“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 before long. Call you later.”
He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged print with him to the conveyer room. There was something odd about the list of timeline designations. They were expressed numerically, in First Level notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exact expression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers. Vall had only a general-education smattering of mathematics—enough to qualify him for the chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector—and he could not identify the peculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort of pattern. Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of the chairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him, and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished. He woke, the list of timeline designations in his hand, when the conveyor rematerialized on Home Timeline. Putting it in his pocket, he hurried to an antigrav shaft and floated up to the floor on which Tortha Karf’s office was.
Tortha Karf was asleep in his chair; Dalla was eating a dinner that had been brought in to her—something better than the sandwich and mug of coffee Vall had mentioned to Thalvan Dras. Several of the bureau chiefs who had been there when he had gone out had left, and the psychist who had taken charge of the prisoner was there.
“I think he’s coming out of the drug, now,” he reported. “Still asleep, 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 hypnotized Salgath into making that visiscreen confession,” Dalla said. “Can you think of any way you could do that without making the subject incapable of lying?”
“Pseudo-memories,” the psychist said. “It would take about three times as long as the time between Salgath Trod’s departure from his apartment and the time of the telecast, though—”
“You know much higher math?” Vall asked the psychist.
“Well, enough to handle my job. Neuron-synapse interrelations, memory-and-association patterns, that kind of thing, all have to be expressed mathematically.”
Vall nodded and handed him the timeline designation list.
“See any kind of a pattern there?” he asked.
The psychist looked at the paper and blanked his face as he drew on hypnotically-acquired information.
“Yes. I’d say that all the numbers are related in some kind of a series to some other number. Simplified down to kindergarten level, say the difference between A and B is, maybe, one-decillionth of the difference between X and A, and the difference between B and C is one-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 to stir about.”
“That’s it,” the psychist said. “I have to run.” He handed the sheet back to Vall, took a last drink from his coffee cup, and bolted out of the room.
Dalla picked up the sheet of paper and looked at it. Vall told her what it was.
“If those timelines are in regular series, they relate to the base line of operations,” she said. “Maybe you can have that worked out. I can see how it would be; a stated interval between the Esaron Sector lines, to simplify transposition control settings.”
“That was what I was thinking. It’s not quite as simple as Dr. Nentrov expressed it, but that could be the general idea. We might be able to work out the location of the base line from that. There seems to be a break in the number sequence in here; that would be the timeline Skordran Kirv found those slaves on.” He reached for the pipe he had left on the desk when he had gone to Police Terminal and began filling it.
A little later, a buzzer sounded and a light came on on one of the communication boxes. He flipped the switch and said, “Verkan Vall here.” Sothran Barth’s voice came cut of the box.
“They’ve just brought in Salgath Trod’s servants. Picked them up as they came out of the house conveyer at the apartment building. I don’t believe 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: one detective had gotten out, and was helping the girl, Zinganna, who had been Salgath Trod’s housekeeper and mistress, to descend. She was really beautiful. Vall thought: rather tall, slender, with dark eyes and 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 black hair. She could have very easily passed for a woman of his own race.
The housemaid and the butler were a couple of entirely different articles. Both were about four or five generations from Fourth Level Primitive savagery. The maid, in garishly cheap finery, was big-boned and heavy-bodied, with red-brown hair; she looked like a member of one of the northern European reindeer-herding peoples who had barely managed to progress as far as the bow and arrow. The butler was probably a mixture of half a dozen primitive races; he was wearing one of his late master’s evening suits, a bright mellow-pink, which was distinctly 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 protesting vehemently. One of the detectives took the woman by the arm; she jerked it loose and aimed a backhand slap at him. He blocked it on his forearm. Immediately, the girl in black turned and said something to her, and she subsided. Vall said, into the box:
“Barth, have the girl in
