Time Crime
have you. For the last ten years, Nebu-hin-Abenoz has been buying
slaves from some secret source. Before the Kholghoor Sector people
began coming in, they were mostly white, with a few brown people who
might have been Polynesians. No Negroes--there's no black race on this
sector, and I suppose the paratime slavers didn't want too many
questions asked. Coru-hin-Irigod, under narco-hypnosis, said that they
were all outlanders, speaking strange languages."
"Ten years! And this is the first hint we've had of it," Vall said.
"That's not a bright mark for any of us. I'll bet the slave population
on some of these Esaron time lines is an anthropologist's nightmare."
"Why, if this has been going on for ten years, there must have been
millions upon millions of people dragged from their own time lines
into slavery!" Dalla said in a shocked voice.
"Ten years may not be all of it," Vall said. "This Nebu-hin-Abenoz
looks like the only tangible lead we have, at present. How does he
operate?"
"About once every ten days, he'll take ten or fifteen men and go a
day's ride--that may be as much as fifty miles; these Caleras have
good horses and they're hard riders--into the hills. He'll take a big
bag of money, all gold. After dark, when he has made camp, a couple of
strangers in Calera dress will come in. He'll go off with them, and
after about an hour, he'll come back with eight or ten of these
strangers and a couple of hundred slaves, always chained in batches of
ten. Nebu-hin-Abenoz pays for them, makes arrangements for the next
meeting, and the next morning he and his party start marching the
slaves to Careba. I might add that, until now, these slaves have been
sold to the mines east of Careba; these are the first that have gotten
into the coastal country."
"That's why this hasn't come to light before, then. The conveyer comes
in every ten days, at about the same place?"
"Yes. I've been thinking of a way we might trap them," Skordran Kirv
said. "I'll need more men, and equipment."
"Order them from Regional or General Reserve." Vall told him. "This
thing's going to have overtop priority till it's cleared up."
He was mentally cursing Vulthor Tharn's procedure-bound timidity as
the conveyer flickered and solidified around them and the overhead red
light turned green.
* * * * *
They emerged into the interior of a long shed, adobe-walled and
thatch-roofed, with small barred windows set high above the earth
floor. It was cool and shadowy, and the air was heavy with the
fragrance of citrus fruits. There were bins along the walls, some
partly full of oranges, and piles of wicker baskets. Another conveyer
dome stood beside the one in which they had arrived; two men in white
cloaks and riding boots sat on the edge of one of the bins, smoking
and talking.
Skordran Kirv introduced them--Gathon Dard and Krador Arv, special
detectives--and asked if anything new had come up. Krador Arv shook
his head.
"We still have about forty to go," he said. "Nothing new in their
stories; still the same two time lines."
"These people," Skordran Kirv explained, "were all peons on the estate
of a Kharanda noble just above the big bend of the Ganges. The Croutha
hit their master's estate about a ten-days ago, elapsed time. In
telling about their capture, most of them say that their master's wife
killed herself with a dagger after the Croutha killed her husband,
but about one out of ten say that she was kidnaped by the Croutha. Two
different time lines, of course. The ones who tell the suicide story
saw no firearms among the Croutha; the ones who tell the kidnap story
say that they all had some kind of muskets and pistols. We're making
synthetic summaries of the two stories."
"We're having trouble with the locals about all these strangers coming
in," Gathon Dard added. "They're getting curious."
"We'll have to take a chance on that," Vall said. "Are the
interrogations still going on? Then let's have a look-in at them."
The big double doors at the end of the shed were barred on the inside.
Krador Arv unlocked a small side door, letting Vall, Dalla and Gathon
Dard out. In the yard outside, a gang of slaves were unloading a big
wagon of oranges and packing them into hampers; they were guarded by a
couple of native riflemen who seemed mostly concerned with keeping
them away from the shed, and a man in a white cloak was watching the
guards for the same purpose. He walked over and introduced himself to
Vall.
"Golzan Doth, local alias Dosu Golan. I'm Consolidated Outtime
Foodstuffs' manager here."
"Nasty business for you people," Vall sympathized. "If it's any
consolation, it's a bigger headache for us."
"Have you any idea what's going to be done about these slaves?"
Golzan Doth asked. "I have to remember that the Company has forty
thousand Paratemporal Exchange Units invested in them. The top office
was very specific in requesting information about that."
Vall shook his head. "That's over my echelon," he said. "Have to be
decided by the Paratime Commission. I doubt if your company'll suffer.
You bought them innocently, in conformity with local custom. Ever buy
slaves from this Coru-hin-Irigod before?"
"I'm new, here. The man I'm replacing broke his neck when his horse
put a foot in a gopher hole about two ten-days ago."
Beside him, Vall could see Dalla nod as though making a mental note.
When she got back to Home Time Line, she'd put a crew of mediums to
work trying to contact the discarnate former plantation manager; at
Rhogom Institute, she had been working on the problem of return of a
discarnate personality from outtime.
"A few times," Skordran Kirv said. "Nothing suspicious; all local
stuff. We questioned Coru-hin-Irigod pretty closely on that point, and
he says that this is the first time he ever brought a batch of
Nebu-hin-Abenoz's outlanders this far west."
* * * * *
The interrogations were being conducted inside the plantation house,
in the secret central rooms where the paratimers lived. Skordran Kirv
used a door-activator to slide open a hidden door.
"I suppose I don't have to warn either of you that any positive
statement made in the hearing of a narco-hypnotized subject--" he
began.
"... Has the effect of hypnotic suggestion--" Vall picked up after
him.
"... And should be avoided unless such suggestion is intended," Dalla
finished.
Skordran Kirv laughed, opening another, inner door, and stood aside.
In what had been the paratimers' recreation room, most of the
furniture had been shoved into the corners. Four small tables had been
set up, widely spaced and with screens between; across each of them,
with an electric recorder between, an almost naked Kharanda slave
faced a Paratime Police psychist. At a long table at the far side of
the room, four men and two girls were working over stacks of cards and
two big charts.
"Phrakor Vuln," the man who was working on the charts introduced
himself. "Synthesist." He introduced the others.
Vall made a point of the fact that Dalla was his wife, in case any of
the cops began to get ideas, and mentioned that she spoke Kharanda,
had spent some time on the Fourth Level Kholghoor, and was a qualified
psychist.
"What have you got, so far?" he asked.
"Two different time lines, and two different gangs of Wizard
Traders," Phrakor Vuln said. "We've established the latter from
physical descriptions and because both batches were sold by the
Croutha at equivalent periods of elapsed time."
Vall picked up one of the kidnap-story cards and glanced at it.
"I notice there's a fair verbal description of these firearms, and
mention of electric whips," he said. "I'm curious about where they
came from."
"Well, this is how we reconstructed them, Chief's Assistant," one of
the girls said, handing him a couple of sheets of white drawing paper.
The sketches had been done with soft pencil; they bore repeated
erasures and corrections. That of the whip showed a cylindrical
handle, indicated as twelve inches in length and one in diameter,
fitted with a thumb-switch.
"That's definitely Second Level Khiftan," Vall said, handing it back.
"Made of braided copper or silver wire and powered with a little
nuclear-conversion battery in the grip. They heat up to about two
hundred centigrade; produce really painful burns."
"Why, that's beastly!" Dalla exclaimed.
"Anything on the Khiftan Sector is." Skordran Kirv looked at the four
slaves at the tables. "We don't have a really bad case here, now. A
few of these people were lash-burned horribly, though."
Vall was looking at the other sketches. One was a musket, with a wide
butt and a band-fastened stock; the lock-mechanism, vaguely flintlock,
had been dotted in tentatively. The other was a long pistol, similarly
definite in outline and vague in mechanical detail; it was merely a
knob-butted miniature of the musket.
"I've seen firearms like these; have a lot of them in my collection,"
he said, handing back the sketches. "Low-order mechanical or
high-order pre-mechanical cultures. Fact is, things like those could
have been made on the Kholghoor Sector, if the Kharandas had learned
to combine sulfur, carbon and nitrates to make powder."
The interrogator at one of the tables had evidently heard all his
subject could tell him. He rose, motioning the slave to stand.
"Now, go with that man," he said in Kharanda, motioning to one of the
detectives in native guard uniform. "You will trust him; he is your
friend and will not harm you. When you have left this room, you will
forget everything that has happened here, except that you were kindly
treated and that you were given wine to drink and your hurts were
anointed. You will tell the others that we are their friends and that
they have nothing to fear from us. And you will not try to remove the
mark from the back of your left hand."
As the detective led the slave out a door at the other side of the
room, the psychist came over to the long table, handing over a card
and lighting a cigarette.
"Suicide story," he said to one of the girls, who took the card.
"Anything new?"
"Some minor details about the sale to the Caleras on this time line. I
think we've about scraped bottom."
"You can't say that," Phrakor Vuln objected. "The very last one may
give us something nobody else had noticed."
Another subject was sent out. The interrogator came over to the table.
"One of the kidnap-story crowd," he said. "This one was right beside
that Croutha who took the shot at the wild pig or whatever it was on
the way to the Wizard Traders' camp. Best description of the guns
we've gotten so far. No question that they're flintlocks." He saw
Verkan Vall. "Oh, hello, Assistant Verkan. What do you make of them?
You're an authority on outtime weapons, I understand."
"I'd have to see them. These people simply don't think mechanically
enough to give a good description. A lot of peoples make flintlock
firearms."
He started running over, in his mind, the paratemporal areas in which
gunpowder but not the percussion-cap was known. Expanding cultures,
which had progressed as far as the former but not the latter. Static
cultures, in which an accidental discovery of gunpowder had never been
followed up by further research. Post-debacle cultures, in which a few
stray bits of ancient knowledge had survived.
Another interrogator came over, and then the fourth. For a while they
sat and talked and drank coffee, and then the next quartet of slaves,
two men and two women, were brought in. One of the women had been
badly blistered by the electric whips of the Wizard Traders; in spite
of reassurances, all were visibly apprehensive.