"Are you taking over, Chief"s a.s.sistant?" Skordran Kirv asked, as the aircar lifted from the landing stage.

"Not at all. My wife and I are starting on our vacation, as soon as I find out what"s been happening here, and report to Chief Tortha. Did your native troopers catch those slavers?"

"Yes, they got them yesterday afternoon; we"ve had them ever since. Do you want the whole thing just as it happened, a.s.sistant Verkan, or just a condensation?"

"Give me what you think it indicates, remembering that you"re probably trying to a.n.a.lyze a large situation from a very small sample."

"It"s big, all right," Skordran Kirv said. "This gang can"t number less than a hundred men, maybe several hundred. They must have at least two two-hundred-foot conveyers and several small ones, and bases on what sounds like some Fifth Level Time line, and at least one air freighter of around five thousand tons. They are operating on a number of Kholghoor and Esaron time lines."

Verkan Vall nodded. "I didn"t think it was any petty larceny," he said.

"Wait till you hear the rest of it. On the Kholghoor Sector, this gang is known as the Wizard Traders; we"ve been using that as a convenience label. They pose as sorcerers--black robes and hood-masks covered with luminous symbols, voice-amplifiers, cold-light auras, energy-weapons, mechanical magic tricks, that sort of thing. They have all the Croutha scared witless. Their procedure is to establish camps in the forest near recently conquered Kharanda cities; then they appear to the Croutha, impress them with their magical powers, and trade manufactured goods for Kharanda captives. They mainly trade firearms, apparently some kind of flintlocks, and powder."

Then they were confining their operations to unpenetrated time lines; there had been no reports of firearms in the hands of the Croutha invaders.

"After they buy a batch of slaves," Skordran Kirv continued, "they transpose them to this presumably Fifth Level base, where they have concentration camps. The slaves we questioned had been airlifted to North America, where there"s another concentration camp, and from there transposed to this Esaron Sector time line where I found them.

They say that there were at least two to three thousand slaves in this North American concentration camp and that they are being transposed out in small batches and replaced by others airlifted in from India. This lot was sold to a Calera named Nebu-hin-Abenoz, the chieftain of a hill town, Careba, about fifty miles south-west of the plantation. There were two hundred and fifty in this batch; this Coru-hin-IriG.o.d only bought the batch he sold at the plantation."

The aircar lost speed and alt.i.tude; below, the countryside was dotted with conveyer heads, each spatially coexistent with some outtime police post or operation. There were a great many of them; the western coast of North America was a center of civilization on many paratemporal sectors, and while the conveyer heads of the commercial and pa.s.senger companies were scattered over hundreds of Fifth Level time lines, those of the Paratime Police were concentrated upon one.

The anti-grav-car circled around a three-hundred-foot steel tower that supported a conveyer head spatially coexistent with one on a top floor of some outtime tall building, and let down in front of a low prefabricated steel shed. A man in police uniform came out to meet them. There was a fifty-foot conveyer dome inside, and a fifty-foot red-lined circle that marked the transposition point of an outtime conveyer. They all entered the dome, and the operator put on the transposition field.

"You haven"t heard the worst of it yet." Skordran Kirv was saying. "On this time line, we have reason to think that the native, Nebu-hin-Abenoz, who bought the slaves, actually saw the slavers"

conveyer. Maybe even saw it activated."

"If he did, we"ll either have to capture him and give him a memory-obliteration, or kill him," Vall said. "What do you know about him?"

"Well, this Careba, the town he bosses, is a little walled town up in the hills. Everybody there is related to everybody else; this man we have, Coru-hin-IriG.o.d, is the son of a sister of Nebu-hin-Abenoz"s wife. They"re all bandits and slavers and cattle rustlers and what have you. For the last ten years, Nebu-hin-Abenoz has been buying slaves from some secret source. Before the Kholghoor Sector people began coming in, they were mostly white, with a few brown people who might have been Polynesians. No Negroes--there"s no black race on this sector, and I suppose the paratime slavers didn"t want too many questions asked. Coru-hin-IriG.o.d, under narco-hypnosis, said that they were all outlanders, speaking strange languages."

"Ten years! And this is the first hint we"ve had of it," Vall said.

"That"s not a bright mark for any of us. I"ll bet the slave population on some of these Esaron time lines is an anthropologist"s nightmare."

"Why, if this has been going on for ten years, there must have been millions upon millions of people dragged from their own time lines into slavery!" Dalla said in a shocked voice.

"Ten years may not be all of it," Vall said. "This Nebu-hin-Abenoz looks like the only tangible lead we have, at present. How does he operate?"

"About once every ten days, he"ll take ten or fifteen men and go a day"s ride--that may be as much as fifty miles; these Caleras have good horses and they"re hard riders--into the hills. He"ll take a big bag of money, all gold. After dark, when he has made camp, a couple of strangers in Calera dress will come in. He"ll go off with them, and after about an hour, he"ll come back with eight or ten of these strangers and a couple of hundred slaves, always chained in batches of ten. Nebu-hin-Abenoz pays for them, makes arrangements for the next meeting, and the next morning he and his party start marching the slaves to Careba. I might add that, until now, these slaves have been sold to the mines east of Careba; these are the first that have gotten into the coastal country."

"That"s why this hasn"t come to light before, then. The conveyer comes in every ten days, at about the same place?"

"Yes. I"ve been thinking of a way we might trap them," Skordran Kirv said. "I"ll need more men, and equipment."

"Order them from Regional or General Reserve." Vall told him. "This thing"s going to have overtop priority till it"s cleared up."

He was mentally cursing Vulthor Tharn"s procedure-bound timidity as the conveyer flickered and solidified around them and the overhead red light turned green.

They emerged into the interior of a long shed, adobe-walled and thatch-roofed, with small barred windows set high above the earth floor. It was cool and shadowy, and the air was heavy with the fragrance of citrus fruits. There were bins along the walls, some partly full of oranges, and piles of wicker baskets. Another conveyer dome stood beside the one in which they had arrived; two men in white cloaks and riding boots sat on the edge of one of the bins, smoking and talking.

Skordran Kirv introduced them--Gathon Dard and Krador Arv, special detectives--and asked if anything new had come up. Krador Arv shook his head.

"We still have about forty to go," he said. "Nothing new in their stories; still the same two time lines."

[Ill.u.s.tration:]

"These people," Skordran Kirv explained, "were all peons on the estate of a Kharanda n.o.ble just above the big bend of the Ganges. The Croutha hit their master"s estate about a ten-days ago, elapsed time. In telling about their capture, most of them say that their master"s wife killed herself with a dagger after the Croutha killed her husband, but about one out of ten say that she was kidnaped by the Croutha. Two different time lines, of course. The ones who tell the suicide story saw no firearms among the Croutha; the ones who tell the kidnap story say that they all had some kind of muskets and pistols. We"re making synthetic summaries of the two stories."

"We"re having trouble with the locals about all these strangers coming in," Gathon Dard added. "They"re getting curious."

"We"ll have to take a chance on that," Vall said. "Are the interrogations still going on? Then let"s have a look-in at them."

The big double doors at the end of the shed were barred on the inside.

Krador Arv unlocked a small side door, letting Vall, Dalla and Gathon Dard out. In the yard outside, a gang of slaves were unloading a big wagon of oranges and packing them into hampers; they were guarded by a couple of native riflemen who seemed mostly concerned with keeping them away from the shed, and a man in a white cloak was watching the guards for the same purpose. He walked over and introduced himself to Vall.

"Golzan Doth, local alias Dosu Golan. I"m Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs" manager here."

"Nasty business for you people," Vall sympathized. "If it"s any consolation, it"s a bigger headache for us."

"Have you any idea what"s going to be done about these slaves?"

Golzan Doth asked. "I have to remember that the Company has forty thousand Paratemporal Exchange Units invested in them. The top office was very specific in requesting information about that."

Vall shook his head. "That"s over my echelon," he said. "Have to be decided by the Paratime Commission. I doubt if your company"ll suffer.

You bought them innocently, in conformity with local custom. Ever buy slaves from this Coru-hin-IriG.o.d before?"

"I"m new, here. The man I"m replacing broke his neck when his horse put a foot in a gopher hole about two ten-days ago."

Beside him, Vall could see Dalla nod as though making a mental note.

When she got back to Home Time Line, she"d put a crew of mediums to work trying to contact the discarnate former plantation manager; at Rhogom Inst.i.tute, she had been working on the problem of return of a discarnate personality from outtime.

"A few times," Skordran Kirv said. "Nothing suspicious; all local stuff. We questioned Coru-hin-IriG.o.d pretty closely on that point, and he says that this is the first time he ever brought a batch of Nebu-hin-Abenoz"s outlanders this far west."

The interrogations were being conducted inside the plantation house, in the secret central rooms where the paratimers lived. Skordran Kirv used a door-activator to slide open a hidden door.

"I suppose I don"t have to warn either of you that any positive statement made in the hearing of a narco-hypnotized subject--" he began.

"... Has the effect of hypnotic suggestion--" Vall picked up after him.

"... And should be avoided unless such suggestion is intended," Dalla finished.

Skordran Kirv laughed, opening another, inner door, and stood aside.

In what had been the paratimers" recreation room, most of the furniture had been shoved into the corners. Four small tables had been set up, widely s.p.a.ced and with screens between; across each of them, with an electric recorder between, an almost naked Kharanda slave faced a Paratime Police psychist. At a long table at the far side of the room, four men and two girls were working over stacks of cards and two big charts.

"Phrakor Vuln," the man who was working on the charts introduced himself. "Synthesist." He introduced the others.

Vall made a point of the fact that Dalla was his wife, in case any of the cops began to get ideas, and mentioned that she spoke Kharanda, had spent some time on the Fourth Level Kholghoor, and was a qualified psychist.