"Surely not. And then?"
"Well, by right of nearest kinship, Count Phebion at once declared himself Prince of Nostor. We tortured a couple of servants lightly-we don't do so much of that in Nostor, since our beloved and gentle Prince… Well, your Majesty, they all agreed that a band of men in black cloaks and masks had suddenly forced their way into Prince Gormoth's chambers, shot him dead, and then fled. In spite of the most diligent search, no trace of them could be found."
"Most mysterious. Fanatical worshipers of false Styphon, without doubt. Now, you say that Prince Phebion, whom we recognize as the rightful Prince of Nostor, will do homage to us?"
"On certain conditions, of course, the most important of which your Majesty has already met. Then, he wishes to be confirmed in his possession of the temple of Styphon in Nostor Town, and the fireseed mills, nitriaries and sulfur springs which his predecessor confiscated from Styphon's House."
"Well, that's granted. And also the act of his late Highness, Prince Gormoth, in elevating you to the title of Duke and First Noble of Nostor.."
"Your Majesty is most gracious!"
"Your Grace has earned it. Now, about these mercenary companies in Nostor?"
"Pure brigands, your Majesty! His highness begs your Majesty to send troops to deal with them."
"That'll be done; I'll send Duke Chartiphon, our Grand Constable, to attend to that. What's happened to Krastokles, by the way?"
"Oh, we have him, and Netzigon too, in the dungeons at Tarr-Nostor. They were both captured a moon-quarter ago. If your Majesty wishes, we'll bring both of them to Tarr-Hostigos."
"Well, don't bother about Netzigon; take his head off yourselves, if you think he needs it. But we want that archpriest. I hope that our faithful Baron Zothnes can spare us the mess of blowing him off a cannon by talking some sense into him."
"I'm sure he can, your Majesty." He wondered just who had arranged the killing of Gormoth, Skranga or Pheblon, or both together. He didn't care; Nostor hadn't been his jurisdiction then. It was now, though, and if either of that pair had ideas about having the other killed, he'd do something about it in a hurry. Court intrigues, he supposed, were something he'd have with him always, but no murders, not inside the Great Kingdom.
After he showed Skranga out, he returned to his desk, opened a box, and got out a cigar-a stogie, rather, and a very crudely made stogie at that. It was a beginning, however. He bit the end and lit it at one of the candles, and picked up another report, a wax-covered wooden tablet. He still hadn't gotten anything done on paper-making. Maybe he'd better not invent paper; if he did, some Dralm-damned bureaucrat would invent paper-work, and then he'd have to spend all his time endlessly reading and annotating reports.
He was happy about Nostor, of course; that meant they wouldn't have a little war to fight next door in the spring, when King Kaiphranos would begin being a problem. And it was nice Pheblon had Krastokles and would turn him over. Two archpriests, about equivalent to cardinals, defecting from Styphon's House was a serious blow. It weakened their religious hold on the Great Kings and their Princes, which was the only hold they had left now that they had lost the fireseed monopoly. Priests, and especially the top level of the hierarchy, were supposed to believe in their gods.
Xentos believed in Dralm, for instance. Maybe he'd have trouble with the old man, some day, if Xentos found his duty to Dralm conflicting with his duty to the Great Kingdom. But he hoped that would never happen.
He'd have to find out more about what was going on in the other Great Kingdoms. Spies-there was a job for Duke Skranga, one that would keep him out of mischief in Nostori local politics. Chief of Secret Service. Skranga was crooked enough to be good at that. And somebody to watch Skranga, of course. That could be one of Klestreus's jobs.
And find out just what the situation was in Nostor. Go there himself; Machiavelli always recommended that for securing a new domain. Make the Nostori his friends-that wouldn't be hard, after they'd lived under the tyranny of Gormoth. And…
General Order, to all Troops: Effective immediately, it shall be a court-martial offense for any member of the Armed Forces of the Great Kingdom of Hos-Hostigos publicly to sing, recite, play, whistle, hum, or otherwise utter the words and/or music of the song known as Marching through Nostor.
VERKAN Vall looked at his watch and wished Dalla would hurry, but Dalla was making herself beautiful for the party. A waste of time, he thought; Dalla had been born beautiful. But try and tell any woman that. Across the low table, Tortha Karf also looked at his watch, and smiled happily. He'd been doing that all through dinner and ever since, and each time had been broader and happier as more minutes till midnight leaked away.
He hoped Dallas preparations would still permit them to reach Paratime Police Headquarters with an hour to spare before midnight. There'd be a big crowd in the assembly room-everybody who was anybody on the Paracops and the Paratime Commission, politicians, society people, and, by special invitation, the Kalvan Project crowd from the University. He'd have to shake hands with most of them, and have drinks with as many as possible, and then, just before midnight, they'd all crowd into the Chief's office, and Tortha Karf would sit down at his desk, and, precisely at 2400, rise, and they'd shake hands, and Tortha Karf would step aside and he'd sit down, and everybody would start that Fourth Level barbarian chant they used on such occasions.
And from then on, he'd be stuck there-Dralm-dammit! He must have said that aloud. The soon-to-retire Chief grinned unsympathetically. "Still swearing in Aryan-Transpacific Zarthani. When do you expect to get back there?"
"Dralm knows, and he doesn't operate on Home Time Line. I'm going to have a lot to do here. One, I'm going to start a flap, and keep it flapping, about this pickup business. Ten new cases in the last eight days. And don't tell me what you told Zarvan Tharg when he was retiring, or what Zarvan Tharg told Hishan Galth when he was retiring. I'm going to do something about this, by Dralm I am!"
"Well, fortunately for the working cops, we're a longevous race. It's a long time between new Chiefs."
"Well, we know what causes it. We'll have to work on eliminating the cause. I'm a hundred and four; I can took forward to another two centuries in that chair of yours. If we don't have enough men, and enough robots, and enough computers to eliminate some of these interpenetrations, we might as well throw it in and quit."
"It'll cost like crazy."
"Look, I don't make a practice of preaching moral ethics, you know that. I just want you to think, for a moment, of the morality of snatching people out of the only world they know and dumping them into an entirely different world, just enough like their own."
"I've thought about it, now and then," Tortha Karf said, in mild understatement. "This fellow Morrison, Lord Kalvan, Great King Kalvan, is one in a million. That was the best thing that could possibly have happened to him, and he'd be the first to say so, if he dared talk about it. But for the rest, the ones the conveyer operators ray down with their needlers are the lucky ones.
"But what are we going to do, Vall? We have a population of ten billion, on a planet that was completely exhausted twelve thousand years ago. I don't think more than a billion and a half are on Home Time Line at any one time; the rest are scattered all over Fifth Level, and out at conveyer-heads all over Fourth, Third and Second. We can't cut them loose; there's a slight moral issue involved there, too. And we can't haul them all in to starve after we stop paratiming. That little Aryan-Transpacific expression you picked up fits. We have a panther by the tail."
"Well, we can do all we can. I saw to it that they did it on the University Kalvan Operation. We checked all the conveyer-heads equivalent with Hostigos Town on every Paratime penetrated time-line, and ours doesn't coincide with any of them."
"I'll bet you had a time." Tortha Karf sipped some more of the after-dinner coffee they were dragging out, and lit another cigarette. "I'll bet they love you in Conveyer Registration Office, too. How many were there?"
"A shade over th
ree thousand, inside four square miles. I don't know what they'll do about the conveyer-head for Agrys City when they go to put one in there. There's a city on that river-mouth island on every time-line that builds cities, and tribal villages on most of the rest."
"Then they aren't just establishing a conveyer-head at Hostigos Town?"
"Oh, no; they're making a real operation out of it. We have five police posts, here and there, including one at Greffa, the capital of Grefftscharr, where Dalla and I are supposed to come from. The University will have study teams, or at least observers, in the capital cities of all the Five Great Kingdoms. Six Kingdoms, now, with Hos-Hostigos. They'll have to be careful; by spring, there'll be a war that'll make the Conquest of Sask look like a schoolyard brawl."
They were both silent for awhile. Tortha Karf, smiling contentedly, was thinking of his farm on Fifth Level Sicily; he'd be there this time tomorrow, stuck with nothing to worry about but what the rabbits were doing to his gardens. Verkan Vall was thinking about his friend, the Great King Kalvan, and everything Kalvan had to worry about. Now there was a man who had a panther by the tail.
Then something else occurred to him; a disquieting thought that had nagged him ever since a remark Dalla had made, the morning before they'd made the drop as Verkan and his party.
"Chief," he said, and remembered that in a couple of hours people would be calling him that. "This pickup problem is only one facet, and a small one, of something big and serious, and fundamental. We're supposed to protect the Paratime Secret. Just how good a secret is it?"
Tortha Karf looked up sharply, his cup halfway to his lips. "What's wrong with the Paratime Secret, Vall?"
"How did we come to discover Paratime transposition?"
Tortha Karf had to pause briefly. He had learned that long ago, and there was considerable mental overlay. "Why, Ghaldron was working to develop a spacewarp drive, to get us out to the stars, and Hesthor was working on the possibility of linear time-travel, to get back to the past, before his ancestors had worn the planet out. Things were pretty grim, on this time-line, twelve thousand years ago. And a couple of centuries before, Rhogom had worked up a theory of multidimensional time, to explain the phenomenon of precognition. Dalla could tell you all about that; that's her subject.
"Well, science was pretty tightly compartmented, then, but somehow Hesthor read some of Rhogom's old papers, and he'd heard about what Ghaldron was working on and got in touch with him. Between them, they discovered paratemporal transposition. Why?"
"As far as I know, nobody off Home Time Line has ever developed any sort of time-machine, linear or lateral. There are Second Level civilizations, and one on Third, that have over-light-speed drives for interstellar ships. But the idea of multidimensional time and worlds of alternate probability is all over Second and Third Levels, and you even find it on Fourth-a mystical concept on Sino-Hindic, and a science-fiction idea on Europo-American."
"And you're thinking, suppose some Sino-Hindic mystic, or some Europo-American science-fiction writer, gets picked up and dumped onto, say, Second Level Interworld Empire?"
"That could do it. It mightn't even be needed. You know, there is no such thing as a single-shot discovery; anything that's been discovered once can be discovered again. That's why it always amuses me to see some technological warfare office classifying a law of nature as top-secret. Gunpowder was the secret of Styphon's House, and look what's happening to Styphon's House now. Of course, gunpowder is a simple little discovery; it's been made tens of thousands of times, all over paratime. Paratemporal transposition is a big, complicated, discovery; it was made just once, twelve thousand years ago, on one time-line. But no secret can be kept forever. One of the University crowd said that, speaking of Styphon's House. He became quite indignant when Dalla mentioned the Paratime Secret in that connection."
"I'll bet you didn't. That's a nice thought to give a retiring Chief of Paratime Police. Now I'll be having nightmares about-"
He broke off, rising to his feet with a smile. A paratimer could always produce a smile when one was needed.
"Well, now, Dalla! That gown! And how did you achieve that hairdo?" He rose and turned. Dalla had come out onto the terrace and was pirouetting slowly in the light from the room behind her. It hadn't been a waste of time, after all.
"But I kept you waiting ages! You're both dears, to be so patient. Do we go now?"
"Yes, the party will have started; we'll get there just at the right time. Not too early, and not too late."
And in two hours, Verkan Vall, Chief of Paratime Police, would begin to assume responsibility for guarding the Paratime Secret.
A panther by the tail. And he was holding it.
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