TIME PRIME (6 page)

“When was this?” Vall asked.

“Yesterday. One-Five-Nine Day. About 1500 local time.”

“Twenty-three hundred Dhergabar time,” Vall commented.

“Yes. And I just found out about it. Came in with the late morning generalized report-digest; very inconspicuous item, no special urgency symbol or anything. Fortunately, one of the report editors spotted it and messaged Police Terminal for a copy of the original report.”

“It’s been a long time since we had anything like that,” Vall said, studying the glowing tip of his cigarette, his face wearing the curiously withdrawn expression of a conscious memory recall. “Fifty years ago; the time that gang kidnapped some girls from Second Level Triplanetary Empire Sector and sold them into the harem of some Fourth Level Indo-Turanian sultan.”

“Yes. That was your first independent case, Vall. That was when I began to think you’d really make a cop. One renegade First Level citizen and four or five ServSec Prole hoodlums with a stolen fifty-foot conveyer. This looks like a rather more ambitious operation.”

Dalla got one of her own cigarettes out and lit it. Vall and Tortha Karf were talking cop talk about method of operation and possible size of the gang involved, and why the slaves had been shipped all the way from India to the west coast of North America.

“Always ready sale for slaves on the Esaron Sector,” Vall was saying. “And so many small independent states and different languages that outtimers wouldn’t be particularly conspicuous.”

“And with this barbarian invasion going on the Kholghoor Sector, slaves could be picked up cheaply,” Tortha Karf added.

In spite of her determination to boycott the conversation, curiosity began to get the better of her. She had spent a year and a half on the Kholghoor Sector, investigating alleged psychic powers of the local priests. There’d been nothing to it—the prophecies weren’t precognition, they were shrewd inferences, and the miracles weren’t psychokinesis, they were sleight-of-hand. She found herself asking: “What barbarian invasion’s this?”

“Oh, Central Asian nomadic people, the Croutha,” Tortha Karf told her. “They came down through Khyber Pass about three months ago, turned east, and hit the headwaters of the Ganges. Without punching a lot of buttons to find out exactly, I’d say they’re halfway to the delta country by now. Leader seems to be a chieftain called Llamh Droogh the Red. A lot of paratime trading companies are yelling for permits to introduce firearms in the Kholghoor Sector to protect their holdings there.”

She nodded. The Fourth Level Kholghoor Sector belonged to what was known as Indus-Ganges-Irrawaddy Basic Sector-Grouping—probability of civilization having developed late on the Indian subcontinent, with the rest of the world, including Europe, in Stone Age savagery or early Bronze Age barbarism. The Kharandas, the people among whom she had once done field-research work, had developed a pre-mechanical, animal-power, handcraft, edge-weapon culture. She could imagine the roads jammed with fugitives from the barbarian invaders, the conveyer hidden among the trees, the lurking slavers—

Watch it, Dalla! Don’t let the old scoundrel play on your feelings!

“Well, what do you want me to do, Chief?” Vall was asking.

“Well, I have to know just what this situation’s likely to develop into, and I want to know why Vulthor Tharn’s been sitting on this ever since Skordran Kirv reported it to him—”

“I can answer the second one now,” Vall replied. “Vulthor Tharn is due to retire in a few years. He has a negatively good, undistinguished record. He’s trying to play it safe.”

Tortha Karf nodded. “That’s what I thought. Look, Vall; suppose you and Dalla transpose from here to Police Terminal, and go to Novilan Equivalent, and give this a quick look-over and report to me, and then rocket to Zarabar Equivalent and go on with your trip to the Dwarma Sector. It may delay you eight or ten hours, but—”

“Closer to twenty-four,” Vall said. “I’d have to transpose to this plantation on the Esaron Sector. How about it, Dalla? Would you want to do that?”

She hesitated for a moment, angry with him. He didn’t want to refuse, and he was trying to make her do it for him.

“I know, it’s a confounded imposition, Dalla,” Tortha Karf told her. “But it’s important that I get a prompt and full estimate of the situation. This may be something very serious. If it’s an isolated incident, it can be handled in a routine manner, but I’m afraid it’s not. It has all the marks of a large-scale operation, and if this is a matter of mass kidnappings from one sector and transpositions to another, you can see what a threat this is to the Paratime Secret.”

“Moral considerations entirely aside,” Vall said. “We don’t need to discuss them; they’re too obvious.”

She nodded. For over twelve millennia, the people of her race and Vall’s and Tortha Karf ’s had been existing as parasites on all the innumerable other worlds of alternate probability on the lateral dimension of time. Smart parasites never injure their hosts, and try never to reveal their existence.

“We could do that, couldn’t we, Vall?” she asked, angry at herself now for giving in. “And if you want to question these slaves, I speak Kharanda, and I know how they think. And I’m a qualified and licensed narco-hypnotic technician.”

“Well, that’s splendid, Dalla!” Tortha Karf enthused. “Wait a moment; I’ll message Police Terminal to have a rocket ready for you.”

“I’ll need a hypno-mech for Kharanda myself,” Vall said. “Dalla, do you know Acalan?”

When she shook her head, he turned back to Tortha Karf. “Look; it’s about a four-hour rocket hop to Novilan Equivalent. Say we have the hypno-mech machines installed in the rocket; Dalla and I can take our language lessons on the way, and be ready to go to work as soon as we land.”

“Good idea,” Tortha Karf approved. “I’ll order that done, right away. Now—”

Oddly enough, she wasn’t feeling so angry now that she had committed herself and Vall. Come to think of it, she had never been on Police Terminal Time Line; very few people, outside the Paratime Police, ever had. And, she had always wanted to learn more about Vall’s work, and participate in it with him. And if she made him refuse, it would be something ugly between them all the time they spent on the Dwarma Sector. But this way—

The big circular conveyer room was crowded, as it had been every minute of every day for the past ten thousand years. At the great circular desk in the center, departing or returning police officers were checking in or out with the flat-topped cylindrical robot clerks, or talking to human attendants. Some were in the regulation green uniform; others, like himself, were in civilian clothes; more were in outtime costumes from all over paratime. Fringed robes and cloth-of-gold sashes and conical caps from the Second Level Khiftan Sector; Fourth Level Proto-Aryan mail and helmets; the short tunics and kilts of Fourth Level Alexandrian-Roman Sector; the Zarkantha loincloth and felt cap and daggers; there were priestly vestments stiff with gold, and military uniforms; there were trousers and jackboots and bare legs; blasters, and swords, and pistols, and bows and quivers, and spears. And the place was loud with a babel of voices and the clatter of teleprinters.

Dalla was looking about her in surprised delight; for her, the vacation had already begun. Verkan was glad; for a while, he had been afraid that she would be unhappy about it. He guided her through the crowd to the desk, spoke for a while to one of the human attendants, and found out which was their conveyer. It was a fixed-destination shuttler, operative only between Home Time Line and Police Terminal, from which most of the Paratime Police operations were routed. He put Dalla in through the sliding door, followed, and closed it behind him, locking it. Then, before he closed the starting switch, he drew a pistol-like weapon and checked it.

In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal transposition field was uninfluenced by material objects outside it. In practice, however, such objects occasionally intruded, and sometimes they were alive and hostile. The last time he had been in this conveyer room, he had seen a quartet of returning officers emerge from a conveyer dome dragging a dead lion by the tail. The sigma-ray needler, which he carried, was the only weapon which could be used under the circumstances. It had no effect whatever on any material structure and could be used inside an activated conveyer without deranging the conductor-mesh, as, say, a bullet or the vibration of an ultrasonic paralyzer would do, and it was instantly fatal to anything having a central nervous system. It was a good weapon to use outtime for that reason; also; even on the most civilized time-line, the most elaborate autopsy would reveal no specific cause of death.

“What’s the Esaron Sector like?” Dalla asked, as the conveyer dome around them coruscated with shifting light and vanished.

“Third Level; probability of abortive attempt to colonize this planet from Mars about a hundred thousand years ago,” he said. “A few survivors—a shipload or so—were left to shift for themselves while the parent civilization on Mars died out. They lost all vestiges of their original Martian culture, even memory of their extraterrestrial origin. About fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago, a reasonably high electrochemical civilization developed and they began working with nuclear energy and developed reaction-drive spaceships. But they’d concentrated so much 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 rocket ports 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 minute 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 Kharandas 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.”