H. Beam Piper - Paratime 01, page 24
“You understand that this confession renders you liable to psycho-rehabilitation?” Tortha Karf asked.
Yes, Councilman Salgath understood that.
“And you agree to come voluntarily to Paratime Police Headquarters, and you will voluntarily undergo narco-hypnotic interrogation?”
Yes, Salgath Trod agreed to that.
“I am now terminating the playback of Councilman Salgath’s call to me,” Tortha Karf said, re-appearing on the screen. “At this point Councilman Salgath began making a statement about his criminal activities, which we have on record. Because he named a number of his criminal associates, whom we have no intention of warning, this portion of Councilman Salgath’s call cannot at this time be made public. We have no intention of having any of these suspects escape, or of giving their associates an opportunity to murder them to prevent their furnishing us with additional information. Incidentally, there was an attempt, made on the landing stage of Paratime Police Headquarters, to murder Councilman Salgath, when he was brought here guarded by Paratime Police officers—”
He went on to give a colorful and, as far as possible, truthful, account of the attack by the two pseudo policemen and their pseudo-prisoner. As he told it, however, all three had been killed before they could accomplish their purpose, one of them by Salgath Trod himself.
The image of Tortha Karf was replaced by a view of the three assassins lying on the landing stage. They all looked dead, even the one who wasn’t; there was nothing to indicate that he was merely drugged. Then, one after another, their faces were shown in closeup, while Tortha Karf asked for close attention and memorization.
“We believe that these men were Fifth Level Proles; we think that they were under hypnotic influence or obeying posthypnotic commands when they made their suicidal attack. If any of you have ever seen any of these men before, it is your duty to inform the Paratime Police.”
That ended it. Tortha Karf pressed a button in front of him and the screen went dark. The spectators relaxed.
“Well! Nothing like being sincere with the public, is there?” Dalla commented. “I’ll remember this the next time I tune in a Management public statement.”
“In about five minutes,” one of the bureau-chiefs, said, “all hell is going to break loose. I think the whole thing is crazy!”
“I hope you have somebody who can give a convincing impersonation,” Lovranth Rolk said.
“Yes. A field agent named Kostran Galth,” Tortha Karf said. “We ran the personal description cards for the whole Force through the machine; Kostran checked to within one-twentieth of one per cent; he’s on Police Terminal, now, coming by rocket from Ravvanan Equivalent. We ought to have the whole thing ready for telecast by 1730 tomorrow.”
“He can’t learn to imitate Salgath’s voice convincingly in that time, with all the work the cosmeticians’ll have to be doing on him,” Dalla said.
“Make up a tape of Salgath’s own voice, out of that pile of recordings we got at his apartment, and what we can get out of the news file,” Vall said. “We have phoneticists who can split syllables and splice them together. Kostran will deliver his speech in dumb-show, and we’ll dub the sound in and telecast them as one. I’ve messaged PolTerm to get to work on that; they can start as soon as we have the speech written.”
“The more it succeeds now, the worse the blow-up will be when we finally have to admit that Salgath was killed here tonight,” the Chief Interofficer Coordinator, Zostha Olv said. “We’d better have something to show the public to justify that.”
“Yes, we had,” Tortha Karf agreed. “Vall, how about the Kholghoor Sector operation. How far’s Ranthar Jard gotten toward locating one of those Wizard Trader time lines?”
“Not very far,” Vall admitted. “He has it pinned down to the subsector, but the belt seems to be one we haven’t any information at all for. Never been any legitimate penetration by paratimers. He has his own hagiologists, and a couple borrowed from Outtime Religious Institute; they’ve gotten everything the slaves can give them on that. About the only thing to do is start random observation with boomerang-balls.”
“Over about a hundred thousand time lines,” Zostha Olv scoffed. He was an old man, even for his long-lived race; he had a thin nose and a narrow, bitter, mouth. “And what will he look for?”
“Croutha with guns,” Tortha Karf told him, then turned to Vall. “Can’t he narrow it more than that? What have his experts been getting out of those slaves?”
“That I don’t know, to date.” Vall looked at the clock. “I’ll find out, though; I’ll transpose to Police Terminal and call him up. And Skordran Kirv. No, Vulthor Tharn; it’d hurt the old fellow’s feelings if I by-passed him and went to one of his subordinates. Half an hour each way, and at most another hour talking to Ranthar and Vulthor; there won’t be anything doing here for two hours.” He rose. “See you when I get back.”
Dalla had turned on the telescreen again; after tuning out a dance orchestra and a comedy show, she got the image of an angry-faced man in evening clothes.
“… And I’m going to demand a full investigation, as soon as Council convenes tomorrow morning!” he was shouting. “This whole story is a preposterous insult to the integrity of the entire Executive Council, your elected representatives, and it shows the criminal lengths to which this would-be dictator, Tortha Karf, and his jackal Verkan Vall will go—”
“So long, jackal,” Dalla called to him as he went out.
He spend the half-hour transposition to Police Terminal sleeping. Paratime-transpositions and rocket-flights seemed to be his only chance to get any sleep. He was still sleepy when he sat down in front of the radio telescreen behind his duplicate of Tortha Karf’s desk and put through a call to Nharkan Equivalent. It was 0600 in India; the Sector Regional Deputy Subchief who was holding down Ranthar Jard’s desk looked equally sleepy; he had a mug of coffee in front of him, and a brown-paper cigarette in his mouth.
“Oh, hello, Assistant Verkan. Want me to call Subchief Ranthar?”
“Is he sleeping? Then for mercy’s sake don’t. What’s the present status of the investigation?”
“Well, we were dropping boomerang balls yesterday, while we had sun to mask the return-flashes. Nothing. The Croutha have taken the city of Sohram, just below the big bend of the river. Tomorrow, when we have sunlight, we’re going to start boomerang-balling the central square. We may get something.”
“The Wizard Traders’ll be moving in near there, about now,” Vall said. “The Croutha ought to have plenty of merchandise for them. Have you gotten anything more done on narrowing down the possible area?”
The deputy bit back a yawn and reached for his coffee mug.
“The experts have just about pumped these slaves empty,” he said. “The local religion is a mess. Seems to have started out as a Great Mother cult; then it picked up a lot of gods borrowed from other peoples; then it turned into a dualistic monotheism; then it picked up a lot of minor gods and devils—new devils usually gods of the older pantheon. And we got a lot of gossip about the feudal wars and faction-fights among the nobility, and so on, all garbled, because these people are peasants who only knew what went on on the estate of their own lord.”
“What did go on there?” Vall asked. “Ask them about recent improvements, new buildings, new fields cleared, new paddies flooded, that sort of thing. And pick out a few of the highest IQ’s from both time lines, and have them locate this estate on a large-scale map, and draw plans showing the location of buildings, fields and other visible features. If you have to, teach them mapping and sketching by hypno-mech. And then drop about five hundred to a thousand boomerang balls, at regular intervals, over the whole paratemporal area. When you locate a time line that gives you a picture to correspond to their description, boomerang the main square in Sohram over the whole belt around it, to find Croutha with firearms.”
The deputy looked at him for a moment, then gulped more coffee.
“Can do, Assistant Verkan. I think I’ll send somebody to wake up Subchief Ranthar, right now. Want to talk to him?”
“Won’t be necessary. You’re recording this call, of course? Then play it back to him. And get cracking with the slaves; you want enough information out of them to enable you to start boomerang balling as soon as the sun’s high enough.”
He broke off the connection and sent out for coffee for himself. Then he put through a call to Novilan Equivalent, in western North America.
It was 1530, there, when he got Vulthor Tham on the screen.
“Good afternoon, Assistant Verkan. I suppose you’re calling about the slave business. I’ve turned the entire matter over to Field Agent Skordran; gave him a temporary rank of Deputy Subchief. That’s subject to your approval and Chief Tortha’s, of course—”
“Make the appointment permanent,” Vall said. “I’ll have a confirmation along from Chief Tortha directly. And let me talk to him, now, if you please, Subchief Vulthor.”
“Yes, sir. Switching you over now.” The screen went into a beautiful burst of abstract-art, and cleared, after a while, with Skordran Kirv looking out of it.
“Hello, Deputy Skordran, and congratulations. What’s come up since we had Nebu-hin-Abenoz cut out from under us?”
“We went in on that time line, that same night, with an airboat and made a recon in the hills back of Careba. Scared the fear of Safar into a party of Caleras while we were working at low altitude, by the way. We found the conveyer-head site; hundred-foot circle with all the grass and loose dirt transposed off it, and a pole pen, very unsanitary, where about two-three hundred slaves would be kept at a time. No indications of use in the last ten days. We did some pretty thorough boomeranging on that spatial equivalent over a couple of thousand time lines and found thirty more of them. I believe the slavers have closed out the whole Esaron Sector operation, at least temporarily.”
That was what he’d been afraid of; he hoped they wouldn’t do the same thing on the Kholghoor Sector.
“Let me have the designations of the time lines on which you found conveyer heads,” he said.
“Just a moment, Chief’s Assistant; I’ll photoprint them to you. Set for reception?”
Vall opened a slide under the screen and saw that the photoprint film was in place, then closed it again, nodding. Skordran Kirv fed a sheet of paper into his screen cabinet and his arm moved forward out of the picture.
“On, sir,” he said. He and Vall counted ten seconds together, and then Skordran Kirv said: “Through to you.” Vall pressed a lever under his screen, and a rectangle of microcopy print popped out.
“That’s about all I have, sir. Want me to keep my troops ready here, or shall I send them somewhere else?”
“Keep them ready, Kirv,” Vall told him. “You may need them before long, Call you later.”
He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged print with him to the conveyer room. There was something odd about the list of time line designations. They were expressed numerically, in First Level notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exact expression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers. Vall had only a general-education smattering of mathematics—enough to qualify him for the chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the Fourth Level Europe-American Sector—and he could not identify the peculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort of pattern. Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of the chairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him, and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished. He woke, the list of time line designations in his hand, when the conveyor rematerialized on Home Time Line. Putting it in his pocket, he hurried to an antigrav shaft and floated up to the floor on which Tortha Karf’s office was.
Tortha Karf was asleep in his chair, Dalla was eating a dinner that had been brought in to her—something better than the sandwich and mug of coffee Vall had mentioned to Thai van Dras. Several of the bureau chiefs who had been there when he had gone out had left, and the psychist who had taken charge of the prisoner was there.
“I think he’s coming out of the drug, now,” he reported. “Still asleep, though. We want him to waken naturally before we start on him. They’ll call me as soon as he shows signs of stirring.”
“The Opposition’s claiming, now, that we drugged and hypnotized Salgath into making that visiscreen confession,” Dalla said. “Can you think of any way you could do that without making the subject incapable of lying?”
“Pseudo-memories,” the psychist said. “It would take about three times as long as the time between Salgath Trod’s departure from his apartment and the time of the telecast, though—”
“You know much higher math?” Vall asked the psychist.
“Well, enough to handle my job. Neuron-synapse interrelations, memory-and-association patterns, that kind of thing, all have to be expressed mathematically.”
Vall nodded and handed him the time-line designation list.
“See any kind of a pattern there?” he asked.
The psychist looked at the paper and blanked his face as he drew on hypnotically-acquired information.
“Yes. I’d say that all the numbers are related in some kind of a series to some other number. Simplified down to kindergarten level, say the difference between A and B is, maybe, one-decillionth of the difference between X and A, and the difference between B and C is one-decillionth of the difference between X and B, and so on—”
A voice came out of one of the communication boxes:
“Dr. Nentrov; the patient’s out of the drug, and he’s beginning to stir about.”
“That’s it,” the psychist said. “I have to run.” He handed the sheet back to Vall, took a last drink from his coffee cup, and bolted out of the room.
Dalla picked up the sheet of paper and looked at it. Vall told her what it was.
“If those time lines are in regular series, they relate to the base line of operations,” she said. “Maybe you can have that worked out. I can see how it would be; a stated interval between the Esaron Sector lines, to simplify transposition control settings.”
“That was what I was thinking. It’s not quite as simple as I)r. Nentrov expressed it, but that could be the general idea. We might be able to work out the location of the base line from that. There seems to be a break in the number sequence in here; that would be the time line Skordran Kirv found those slaves on.” He reached for the pipe he had left on the desk when he had gone to Police Terminal and began filling it.
A little later, a buzzer sounded and a light came on on one of the communication boxes. He flipped the switch and said, “Verkan Vall here.” Sothran Barth’s voice came out of the box.
“They’ve just brought in Salgath Trod’s servants. Picked them up as they came out of the house conveyer at the apartment building. I don’t believe they know what’s happened. “
Vall flipped a switch and twiddled a dial, a viewscreen lit up, showing the landing stage. The police car had just landed; one detective had gotten out, and was helping the girl, Zinganna, who had been Salgath Trod’s housekeeper and mistress, to descend. She was really beautiful. Vall thought; rather tall, slender, with dark eyes and a creamy light-brown skin. She wore a black cloak, and, under it, a black and silver evening gown. A single jewel twinkled in her black hair. She could have very easily passed for a woman of his own race.
The housemaid and the butler were a couple of entirely different articles. Both were about four or five generations from Fourth Level Primitive savagery. The maid, in garishly cheap finery, was big-boned and heavy-bodied, with red-brown hair; she looked like a member of one of the northern European reindeer-herding peoples who had barely managed to progress as far as the bow and arrow. The butler was probably a mixture of half a dozen primitive races; he was wearing one of his late master’s evening suits, a bright mellow-pink, which was distinctly unflattering to his complexion.
The sound-pickup was too far away to give him what they were saying, but the butler and maid were waving their arms and protesting vehemently. One of the detectives took the woman by the arm; she jerked it loose and aimed a backhand slap at him. He blocked it on his forearm. Immediately, the girl in black turned and said something to her, and she subsided. Vall said, into the box:
“Barth, have the girl in the black cloak brought down to Number Four Interview Room. Put the other two in separate detention cubicles; we’ll talk to them later.” He broke the connection and got to his feet. “Come on, Dalla. I want you to help me with the girl.”
“Just try and stop me,” Dalla told him. “Any interviews you have with that little item, I want to sit in on.”
The Proletarian girl, still guarded by a detective, had already been placed in the interview room. The detective nodded to Vall, tried to suppress a grin when he saw Dalla behind him, and went out. Vall saw his wife and the prisoner seated, and produced his cigarette case, handing it around.
“You’re Zinganna; you’re of the household of Councilman Salgath Trod, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Housekeeper and hostess,” the girl replied. “I am also his mistress.”
Vall nodded, smiling. “Which confirms my long-standing respect for Councilman Salgath’s exquisite taste.”
“Why, thank you,” she said. “But I doubt if I was brought here to receive compliments. Or was I?”
“No, I’m afraid not. Have you heard the newscasts of the past few hours concerning Councilman Salgath?”
She straightened in her seat, looking at him seriously.
“No. I and Nindrandigro and Calilla spent the evening on ServSec One-Six-Five. Councilman Salgath told me that he had some business and wanted them out of the apartment, and wanted me to keep an eye on them. We didn’t hear any news at all.” She hesitated. “Has anything… serious… happened?”
Vall studied her for a moment, then glanced at Dalla.
There existed between himself and his wife a sort of vague, semi telepathic, rapport; they had never been able to transmit definite and exact thoughts, but they could clearly comprehend one another’s feelings and emotions. He was conscious, now, of Dalla’s sympathy for the Proletarian girl.
