TIME PRIME

by H. Beam Piper

  The Abzar people had done neither. They had wasted their resources to the last, fighting bitterly over the ultimate crumbs, with fission bombs, and with muskets, and with swords, and with spears and clubs, and finally they had died out, leaving a planet of almost uniform desert dotted with vast empty cities which even twelve thousand years had hardly begun to obliterate.

  So nobody on the Paratime Sector went to the Abzar Sector. There was nothing there—except a hiding place.

  “Well, message that to Subchief Ranthar Jard, Kholghoor Sector at Nharkan Equivalent, and to Subchief Vulthor, Esaron Sector, Novilan Equivalent,” Vall said. “And be sure to mark what you send Vulthor, ‘Immediate attention Deputy Subchief Skordran.’”

  That reminded him of something; as soon as he was through with Zulthran, he got out an order in the name of Tortha Karf authorizing Skordran Kirv’s promotion on a permanent basis and messaged it out. Something was going to have to be done with Vulthor Tharn, too. A promotion of course—say Deputy Bureau Chief, Hypno-Mech Tape Library at Dhergabar Home Time Line; there Vulthor’s passion for procedure and his caution would be assets instead of liabilities.

  He called Vlasthor Arph, the Chief ’s Deputy assigned to him as adjutant. “I want more troops from ServSec and IndSec,” he said. “Go over the TO’s and see what can be spared from where; don’t strip any time-line, but get a force on the order of about three divisions. And locate all the big antigrav-equipped ship transposition docks on Commercial and Passenger Sectors, and a list of freighters and passenger ships that can be commandeered in a hurry. We think we’ve spotted the time-line the Organization’s using as a base. As soon as we raid a couple of places near Nharkan and Novilan Equivalents, we’re going to move in for a planet-wide cleanup.”

  “I get it, Chief ’s Assistant. I do everything I can to get ready for a big move without letting anything leak out. After you strike the first blow, there won’t be any security problem and the lid will be off. In the meantime, I make up a general plan and alert all our own people. Right?”

  “Right. And for your information, the base isn’t Fifth Level; it’s First Level Abzar.”

  He gave the designation. Vlasthor Arph chuckled. “Well, think of that! I’d even forgotten there was an Abzar Sector. Shall I tell the reporters that?”

  “Fangs of Fasif, no!” Vall fairly howled. Then, curiously: “What reporters? How’d they get onto Pol-Term?”

  “About fifty or sixty news-service people Chief Tortha sent down here, this morning, with orders to prevent them from filing any stories from here but to let them cover the raids when they come off. We were instructed to furnish them weapons and audio-visual equipment and vocowriters and anything else they needed, and—”

  Vall grinned. “That was one I’d never thought of,” he admitted. “The old fox is still the old fox. No, tell them nothing; we’ll just take them along and show them. Oh, and where are Dr. Hadron Dalla and that girl of Salgath Trod’s?”

  “They’re sleeping, now. Rest Room Eighteen.”

  I

  Dalla and Zinganna were asleep on a big mound of silk cushions in one corner, their glossy black heads close together and Zinganna’s brown arm around Dalla’s white shoulder. Their faces were calmly beautiful in repose, and they smiled slightly, as though they were wandering through a happy dream. For a little while, Vall stood looking at them, then he began whistling softly. On the third or fourth bar, Dalla woke and sat up, waking Zinganna, and blinked at him perplexedly.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “About 1245,” he told her.

  “Oh! We just got to sleep,” she said. “We’re both bushed!”

  “You had a hard time. Feel all right after your narco-hyp, Zinganna?”

  “It wasn’t so bad, and I had a nice sleep. And Dalla...Dr. Hadron, I mean—”

  “Dalla,” Vall’s wife corrected. “Remember what I told you?”

  “Dalla, then,” Zinganna smiled. “Dalla gave me some hypno-treatment, too. I don’t feel so badly about Trod, any more.”

  “Well, look, Zinganna. We’re going to have a man impersonate Councilman Salgath on a telecast. The cosmeticians are making him over now. Would you find it too painful to meet him, and talk to him?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind. I can criticize the impersonation; remember, I knew Trod very well. You know, I was his hostess, too. I met many of the people with whom he was associated, and they know me. Would things look more convincing if I appeared on the telecast with your man?”

  “It certainly would; it would be a great help!” he told her enthusiastically. “Maybe you girls ought to get up, now. The telecast isn’t till 1930, but there’s a lot to be done getting ready.”

  Dalla yawned. “What I get, trying to be a cop,” she said, then caught the other girl’s hands and rose, pulling her up. “Come on, Zinna; we have to get to work!”

  II

  Vall rose from behind the reading-screen in Ranthar Jard’s office, stretching his arms over his head. For almost an hour, he had sat there pushing buttons and twiddling selector and magnification-adjustment knobs, looking at the pictures the Kholghoor-Nharkan cops had taken with auto-return balls dropped over the spatial equivalent of Sohram. One set of pictures, taken at two thousand feet, showed the central square of the city. The effects of the Croutha sack were plainly visible; so were the captives herded together under guard like cattle.

  By increasing magnification, he looked at groups of the barbarian conquerors, big men with blond or reddish-brown hair, in loose shirts and baggy trousers and rough cowhide buskins. Many of them wore bowl-shaped helmets, some had shirts of ring-mail, all of them carried long, straight swords with cross-hilts, and about half of them had pistols thrust through their belts or muskets slung from their shoulders.

  The other set of pictures showed the Wizard Trader camps and conveyer heads. In each case, a wide oval had been burned out in the jungle, probably with heavyduty heat guns. The camps were surrounded with stout wire-mesh fence: in each there were a number of metal prefab-huts and an inner fenced slave-pen. A trail had been cut from each to a similarly cleared circle farther back in the forest, and in the centers of one or two of these circles he saw the actual conveyer domes. There was a great deal of activity in all of them, and he screwed the magnification-adjustment to the limit to scrutinize each human figure in turn. A few of the men, he was sure, were First Level Citizens; more were either Proles or outtimers. Quite a few of them were of a dark, heavy-featured, black-bearded type.

  “Some of these fellows look like Second Level Khiftans,” he said. “Rush an individual picture of each one, maximum magnification consistent with clarity, to Dhergabar Equivalent to be transposed to Home Time Line. You get all the dope from Zulthran Torv?”

  “Yes; Abzar Sector,” Ranthar Jard said. “I’d never have thought of that. Wonder why they used that series system, though. I’d have tried to spot my operations as completely at random as possible.”

  “Only thing they could have done,” Vall said. “When we get hold of one of their conveyers, we’re going to find the control panel’s just a mess of arbitrary symbols, and there’ll be something like a computer-machine built into the control cabinet to select the right time-line whenever a dial’s set or a button pushed, and the only way that could be done would be by establishing some kind of a numerical series. And we were trustingly expecting to locate their base from one of their conveyers! Why, if we give all those people in the pictures narco-hyps, we won’t learn the base-line designation; none of them will know it. They just go where the conveyers take them.”

  “Well, we’re all set now,” Ranthar Jard said. “I have a plan of attack worked out; subject to your approval. I’m ready to start implementing it now.” He glanced at his watch. “The Salgath telecast is over on Home Time Line, and in a little while a transcript will be on this time-line. Want to watch it here, sir?”

  III

  The telecast screen in the living room of Tortha Karf ’s town
apartment was still on; in it, a girl with bright red hair danced slowly to soft music against a background of shifting color. The four men who sat in a semicircle facing it sipped their drinks and watched idly.

  “Ought to be getting some sort of public reaction soon,” Tortha Karf said, glancing at his watch.

  “Well, I’ll have to admit, it was done convincingly,” Zostha Olv, the Chief Interoffice Coordinator, admitted grudgingly. “I’d have believed it, if I hadn’t known the real facts.”

  “Shooting it against the background of those wide windows was smart,” Lovranth Rolk said. “Every schoolchild would recognize that view of the rocketport as being on Police Terminal. And including that girl Zinganna; that was a real masterpiece!”

  “I’ve met her a few times,” Elbraz Vark, the Political Liaison Assistant, said. “Isn’t she lovely!”

  “Good actress, too,” Tortha Karf said. “It’s not easy to impersonate yourself.”

  “Well, Kostran Galth did a fine job of acting, too,” Lovranth Rolk said. “That was done to perfection—the distinguished politician, supported by his loyal mistress, bravely facing the disgraceful end of his public career.”

  “You know, I believe I could get that girl a booking with one of the big theatrical companies. Now that Salgath’s dead, she will need somebody to look after her.”

  “What sharp, furry ears you have, Mr. Elbraz!” Zostha Olv grunted.

  The music stopped as though cut off with a knife, and the slim girl with the red hair vanished in a shatter of many colors.

  When the screen cleared, one of the announcers was looking out of it. “We interrupt this program for an important newscast of a sensational development in the Salgath affair. Your next speaker will be Yandar Yadd—”

  “I thought you’d managed to get that blabbermouth transposed to Pol-Term,” Zostha said.

  “He wouldn’t go,” Tortha Karf replied. “Said it was just a trick to get him off Home Time Line during the Council crisis.”

  Yandar Yadd had appeared on the screen as the pickup swung about. “... Recording ostensibly made by Councilman Salgath on Police Terminal Time Line, and telecast on Home Time Line an hour ago. Well, I don’t know who he was, but I now have positive proof that he definitely was not Salgath Trod!”

  “We’re sunk!” Zostha Olv grunted. “He’d never make a statement like that unless he could prove it.”

  “... Something suspicious about the whole thing from the beginning,” the newsman was saying. “So I checked. If you recall, the actor impersonating Salgath gestured rather freely with his hands, in imitation of a well-known mannerism of the real Salgath Trod; at one point, the ball of his right thumb was presented directly to the pickup. Here’s a still of that scene.”

  He stepped aside, revealing a viewscreen behind him; when he pressed a button, the screen lighted; on it was a stationary picture of Kostran Galth as Salgath Trod, his right hand raised in front of him.

  “Now watch this. I’m going to step up the magnification slowly so that you can be sure there’s no substitution. Camera a little closer, Trath!”

  The screen in the background seemed to advance until it filled the entire screen. Yandar Yadd was still talking, out of the picture; a metal-tipped pointer came into the picture, touching the right thumb, which grew larger and larger until it was the only thing visible.

  “Now here,” Yandar Yadd’s voice continued. “Any of you who are familiar with the ancient science of dactyloscopy will recognize this thumb as having the ridge-pattern known as a ‘twin loop.’ Even with the high degree of magnification possible with the microgrid screen, we can’t bring out the individual ridges, but the pattern is unmistakable. I ask you to memorize that image, while I show you another right thumb print, this time a certified photo-copy of the thumb print of the real Salgath Trod.” The magnification was reduced a little, a card was moved into the picture, and it was stepped up again. “See, this thumb print is of the type known as a ‘tented arch.’ Observe the difference.”

  “That does it!” Zostha Olv cried. “Karf, for the first and last time, let me remind you that I opposed this lunacy from the beginning. Now, what are we going to do next?”

  “I suggest that we get to Headquarters as soon as we can,” Tortha Karf said. “If we wait too long, we may not be able to get in.”

  Yandar Yadd was back on the screen, denouncing Tortha Karf passionately. Tortha went over and snapped it off.

  “I suggest we transpose to Pol-Term,” Lovranth Rolk said. “It won’t be so easy for them to serve a summons on us there.”

  “You can go to Pol-Term if you want to,” Tortha Karf retorted. “I’m going to stay here and fight back, and if they try to serve me with a summons, they’d better send a robot for a process server.”

  “Fight back!” Zostha Olv echoed. “You can’t fight the Council and the whole Management! They’ll tear you into inch bits!”

  “I can hold them off till Vall’s able to raid those Abzar Sector bases,” Tortha Karf said. He thought for a moment. “Maybe this is all for the best, after all. If it distracts the Organization’s attention—”

  IV

  “I wish we could have made a boomerang-ball reconnaissance,” Ranthar Jard was saying, watching one of the viewscreens, in which a film, taken from an airboat transposed to an adjoining Abzar Sector time-line, was being shown. The boat had circled over the Ganges, a mere trickle between wide, deeply cut banks, and was crossing a gullied plain, sparsely grown with thornbush. “The base ought to be about there, but we have no idea what sort of changes this gang has made.”

  “Well, we couldn’t: we didn’t dare take the chance of it being spotted. This has to be a complete surprise. It’ll be about like the other place, the one the slaves described. There won’t be any permanent buildings. This operation only started a few months ago with the Croutha invasion; it may go on for four or five months, till the Croutha have all their surplus captives sold off. That country,” Verkan added, gesturing at the screen, “will be flooded out when the rains come. See how it’s suffered from flood-erosion. There won’t be a thing there that can’t be knocked down and transposed out in a day or so.”

  “I wish you’d let me go along,” Ranthar Jard worried.

  “We can’t do that, either,” Vall said. “Somebody’s got to be in charge here, and you know your own people better than I do. Besides, this won’t be the last operation like this. Next time, I’ll have to stay on Police Terminal and command from a desk; I want first-hand experience with the outtime end of the job, and this is the only way I can get it.”

  Verkan watched the four police-girls who were working at the big terrain board showing the area of the Police Terminal Time Line around them. They had covered the miniature buildings and platforms and towers with a fine mesh, at a scale-equivalent of fifty feet; each intersection marked the location of a three-foot conveyer ball loaded with a sleep-gas bomb and rigged with an automatic detonator which would explode it and release the gas as soon as it rematerialized on the Abzar Sector.

  Higher, on stiff wires that raised them to what represented three thousand feet, were the disks that stood for ten hundred-foot conveyers; they would carry squads of Paratime Police in aircars and thirty-foot air boats. There was a ring of big two-hundred-foot conveyers a mile out; they would carry the armor and the airborne infantry and the little two-man scooters of the air-cavalry from the Service and Industrial Sectors. Directly over the spatial equivalent of the Kholghoor Sector Wizard Traders’ conveyers was the single disk of Verkan Vall’s command conveyer at a represented five thousand feet, and in a half-mile circle around it were the five news service conveyers.

  “Where’s the ship-conveyer?” he asked.

  “Actually it’s on antigrav about five miles north of here,” one of the girls said. “Representationally, about where Subchief Ranthar’s standing.”

  Another girl added a few more bits to the network that represented the sleepgas bombs and stepped back, taking off her
earphones. “Everything’s in place, now, Assistant Verkan,” she told him.

  “Good. I’m going aboard now,” he said. “You can have it, Jard.”

  He shook hands with Ranthar Jard, who moved to the switch which would activate all the conveyers simultaneously, and accepted the good wishes of the girls at the terrain board. Then he walked to the mesh-covered dome of the hundredfoot conveyer, with the five news service conveyers surrounding it in as regular a circle as the buildings and towers of the regular conveyer heads would permit. The members of his own detail, smoking and chatting outside, saw him and started moving inside; so did the news people.

  A public-address speaker began yelping in a hundred voices all over the area, warning those who were going with the conveyers to get aboard. He went in through a door, between two aircars, and on to the central control-desks, going up to a visiscreen over which somebody had crayoned “Novilan EQ.” It gave him a view over the shoulder of a man in the uniform of a field agent third class, of the interior of a conveyer like his own.

  I

  “Hello, Assistant Verkan,” a voice came out of the speaker under the screen, as the man moved his lips. “Deputy Skordran! Here’s Chief ’s Assistant Verkan now!”