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Taking the disk of blue plastic from his packet, he handed it to the clerk at the desk, who dropped it into a slot in the voder in front of him. Instantly, a mechanical voice responded: "Verkan Vall, blue-seal noble, hereditary Mavrad of Nerros. Special Chief's Assistant, Paratime Police, special assignment. Subject to no orders below those of Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police.
Verkan Vall was glad of that; he wanted that head for the trophy-room of his home on Nerros. Grunting and straining, he got the thing into the back of the jeep, and flung his almost shredded tweed coat over it. A last look around assured him that he had left nothing unaccountable or suspicious. The brush was broken where the nighthound had been tearing at the coat; a bear might have done that.
The young Mavrad of Nerros was thinking as a paratimer should. "What's the designation of your line, again?" Verkan Vall told him. It was a short numerical term of six places, but it expressed a number of the order of ten to the fortieth power, exact to the last digit. Tortha Karf repeated it into his stenomemograph, with explanatory comment.
Nevertheless, we are sparing nothing for the sake of getting at the truth; he is already thoroughly dislocated, we are applying all the herbs of Saint John's day; as saith the old comedian Plautus, 'Advorsum stimulos, laminas, crucesque, compedesque, Nerros, catenas, carceres, numellas, pedicas, boias. Nothing answers; that man is terrible. I am at my wit's end over him."
He grunted out a string of English oaths, and capped them with an obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the Fourth Level inhabitants of his island home of Nerros, to the south, and a thundering curse in the name of Mogga, Fire-God of Dool, in a Third-Level tongue.
He wouldn't be making any mistake in turning his post over to the Mavrad of Nerros on his retirement. "Yes, Vall; I know," he said. "But when you've been at this desk as long as I have, you'll have a sour moment or two, now and then, too." A blue light flashed over one of the booths across the room.
In fact, it seems slightly indecent to them for anybody to want privacy." One of Thalvan Dras' human servants came into the room, coughed apologetically, and said: "A visiphone-call for His Valor, the Mavrad of Nerros." Vall went on nibbling ham and wine sauce; the servant repeated the announcement a trifle more loudly. "Vall, you're being paged!" Thalvan Dras told him, with a touch of impatience.
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