A man appeared for a moment in the lighted doorway of the shed, then stepped outside.
“Look!” Dalla cried. “There’s Vall!”
“There’s Assistant Verkan, now,” the commentator agreed. “Chief’s Assistant, would you mind saying a few words, here? I know you’re a busy man, sir, but you are also the public hero of Home Timeline, and everybody will be glad if you say something to them—”
Tortha Karf sealed the door of the apartment behind them, then activated one of the robot servants and sent it gliding out of the room for drinks. Verkan Vall took off his belt and holster and laid them aside, then dropped into a deep chair with a sigh of relief. Dalla advanced to the middle of the room and stood looking about in surprised delight.
“Didn’t expect this, from the mess outside?” Vall asked. “You know, you really are on the paracops, now. Nobody off the Force knows about this hideout of the Chief’s.”
“You’d better find a place like this, too,” Tortha Karf advised. “From now on, you’ll have about as much privacy at that apartment in Turquoise Towers as you’d enjoy on the stage of Dhergabar Opera House.”
“Just what is my new position?” Vall asked, hunting his cigarette case out of his tunic. “Duplicate Chief of Paratime Police?”
The robot came back with three tall glasses and a refrigerated decanter on its top. It stopped in front of Tortha Karf and slewed around on its treads; he filled a glass and sent it to the chair where Dalla had seated herself; when she got a drink, she sent it to Vall. Vall sent if back to Tortha Karf, who turned it off.
“No; you have the modifier in the wrong place. You’re Chief of Duplicate Paratime Police. You take the setup you have now, and expand it; continue the present lines of investigation, and be ready to exploit anything new that comes up. You won’t bother with any of this routine flying-saucer-scare stuff; just handle the Organization business. That’ll keep you busy for a long time, I’m afraid.”
“I notice you slammed down on the first Council member who began shouting about how you’d wiped out the Great Paratemporal Crime-Ring,” Vall said.
“Yes. It isn’t wiped out, and it won’t be wiped out for a long time. I shall be unspeakably delighted if, when I turn my job over to you, you have it wiped out. And even then, there’ll be a loose end to pick up every now and then till you retire.”
“We have Council and the Management with us, now,” Vall said. “This was the first secret session of Executive Council in over two thousand years. And I thought I’d drop dead when they passed that motion to submit themselves to narco-hypnosis.”
“A few Councilmen are going to drop dead before they can be narco-hypped,” Dalla prophesied over the rim of her glass.
“A few have already. I have a list of about a dozen of them who have had fatal accidents or committed suicide, or just died or vanished since the news of your raid broke. Four of them I saw, in the screen, jump up and run out as soon as the news came in, on One-Six-Five Day. And a lot of other people; our friend Yandar Yadd’s dropped out of sight, for one. You heard what we got out of those servants of Salgath Trod’s?”
“I didn’t,” Dalla said. “What?”
“Both spies for the Organization. They reported to a woman named Farilla, who ran a fortune-telling parlor in the Prole district. Her occult powers didn’t warn her before we sent a squad of plain-clothes men for her. That was an entirely illegal arrest, by the way, but it netted us a list of about three hundred prominent political, business and social persons whose servants have been reporting to her. She thought she was working for a telecast gossipist.”
“That’s why we have a new butler, darling,” Vall interrupted. “Kandagro was reporting on us.”
“Who did she pass the reports on to?” Dalla asked.
Tortha Karf beamed. “She thinks more like a cop every time I talk to her,” he told Vall. “You better appoint her your Special Assistant. Why, about 1800 every day, some Prole would come in, give the recognition sign, and get the day’s accumulation. We only got one of them, a fourteen-year-old girl. We’re having some trouble getting her deconditioned to a point where she can be hypnotized into talking; by the time we do, they’ll have everything closed out, I suppose. What’s the latest from Abzar Sector? I missed the last report in the rush to get to this Council session.”
“All stalled. We’re still boomeranging the sector, but it’s about five billion timelines deep, and the pattern for the Kholghoor and Esaron Sectors doesn’t seem to apply. I think they have a lot of these Abzar timelines close together, and they get from one to another via some terminal on Fifth Level.”
Tortha Karf nodded. It was impossible to make a transposition of less than ten parayears—a hundred thousand timelines. It was impossible that the field could build and collapse that soon.
“We also think that this Abzar timeline was only used for the Croutha-Wizard Trader operation. Nothing we found there was more than a couple of months old; nothing since the last rainy season in India, for instance. Everything was cleaned out on Skordran Kirv’s end.”
“Tell him to try the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Valleys,” Tortha Karf said. “A lot of those slaves are sure
