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 timelines.”
“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 timelines, 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 Timeline, 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 timelines, 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
