'll fix that for you."
Dalla was already asleep when the pilot was adjusting his helmet and
giving him his injection. He never felt the rocket tilt into firing
position, and while he slept, the Kharands language, with all its
vocabulary and grammar, became part of his subconscious knowledge,
needing only the mental pronunciation of a trigger-symbol to bring it
into consciousness. The pilot was already unfastening and raising his
helmet when he opened his eyes. Dalla, beside him, was sipping a cup
of spiced wine.
On the landing stage of the Sector-Regional Headquarters at Novilan
Equivalent, four or five people were waiting for them. Vall recognized
the subchief, Vulthor Tharn, who introduced another man, in riding
boots and a white cloak, as Skordran Kirv. Vall clasped hands with him
warmly.
"Good work, Agent Skordran. You got onto this promptly."
"I tried to, sir. Do you want the dope now? We have half an hour's
flight to our spatial equivalent, and another half hour in
transposition."
"Give it to me on the way," he said, and turned to Vulthor Tharn.
"Our Esaron costumes ready?"
"Yes. Over there in the control tower. We have a temporary conveyer
head set up about two hundred miles south of here, which will take you
straight through to the plantation."
"Suppose you change now, Dalla," he said. "Subchief, I'd like a word
with you privately."
He and Vulthor Tharn excused themselves and walked over to the edge of
the landing stage. The SecReg Subchief was outwardly composed, but
Vall sensed that he was worried and embarrassed.
"Now, what's been done since you got Agent Skordran's report?" Vall
asked.
"Well, sir, it seems that this is more serious than we had
anticipated. Field Agent Skordran, who will give you the particulars,
says that there is every indication that a large and well-organized
gang of paratemporal criminals, our own people, are at work. He says
that he's found evidence of activities on Fourth Level Kholghoor that
don't agree with any information we have about conditions on that
sector."
"Beside transmitting Agent Skordran's report to Dhergabar through the
robot report-system, what have you done about it?"
"I confirmed Agent Skordran in charge of the local investigation, and
gave him two detectives and a psychist, sir. As soon as we could
furnish hypno-mech indoctrination in Kharanda to other psychists, I
sent them along. He now has four of them, and eight detectives. By
that time, we had a conveyer head right at this Consolidated Outtime
Foodstuffs plantation."
"Why didn't you just borrow psychists from SecReg for Kholghoor,
Eastern India?" Vall asked. "Subchief Ranthar would have loaned you a
few."
"Oh, I couldn't call on another SecReg for men without higher-echelon
authorization. Especially not from another Sector Organization, even
another Level Authority," Vulthor Tharn said. "Beside, it would have
taken longer to bring them here than hypno-mech our own personnel."
He was right about the second point. Vall agreed mentally; however,
his real reason was procedural.
"Did you alert Ranthar Jard to what was going on in his SecReg?" he
asked.
"Gracious, no!" Vulthor Tharn was scandalized. "I have no authority to
tell people of equal echelon in other Sector and Level organizations
what to do. I put my report through regular channels; it wasn't my
place to go outside my own jurisdiction."
And his report had crawled through channels for fourteen hours, Vall
thought.
"Well, on my authority, and in the name of Chief Tortha, you message
Ranthar Jard at once; send him every scrap of information you have on
the subject, and forward additional information as it comes in to
you. I doubt he'll find anything on any time-line that's being
exploited by any legitimate paratimers. This gang probably work
exclusively on unpenetrated time-lines; this business Skordran Kirv
came across was a bad blunder on some underling's part." He saw Dalla
emerge from the control tower in breeches and boots and a white cloak,
buckling on a heavy revolver. "I'll go change, now; you get busy
calling Ranthar Jard. I'll see you when I get back."
* * * * *
"Are you taking over, Chief's Assistant?" Skordran Kirv asked, as the
aircar lifted from the landing stage.
"Not at all. My wife and I are starting on our vacation, as soon as I
find out what's been happening here, and report to Chief Tortha. Did
your native troopers catch those slavers?"
"Yes, they got them yesterday afternoon; we've had them ever since. Do
you want the whole thing just as it happened, Assistant Verkan, or
just a condensation?"
"Give me what you think it indicates, remembering that you're probably
trying to analyze a large situation from a very small sample."
"It's big, all right," Skordran Kirv said. "This gang can't number
less than a hundred men, maybe several hundred. They must have at
least two two-hundred-foot conveyers and several small ones, and bases
on what sounds like some Fifth Level Time line, and at least one air
freighter of around five thousand tons. They are operating on a number
of Kholghoor and Esaron time lines."
Verkan Vall nodded. "I didn't think it was any petty larceny," he
said.
"Wait till you hear the rest of it. On the Kholghoor Sector, this gang
is known as the Wizard Traders; we've been using that as a convenience
label. They pose as sorcerers--black robes and hood-masks covered with
luminous symbols, voice-amplifiers, cold-light auras, energy-weapons,
mechanical magic tricks, that sort of thing. They have all the Croutha
scared witless. Their procedure is to establish camps in the forest
near recently conquered Kharanda cities; then they appear to the
Croutha, impress them with their magical powers, and trade
manufactured goods for Kharanda captives. They mainly trade firearms,
apparently some kind of flintlocks, and powder."
Then they were confining their operations to unpenetrated time lines;
there had been no reports of firearms in the hands of the Croutha
invaders.
"After they buy a batch of slaves," Skordran Kirv continued, "they
transpose them to this presumably Fifth Level base, where they have
concentration camps. The slaves we questioned had been airlifted to
North America, where there's another concentration camp, and from
there transposed to this Esaron Sector time line where I found them.
They say that there were at least two to three thousand slaves in
this North American concentration camp and that they are being
transposed out in small batches and replaced by others airlifted in
from India. This lot was sold to a Calera named Nebu-hin-Abenoz, the
chieftain of a hill town, Careba, about fifty miles south-west of the
plantation. There were two hundred and fifty in this batch; this
Coru-hin-Irigod only bought the batch he sold at the plantation."
* * * * *
The aircar lost speed and altitude; below, the countryside was dotted
with conveyer heads, each spatially coexistent with some outtime
police post or operation. There were a great many of them; the western
coast of North America was a center of civilization on many
paratemporal sectors, and while the conveyer heads of the commercial
and passenger companies were scattered over hundreds of Fifth Level
time lines, those of the Paratime Police were concentrated upon one.
The anti-grav-car circled around a three-hundred-foot steel tower that
supported a conveyer head spatially coexistent with one on a top floor
of some outtime tall building, and let down in front of a low
prefabricated steel shed. A man in police uniform came out to meet
them. There was a fifty-foot conveyer dome inside, and a fifty-foot
red-lined circle that marked the transposition point of an outtime
conveyer. They all entered the dome, and the operator put on the
transposition field.
"You haven't heard the worst of it yet." Skordran Kirv was saying. "On
this time line, we have reason to think that the native,
Nebu-hin-Abenoz, who bought the slaves, actually saw the slavers'
conveyer. Maybe even saw it activated."
"If he did, we'll either have to capture him and give him a
memory-obliteration, or kill him," Vall said. "What do you know about
him?"
"Well, this Careba, the town he bosses, is a little walled town up in
the hills. Everybody there is related to everybody else; this man we
have, Coru-hin-Irigod, is the son of a sister of Nebu-hin-Abenoz's
wife. They're all bandits and slavers and cattle rustlers and what