“What’s the designation of your line, again?”
Verkan Vall told him. It was a short numerical term of six places, but it expressed a number of the order of ten to the fortieth power, exact to the last digit. Tortha Karf repeated it into his stenomemograph, with explanatory comment.
“There seems to be quite a few things going wrong, in that area,” he said. “Let’s see, now.”
He punched the designation on a keyboard; instantly, it appeared on a translucent screen in front of him. He punched another combination, and, at the top of the screen, under the number, there appeared:
Events, Past Elapsed Five Years.
He punched again; below this line appeared the subheading:
Events Involving Paratime Transposition.
Another code-combination added a third line:
(Attracting Public Notice Among Inhabitants.)
He pressed the start button; the headings vanished, to be replaced by page after page of print, succeeding one another on the screen as the two men read. They told strange and apparently disconnected stories—of unexplained fires and explosions; of people vanishing without trace; of unaccountable disasters to aircraft. There were many stories of an epidemic of mysterious disk-shaped objects seen in the sky, singly or in numbers. To each account was appended one or more reference-numbers. Sometimes Tortha Karf or Verkan Vall would punch one of these, and read, on an adjoining screen, the explanatory matter referred to.
Finally Tortha Karf leaned back and lit a fresh cigarette.
“Yes, indeed, Vall; very definitely we will have to take action in the matter of the runaway nighthound of the late Gavran Sarn,” he said. “I’d forgotten that that was the timeline onto which the Ardrath expedition launched those antigrav disks. If this extraterrestrial monstrosity turns up, on the heels of that ‘Flying Saucer’ business, everybody above the order of intelligence of a cretin will suspect some connection.”
“What really happened, in the Ardrath matter?” Verkan Vall inquired. “I was on the Third Level, on that Luvarian Empire operation, at the time.”
“That’s right; you missed that. Well, it was one of these joint-operation things. The Paratime Commission and the Space Patrol were experimenting with a new technique for throwing a spaceship into paratime. They used the cruiser Ardrath, Kalzarn Jann commanding. Went into space about halfway to the Moon and took up orbit, keeping on the sunlit side of the planet to avoid being observed. That was all right. But then, Captain Kalzarn ordered away a flight of antigrav disks, fully manned, to take pictures, and finally authorized a landing in the western mountain range, Northern Continent, Minor Landmass. That’s when the trouble started.”
He flipped the run-back switch, till he had recovered the page he wanted. Verkan Vall read of a Fourth Level aviator, in his little airscrew-drive craft, sighting nine high-flying saucerlike objects.
“That was how it began,” Tortha Karf told him. “Before long, as other incidents of the same sort occurred, our people on that line began sending back to know what was going on. Naturally, from the different descriptions of these ‘saucers,’ they recognized the objects as antigrav landing-disks from a spaceship. So I went to the Commission and raised atomic blazes about it, and the Ardrath was ordered to confine operations to the lower areas of the Fifth Level. Then our people on that timeline went to work with corrective action. Here.”
He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last.
“The standard smother-out technique,” Verkan Vall grinned. “I only heard a little talk about the ‘Flying Saucers,’ and all of that was in joke. In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it—Wasn’t that the timeline the Tharmax Trading Corporation almost lost their paratime license on?”
“That’s right; it was! They bought up all the cigarettes, and caused a conspicuous shortage, after Fourth Level cigarettes had been introduced on this line and had become popular. They should have spread their purchases over a number of lines, and kept them within the local supply-demand frame. And they also got into trouble with the local government for selling unrationed petrol and automobile tires. We had to send in a special-operations group, and they came closer to having to engage in outtime local politics than I care to think of.” Tortha Karf quoted a line from a currently popular song about the sorrows of a policeman’s life. “We’re jugglers, Vall; trying to keep our traders and sociological observers and tourists and plain idiots like the late Gavran Sarn out of trouble; trying to prevent panics and disturbances and dislocations of local economy as a result of our operations; trying to keep out of outtime politics—and, at all times, at all costs and hazards, by all means, guarding the secret of paratime transposition. Sometimes I wish Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom had strangled in their cradles!”
Verkan Vall shook his head. “No, chief,” he said. “You don’t mean that; not really,” he said. “We’ve been paratiming for the past ten thousand years. When the Ghaldron-Hesthor transtemporal field was discovered, our ancestors had pretty well exhausted the resources of this planet. We had a world population of half a billion, and it was all they could do to keep alive. After we began paratime transposition, our population climbed to ten billion, and there it stayed for the last eight thousand years. Just enough of us to enjoy our planet and the other planets of the system to the fullest; enough of everything for everybody that nobody needs fight anybody for anything. We’ve tapped the resources of those other worlds on other timelines, a little here, a little there, and not enough to really hurt anybody. We’ve left our mark in a few places—the Dakota Badlands, and the Gobi, on the Fourth Level, for instance—but we’ve done no great damage to any of them.”
“Except the time they blew up half the Southern Island Continent,
