He looked at the sunlight falling through the window on the still recumbent form of his companion, Faru-hin-Obaran. Outside, he could hear the sounds of the plantation coming to life—an ax thudding on wood, the clatter of pans from the kitchens. Crossing to Faru-hin-Obaran’s bed, he grasped the sleeper by the ankle, tugging.
“Waken, Faru!” he shouted. “Get up and clear the fumes from your head! We start back to Careba today!”
Faru swore groggily and pushed himself into a sitting position, fumbling on the floor for his trousers.
“What day’s this?” he asked.
“The day after we went to bed, ninny!” Then Coru-hin-Irigod wrinkled his brow. He could remember, clearly enough, the sale of the slaves, but after that—Oh, well, he’d been drinking; it would all come back to him, after a while.
Verkan Vall rubbed his hand over his face wearily, started to light another cigarette, and threw it across the room in disgust. What he needed was a drink—a long drink of cool, tart white wine, laced with brandy—and then he needed to sleep.
“We’re absolutely nowhere!” Ranthar Jard said. “Of course they’re operating on timelines we’ve never penetrated. The fact that they’re supplying the Croutha with guns proves that; there isn’t a firearm on any of the timelines our people are legitimately exploiting. And there are only about three billion timelines on this belt of the Croutha invasion—”
“If we could think of a way to reduce it to some specific area of paratime—” one of Ranthar Jard’s deputies began.
“That’s precisely what we’ve been trying to do, Klav,” Vall said. “We haven’t done it.”
Dalla, who had withdrawn from the discussion and was on a couch at the side of the room, surrounded by reports and abstracts and summaries, looked up.
“I took hours and hours of hypno-mech on Kholghoor Sector religions, before I went out on that wild-goose chase for psychokinesis and precognition data,” she said. “About six or eight hundred years ago, there were religious wars and heresies and religious schisms all over the Kharanda country. No matter how uniform the Kholghoor Sector may be otherwise, there are dozens and dozens of small belts and sub-sectors of different religions or sects or god-cults.”
“That’s right,” Ranthar Jard agreed, brightening. “We have hagiologists who know all that stuff; we’ll have a couple of them interrogate those slaves. I don’t know how much they can get out of them—lot of peasants, won’t be up on the theological niceties—but a synthesis of what we get from the lot of them—”
“That’s an idea,” Vall agreed. “About the first idea we’ve had, here—Oh, how about politics, too? Check on who’s the king, what the stories about the royal family are, that sort of thing.”
Ranthar Jard looked at the map on the wall. “The Croutha have only gotten halfway to Nharkan, here. Say we transpose detectives in at night on some of these timelines we think are promising, and check up at the tax-collection offices on a big landowner north of Jhirda named Ghromdour? That might get us something.”
“Well, I don’t want you to think we’re trying to get out of work, Chief’s Assistant,” one of the deputies said, “but is there any real necessity for our trying to locate the Wizard Trader timelines? If you can get them from the Esaron Sector, it’ll be the same, won’t it?”
“Marv, in this business you never depend on just one lead,” Ranthar Jard told him. “And beside, when Skordran Kirv’s gang hits the base of operations in North America, there’s no guarantee that they may not have time to send off a radio warning to the crowd at the base here in India. We have to hit both places at once.”
“Well, that, too,” Vall said. “But the main thing is to get these Wizard Trader camps on the Kholghoor Sector cleaned out. How are you fixed for men and equipment, for a big raid, Jard?”
Ranthar Jard shrugged. “I can get about five hundred men with conveyers, including a couple of two-hundred-footers to carry airboats,” he said.
“Not enough. Skordran Kirv has one complete armored brigade, one airborne infantry brigade, and an air cavalry regiment, with Ghaldron-Hesthor equipment for a simultaneous transposition,” Vall said.
“Where in blazes did he get them all?” Ranthar Jard demanded.
“They’re guard troops, from Service Sector and Industrial Sector. We’ll get you the same sort of a force. I only hope we don’t have another Prole insurrection while they’re away—”
“Well, don’t think I’m trying to argue policy with you,” Ranthar Jard said, “but that could raise a dreadful stink on Home Timeline. Especially on top of this news-break about the slave trade.”
“We’ll have to take a chance on that,” Vall said. “If you’re worried about what the book says, forget it. We’re throwing the book away, on this operation. Do you realize that this thing is a threat to the whole Paratime Civilization?”
“Of course I do,” Ranthar Jard said. “I know the doctrine of Paratime Security as well as you or anybody else. The question is, does the public realize it?”
A buzzer sounded. Ranthar Jard pressed a switch on the intercom-box in front of him and said: “Ranthar here. Well?”
“Visiphone call, top urgency, just came in for Chief’s Assistant Verkan, from Novilan Equivalent. Where can I put it through, sir?”
“Here; booth seven.” Ranthar Jard pointed across the room, nodding to Vall. “In just a moment.”
Gathon Dard and Antrath Alv—temporary local aliases, Ganadara and Atarazola—sat relaxed in their saddles, swaying to the motion of their horses. They wore the rust-brown hooded cloaks of the northern Jeseru people, in sober contrast to the red and yellow and blue striped robes and sunbonnets of the Caleras in whose company they rode. They carried short repeating carbines in saddle scabbards, and heavy revolvers and long knives on their belts, and each led six heavily-laden packhorses.
Coru-hin-Irigod, riding beside Ganadara, pointed up the trail ahead.
“From up there,” he said, speaking in Acalan, the lingua franca of the North American West Coast on that sector, “we can see across the
