TIME PRIME

by H. Beam Piper

  “Sounds simple,” the Chief said. The car landed and he helped Dalla out. “I suppose both you and he know how many chances against one he has of finding anything.” They went over to an antigrav-shaft and floated down to the floor on which Tortha Karf had a duplicate of the office in the Paratime Building on Home Time Line. “It’s the only chance we have, though.”

  “There’s one thing that bothers me,” Dalla said, as they entered the office and went back behind the horseshoe-shaped desk. “I understand that the news about this didn’t break on Home Time Line till the late morning of One-Six-One Day. Nebu-hin-Abenoz was murdered at about 1700 local time, which would be 0100 this morning Dhergabar time. That would give this gang fourteen hours to hear the news, transmit it to their base, and get these three men hypno-conditioned, disguised, transposed to this Esaron Sector time-line, and into Careba.” She shook her head. “That’s pretty fast work.”

  Tortha Karf looked sidewise at Verkan Vall. “Your girl has the makings of a cop, Vall,” he commented.

  “She’s been a big help on Esaron and Kholghoor Sectors,” Vall said. “She wants to stay with it and help me; I’m very glad to have her with me.”

  Tortha Karf nodded. He knew, too, that Dalla wouldn’t want to have to go back to Home Time Line and wait the long investigation out.

  “Of course; we can use all the help we can get. I think we can get a lot from Dalla. Fix her up with some kind of a title and police status—technical expert, assistant, or something like that.” He clasped hands, man-fashion, with her. “Glad to have you with us, Dalla,” he said.

  Then he turned to Vall. “There was almost twenty-four hours between the time I heard about this and when this blasted Yandar Yadd got a hold of the story. Of all the infernal, irresponsible—” He almost choked with indignation. “And it was another fourteen hours between the time Skordran sent in his report and I heard about it.”

  “Golzan Doth sent in a report to his company about the same time Skordran Kirv made his first report to his Sector-Regional Subchief.” Vall mentioned.

  “That might be it,” Tortha Karf considered. “I wish there were another explanation, because that implies a very extensive intelligence network, which means a big organization. But I’m afraid that’s it. I wish I could pull in everybody in Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs who handled that report and narco-hypnotize them. Of course, we can’t do things like that on Home Time Line, and with the political situation what it is now—”

  “Why, what’s been happening, Chief?”

  Tortha Karf swore with weary bitterness. “Salgath Trod is what’s been happening. At first, after Yandar Yadd broke the story on the air, there was just a lot of unorganized Opposition sniping in Council; Salgath waited till the middle of the afternoon, when the Management members were beginning to rally, and took the floor. The Centrists and Right Moderates were trying the appeal-to-reason approach; that did as much good as trying to put out a Fifth Level forest fire with a hand-extinguisher. Finally, Salgath got a motion of censure against the Management recognized. That means a confidence vote in ten days. Salgath has a rabble of Leftists and dissident Centrists with him; I doubt if he can muster enough votes to overturn the Management, but it’s going to make things rough for us.”

  “Which may be just the reason Salgath started this uproar,” Vall suggested.

  “That,” Tortha Karf said, “is being considered; there is a discreet inquiry being made into Salgath Trod’s associates, his sources of income, and so on. Nothing has turned up as yet, but we have hopes.”

  “I believe,” Vall said, “that we have a better chance right on Home Time Line than outtime.”

  Tortha Karf looked up sharply. “So?” he asked.

  Vall was stuffing tobacco into a pipe. “Yes. Chief. We have a big criminal organization—let’s call it the Slave Trust, for a convenience-label. The people who run it aren’t stupid. The fact that they’ve been shipping slaves to the Esaron Sector for ten years before we found out about it proves that. So does the speed with which they got rid of this Nebu-hin-Abenoz, right in front of a pair of our detectives. For that matter, so does the speed with which they moved in to exploit this Croutha invasion of Kholghoor Sector India.

  “Well, I’ve studied illegal and subversive organizations all over Paratime, and among the really successful ones, there are a few uniform principles. One is cellular organization—small groups, acting in isolation from one another, cooperating with other cells but ignorant of their composition. Another is the principle of no upward contact—leaders contacting their subordinates through contact-blocks and ignorant intermediaries. And another is a willingness to kill off anybody who looks like a potential betrayer or forced witness. The late Nebu-hin-Abenoz, for instance.

  “I’ll be willing to bet that if we pick up some of these Wizard Traders, say, or a gang that’s selling slaves to some Nebu-hin-Abenoz personality on some other time-line, and narco-hypnotize them, all they’ll be able to do will be name a few immediate associates, and the group leader will know that he’s contacted from time to time by some stranger with orders, and that he can make emergency contacts only through some blind accommodation-address. The men who are running this are right on Home Time Line, many of them in positions of prominence, and if we can catch one of them and narco-hyp him, we can start a chain-reaction of disclosures all through this Slave Trust.”

  “How are we going to get at these top men?” Tortha Karf wanted to know. “Advertise for them on telecast?”

  “They’ll leave traces; they won’t be able to avoid it. I think, right now, that Salgath Trod is one of them. I think there are other prominent politicians, and business people. Look for irregularities and peculiarities in outtime currency-exchange transactions. For instance, to sections in Esaron Sector obus. Or big gold bullion transactions.”

  “Yes. And if they have any really elaborate outtime bases, they’ll need equipment that can only be gotten on Home Time Line,” Tortha Karf added. “Paratemporal conveyer parts, and field-conductor mesh. You can’t just walk into a hardware store and buy that sort of thing.”

  Dalla leaned forward to drop her cigarette ash into a tray. “Try looking into the Bureau of Psychological Hygiene,” she suggested. “That’s where you’ll really strike it rich.”

  Vall and Tortha Karf both turned abruptly and looked at her for an instant.

  “Go on,” Tortha Karf encouraged. “This sounds interesting.”

  “The people back of this,” Dalla said, “are definitely classifiable as criminals. They may never perform a criminal act themselves, but they give orders for and profit from such acts, and they must possess the motivation and psychology of criminals. We define people as criminals when they suffer from psychological aberrations of an antisocial character, usually paranoid—excessive egoism, disregard for the rights of others, inability to recognize the social necessity for mutual cooperation and confidence. On Home Time Line, we have universal psychological testing for the purpose of detecting and eliminating such characteristics.”

  “It seems to have failed in this case,” Tortha Karf began, then snapped his fingers. “Of course! How blasted silly can I get, when I’m not trying?”

  “Yes, of course,” Verkan Vall agreed. “Find out how these people missed being spotted by psychotesting; that’ll lead us to who missed being tested adequately, and also who got into the Bureau of Psychological Hygiene who didn’t belong there.”

  “I think you ought to give an investigation of the whole BuPsychHyg setup very high priority,” Dalla said. “A psychotest is only as good as the people who give it, and if we have criminals administering these tests—”

  “We have our friends on Executive Council,” Tortha Karf said. “I’ll see that that point is raised when Council re-convenes.” He looked at the clock. “That’ll be in three hours, by the way. If it doesn’t accomplish another thing, it’ll put Salgath Trod in the middle. He can’t demand an investigation of the Paratime Police out of one side of h
is mouth and oppose an investigation of Psychological Hygiene out of the other. Now what else have we to talk about?”

  “Those hundred slaves we got off the Esaron Sector,” Vall said. “What are we going to do with them? And if we locate the time-line the slavers have their bases on, we’ll have hundreds, probably thousands, more.”

  “We can’t sort them out and send them back to their own time-lines, even if that would be desirable,” Tortha Karf decided. “Why, settle them somewhere on the Service Sector. I know, the Paratime Transposition Code limits the Service Sector to natives of time-lines below second-order barbarism, but the Paratime Transposition Code has been so badly battered by this business that a few more minor literal infractions here and there won’t make any difference. Where are they now?”

  “Police Terminal, Nharkan Equivalent.”

  “Better hold them there, for the time being. We may have to open a new ServSec time-line to take care of all the slaves we find, if we can locate the outtime base line these people are using—Vall, this thing’s too big to handle as a routine operation along with our other work. You take charge of it. Set up your headquarters here, and help yourself to anything in the way of personnel and equipment you need. And bear in mind that this confidence vote is coming up in ten days—on the morning of One-Seven-Two Day. I’m not asking for any miracles, but if we don’t get this thing cleared up by then, we’re in for trouble.”

  “I realize that, sir. Dalla, you’d better go back to Home Time Line with the Chief,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to help me here, at present. Get some rest, and then try to wangle an invitation for the two of us to dinner at Thalvan Dras’ apartments this evening.”

  He turned back to Tortha Karf. “Even if he never pays any attention to business, Dras still owns Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs,” he said. “He might be able to find out, or help us find out, how the story about those slaves leaked out of his company.”

  “Well, that won’t take much doing,” Dalla said. “If there’s as much excitement on Home Time Line as I think, Dras would turn somersaults and jump through hoops to get us to one of his dinners right now.”

  I

  Salgath Trod pushed the litter of papers and record-tape spools to one side impatiently. “Well, what else did you expect?” he demanded. “This was the logical next move. BuPsychHyg is supposed to detect anybody who believes in looking out for his own interests first, and condition him into a pious law-abiding sucker. Well, the sacred Bureau of Sucker-Makers slipped up on a lot of us. It’s a natural alibi for Tortha Karf.”

  “It’s also a lot of grief for all of us,” the young man in the wrap-around tunic added. “I don’t want my psychotests reviewed by some duty-struck bigot who can’t be reasoned with, and neither do you.”

  “I’m getting something organized to counter that,” Salgath Trod said. “I’m going to attack the whole scientific basis of psychotesting. There’s Dr. Frasthor Klav; he’s always contended that what are called criminal tendencies are the result of the individual’s total environment, and that psychotesting and personality-analysis are valueless because the total environment changes from day to day, even from hour to hour—”

  “That won’t do,” the nameless young man who was the messenger of somebody equally nameless retorted. “Frasthor’s a crackpot; no reputable psychologist or psychist gives his opinions a moment’s consideration. And besides, we don’t want to attack Psychological Hygiene. The people in it with whom we can do business are our safeguard; they’ve given all of us a clean bill of mental health, and we have papers to prove it. What we have to do is to make it appear that that incident on the Esaron Sector is all there is to this, and also involve the Paratime Police themselves. The slavers are all Paracops. It isn’t the fault of BuPsychHyg because the Paratime Police have their own psychotesting staff. That’s where the trouble is; the Paracops haven’t been adequately testing their own personnel.”

  “Now how are you going to do that?” Salgath Trod asked disdainfully.

  “You’ll take the floor, the first thing tomorrow, and utilize these new revelations about the Wizard Traders. You’ll accuse the Paratime Police of being the Wizard Traders themselves. Why not? They have their own paratemporal transposition equipment shops on Police Terminal, they have facilities for manufacturing duplicates of any kind of outtime items, like the firearms, for instance, and they know which time-lines on which sectors are being exploited by legitimate paratime traders and which aren’t. What’s to prevent a gang of unscrupulous Paracops from moving in on a few unexploited Kholghoor time-lines, buying captives from the Croutha, and shipping them to the Esaron Sector?”

  “Then why would they let a thing like this get out?” Salgath Trod inquired.

  “Somebody slipped up and moved a lot of slaves onto an exploited Esaron time-line. Or, rather, Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs established a plantation on a time-line they were shipping slaves to. Parenthetically, that’s what really did happen; the mistake our people made was in not closing out that time-line as soon as Consolidated Foodstuffs moved in,” the young man said. “So, this Skordran Kirv, who is a dumb boy who doesn’t know what the score is, found these slaves and blatted about it to this Golzan Doth, and Golzan reported it to his company, and it couldn’t be hushed up, so now Tortha Karf is trying to scare the public with ghost stories about a gigantic paratemporal conspiracy to get more appropriations and more power.”

  “How long do you think I’d get away with that?” Salgath Trod demanded. “I can only stretch parliamentary immunity so far. Sooner or later, I’d have to make formal charges to a special judicial committee, and that would mean narco-hypnosis, and then it would all come out.”

  “You’ll have proof,” the young man said. “We’ll produce a couple of these Kharandas whom Verkan Vall didn’t get hold of. Under narco-hypnosis, they’ll testify that they saw a couple of Wizard Traders take their robes off. Under the robes were Paratime Police uniforms. Do you follow me?”

  Salgath Trod made a noise of angry disgust. “That’s ridiculous! I suppose these Kharandas will be given what is deludedly known as memory obliteration, and a set of pseudo-memories; how long do you think that will last? About three ten-days. There is no such thing as memory obliteration; there’s memory-suppression and pseudo-memory overlay. You can’t get behind that with any quickie narco-hypnosis in the back room of any police post, I’ll admit that,” he said. “But a skilled psychist can discover, inside of five minutes, when a narco-hypnotized subject is carrying a load of false memories, and in time, and not too much time, all that top layer of false memories and blockages can be peeled off. And then where would we be?”

  “Now wait a minute, Councilman. This isn’t just something I dreamed up,” the visitor said. “This was decided upon at the top. At the very top.”

  “I don’t care whose idea it was,” Salgath Trod snapped. “The whole thing is idiotic, and I won’t have anything to do with it.”

  The visitor’s face froze. All the respect vanished from his manner and tone; his voice was like ice cakes grating together in a winter river. “Look, Salgath; this is an Organization order,” he said. “You don’t refuse to obey Organization orders, and you don’t quit the Organization. Now get smart, big boy; do what you’re told to.”

  He took a spool of record tape from his pocket and laid it on the desk. “Outline for your speech; put it in your own words, but follow it exactly.”

  He stood watching Salgath Trod for a moment. “I won’t bother telling you what’ll happen to you if you don’t,” he added. “You can figure that out for yourself.” With that, he turned and went out the private door.

  For a while, Salgath Trod sat staring after him. Once he put his hand out toward the spool, then jerked it back as though the thing were radioactive. Once he looked at the clock; it was just 1600.

  II

  The green aircar settled onto the landing stage; Verkan Vall, on the front seat beside the driver, opened the door.

&
nbsp; “Want me to call for you later, Assistant Verkan?” the driver asked.

  “No thank you, Drenth. My wife and I are going to a dinner party, and we’ll probably go night-clubbing afterward. Tomorrow morning, all the anti-Management commentators will be yakking about my carousing around when I ought to be battling the Slave Trust. No use advertising myself with an official car and giving them a chance to add, ‘at public expense.’”

  “Well, have some fun while you can,” the driver advised, reaching for the carradio phone. “Want me to check you in here, sir?”

  “Yes, if you will. Thank you, Drenth.”

  Kandagro, his human servant, admitted him to the apartment six floors down. “Mistress Dalla is dressing,” he said. “She asked me to tell you that you are invited to dinner this evening with Thalvan Dras at his apartment.”

  Vall nodded. “I’ll talk to her about it now,” he said. “Lay out my dress uniform: short jacket, boots and breeches, and needler.”

  “Yes, Master Verkan: I’ll go lay out your things and get your bath ready.” The servant turned and went into the alcove which gave access to the dressing rooms, turning right into Vall’s.

  Vall followed him, turning left into his wife’s. “Oh, Dalla!” he called.

  “In here!” her voice came out of her bathroom.

  He passed through the dressing room to find her stretched on a plastic-sheeted couch, while her maid, Rendarra, was rubbing her body vigorously with some pungent- smelling stuff about the consistency of machine-grease. Her face was masked in the stuff, and her hair was covered with an elastic cap. He had always suspected that beauty was the real feminine religion from the willingness of its devotees to submit to martyrdom for it.