gulped more coffee.
"Can do, Assistant Verkan. I think I'll send somebody to wake upSubchief Ranthar, right now. Want to talk to him."
"Won't be necessary. You're recording this call, of course? Then playit back to him. And get cracking with the slaves; you want enoughinformation out of them to enable you to start boomerang balling assoon as the sun's high enough."
* * * * *
He broke off the connection and sent out for coffee for himself. Thenhe put through a call to Novilan Equivalent, in western North America.
It was 1530, there, when he got Vulthor Tharn on the screen.
"Good afternoon. Assistant Verkan. I suppose you're calling about theslave business. I've turned the entire matter over to Field AgentSkordran; gave him a temporary rank of Deputy Subchief. That's subjectto your approval and Chief Tortha's, of course--"
"Make the appointment permanent," Vall said. "I'll have a confirmationalong from Chief Tortha directly. And let me talk to him now, if youplease. Subchief Vulthor."
"Yes, sir. Switching you over now." The screen went into a beautifulburst of abstract art, and cleared, after a while, with Skordran Kirvlooking out of it.
"Hello, Deputy Skordran, and congratulations. What's come up since wehad Nebu-hin-Abenoz cut out from under us?"
"We went in on that time line, that same night, with an airboat andmade a recon in the hills back of Careba. Scared the fear of Safarinto a party of Caleras while we were working at low altitude, by theway. We found the conveyer-head site: hundred-foot circle with all thegrass and loose dirt transposed off it and a pole pen, very unsanitarywhere about two-three hundred slaves would be kept at a time. Noindications of use in the last ten days. We did some pretty thoroughboomeranging on that spatial equivalent over a couple of thousand timelines and found thirty more of them. I believe the slavers have closedout the whole Esaron Sector operation, at least temporarily."
That was what he'd been afraid of; he hoped they wouldn't do the samething on the Kholghoor Sector.
"Let me have the designations of the time lines on which you foundconveyer heads," he said.
"Just a moment, Chief's Assistant; I'll photoprint them to you. Setfor reception?"
Vall opened a slide under the screen and saw that the photoprint filmwas in place, then closed it again, nodding. Skordran Kirv fed a sheetof paper into his screen cabinet and his arm moved forward out of thepicture.
"On, sir," he said. He and Vall counted ten seconds together, and thenSkordran Kirv said: "Through to you." Vall pressed a lever under hisscreen, and a rectangle of microcopy print popped out.
"That's about all I have, sir. Want me to keep my troops ready here,or shall I send them somewhere else?"
"Keep them ready, Kirv," Vall told him. "You may need them beforelong. Call you later."
He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged printwith him to the conveyer room. There was something odd about the listof time line designations. They were expressed numerically, in FirstLevel notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exactexpression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers. Vall had only ageneral-education smattering of mathematics--enough to qualify him forthe chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the FourthLevel Europo-American Sector--and he could not identify thepeculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort ofpattern. Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of thechairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him,and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished. Hewoke, the list of time line designations in his hand, when theconveyor rematerialized on Home Time Line. Putting it in his pocket,he hurried to an antigrav shaft and floated up to the floor on whichTortha Karf's office was.
* * * * *
Tortha Karf was asleep in his chair; Dalla was eating a dinner thathad been brought in to her--something better than the sandwich and mugof coffee Vall had mentioned to Thalvan Dras. Several of the bureauchiefs who had been there when he had gone out had left, and thepsychist who had taken charge of the prisoner was there.
"I think he's coming out of the drug, now," he reported. "Stillasleep, though. We want him to waken naturally before we start on him.They'll call me as soon as he shows signs of stirring."
"The Opposition's claiming, now, that we drugged and hypnotizedSalgath into making that visiscreen confession," Dalla said. "Can youthink of any way you could do that without making the subjectincapable of lying?"
"Pseudo-memories," the psychist said. "It would take about three timesas long as the time between Salgath Trod's departure from hisapartment and the time of the telecast, though--"
"You know much higher math?" Vall asked the psychist.
"Well, enough to handle my job. Neuron-synapse inter-relations,memory-and-association patterns, that kind of thing, all have to beexpressed mathematically."
Vall nodded and handed him the time-line designation list.
"See any kind of a pattern there?" he asked.
The psychist looked at the paper and blanked his face as he drew onhypnotically-acquired information.
"Yes. I'd say that all the numbers are related in some kind of aseries to some other number. Simplified down to kindergarten level,say the difference between A and B is, maybe, one-decillionth of thedifference between X and A, and the difference between B and C isone-decillionth of the difference between X and B, and so on--"
A voice came out of one of the communication boxes:
"Dr. Nentrov; the patient's out of the drug, and he's beginning tostir about."
"That's it," the psychist said. "I have to run." He handed the sheetback to Vall, took a last drink from his coffee cup, and bolted out ofthe room.
Dalla picked up the sheet of paper and looked at it. Vall told herwhat it was.
"If those time lines are in regular series, they relate to the baseline of operations," she said. "Maybe you can have that worked out. Ican see how it would be; a stated interval between the Esaron Sectorlines, to simplify transposition control settings."
"That was what I was thinking. It's not quite as simple as Dr. Nentrovexpressed it, but that could be the general idea. We might be able towork out the location of the base line from that. There seems to be abreak in the number sequence in here; that would be the time lineSkordran Kirv found those slaves on." He reached for the pipe he hadleft on the desk when he had gone to Police Terminal and began fillingit.
A little later, a buzzer sounded and a light came on on one of thecommunication boxes. He flipped the switch and said, "Verkan Vallhere." Sothran Barth's voice came cut of the box.
"They've just brought in Salgath Trod's servants. Picked them up asthey came out of the house conveyer at the apartment building. I don'tbelieve they know what's happened."
Vall flipped a switch and twiddled a dial; a viewscreen lit up,showing the landing stage. The police car had just landed: onedetective had gotten out, and was helping the girl, Zinganna, who hadbeen Salgath Trod's housekeeper and mistress, to descend. She wasreally beautiful. Vall thought: rather tall, slender, with dark eyesand a creamy light-brown skin. She wore a black cloak, and, under it,a black and silver evening gown. A single jewel twinkled in her blackhair. She could have very easily passed for a woman of his own race.
The housemaid and the butler were a couple of entirely differentarticles. Both were about four or five generations from Fourth LevelPrimitive savagery. The maid, in garishly cheap finery, was big-bonedand heavy-bodied, with red-brown hair; she looked like a member of oneof the northern European reindeer-herding peoples who had barelymanaged to progress as far as the bow and arrow. The butler wasprobably a mixture of half a dozen primitive races; he was wearing oneof his late master's evening suits, a bright mellow-pink, which wasdistinctly unflattering to his complexion.
The sound-pickup was too far away to give him what they were saying,but the butler and maid were waving their arms and protestingvehemently. One of the detectives took th
e woman by the arm; shejerked it loose and aimed a backhand slap at him. He blocked it on hisforearm. Immediately, the girl in black turned and said something toher, and she subsided. Vall said, into the box:
"Barth, have the girl in the black cloak brought down to Number FourInterview Room. Put the other two in separate detention cubicles;we'll talk to them later." He broke the connection and got to hisfeet. "Come on, Dalla. I want you to help me with the girl."
"Just try and stop me," Dalla told him. "Any interviews you have withthat little item, I want to sit in on."
* * * * *
The Proletarian girl, still guarded