“You’re sure of that?”
“The Organization is too thorough not to have had a spy in Salgath’s household. It wasn’t Zinganna, because she’s volunteered to talk to us under narco-hyp. So who does that leave?”
“Well, that’s different; that makes them suspects.” The lieutenant seemed relieved. “We’ll pump that pair out right away.”
When he got back to Tortha Karf’s office, the Chief was awake, and doodling on his notepad with his multicolor pen. Vall looked at the pad and winced; the Chief was doodling bugs again—red ants with black legs, and blue-and-green beetles. Then he saw that the psychist, Nentrov Dard, was drinking straight 150-proof palm-rum.
“Well, tell me the worst,” he said.
“Our boy’s memory-obliterated,” Nentrov Dard said, draining his glass and filling it again. “And he’s plastered with pseudo-memories a foot thick. It’ll be five or six ten-days before we can get all that stuff peeled off and get him unblocked. I put him to sleep and had him transposed to Police Terminal. I’m going there, myself, tomorrow morning, after I’ve had some sleep, and get to work on him. If you’re hoping to get anything useful out of him in time to head off this Council crisis that’s building up, just forget it.”
“And that leaves us right back with our old friends, the Wizard Traders,” Tortha Karf added. “And if they’ve decided to suspend activities on the Kholghoor Sector, too—” He began drawing a big blue and black spider in the middle of the pad.
Nentrov Dard crushed out his cigar, drank his rum, and got to his feet.
“Well, good night, Chief; Vall. If you decide to wake me up before 1000, send somebody you want to get rid of in a hurry.” He walked around the deck and out the side door.
“I hope they don’t,” Vall said to Tortha Karf. “Really, though, I doubt if they do. This is their chance to pick up a lot of slaves cheaply; the Croutha are too busy to bother haggling. I’m going through to PolTerm, now; when Dalla and Zinganna get through, tell them to join me there.”
On Police Terminal, he found Kostran Galth, the agent who had been selected to impersonate Salgath Trod. After calling Zulthran Torv, the mathematician in charge of the Computer Office and giving him the Esaron timeline designations and Nentrov Dard’s ideas about them, he spent about an hour briefing Kostran Galth on the role he was to play. Finally, he undressed and went to bed on a couch in the rest room behind the office.
It was noon when he woke. After showering, shaving and dressing hastily, he went out to the desk for breakfast, which arrived while he was putting a call through to Ranthar Jard, at Nharkan Equivalent.
“Your idea paid off, Chief’s Assistant,” the Kholghoor SecReg Subchief told him. “The slaves gave us a lot of physical description data on the estate, and told us about new fields that had been cleared, and a dam this Lord Ghromdour was building to flood some new rice-paddies. We located a belt of about five parayears where these improvements had been made: we started boomeranging the whole belt, timeline by timeline. So far, we have ten or fifteen pictures of the main square at Sohram showing Croutha with firearms, and pictures of Wizard Trader camps and conveyer heads on the same timelines. Here, let me show you; this is from an airboat over the forest outside the equivalent of Sohram.”
There was no jungle visible when the view changed; nothing but clusters of steel towers and platforms and buildings that marked conveyer heads, and a large rectangle of red-and-white antigrav-buoys moored to warn air traffic out of the area being boomeranged. The pickup seemed to be pointed downward from the bow of an airboat circling at about ten thousand feet.
“Balls ready to go,” a voice called, and then repeated a string of timeline designations. “Estimated return, 1820, give or take four minutes.”
“Varth,” Ranthar Jard said, evidently out of the boat’s radio. “Your telecast is being beamed on Dhergabar Equivalent; Chief’s Assistant Verkan is watching. When do you estimate your next return?”
“Any moment, now, sir; we’re holding this drop till they rematerialize.”
Vall watched unblinkingly, his fork poised halfway to his mouth. Suddenly, about a thousand feet below the eye of the pickup, there was a series of blue flashes, and, an instant later, a blossoming of red-and-white parachutes, ejected from the photo-reconnaissance balls that had returned from the Kholghoor Sector.
“All right; drop away,” the boat captain called. There was a gush, from underneath, of eight-inch spheres, their conductor-mesh twinkling golden-bright in the sunlight. They dropped in a tight cluster for a thousand or so feet and then flashed and vanished. From the ground, six or eight aircars rose to meet the descending parachutes and catch them.
The screen went cubist for a moment, and then Ranthar Jard’s swarthy, wide-jawed face looked out of it again. He took his pipe from his mouth.
“We’ll probably get a positive out of the batch you just saw coming in,” he said. “We get one out of about every two drops.”
“Message a list of the timeline designations you’ve gotten so far to Zulthran Torv, at Computer Office here,” Vall said. “He’s working on the Esaron Sector dope; we think a pattern can be established. I’ll be seeing you in about five hours; I’m rocketing out of here as soon as I get a few more things cleared up here.”
Zulthran Torv, normally cautious to the degree of pessimism, was jubilant when Vall called him.
“We have something, Vall,” he said. “It is, roughly, what Dr. Nentrov suggested—each of the intervals between the designations is a very minute but very exact fraction of the difference between lesser designation and the baseline designation.”
“You have the baseline designation?” Vall demanded.
“Oh, yes. That’s what I was telling you. We worked that out from the designations you gave me.” He recited it.
