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"Suppose you change now, Dalla," he said. "Subchief, I'd like a word with you privately." He and Vulthor Tharn excused themselves and walked over to the edge of the landing stage. The SecReg Subchief was outwardly composed, but Vall sensed that he was worried and embarrassed. "Now, what's been done since you got Agent Skordran's report?" Vall asked.
Security of the secret of paratime transposition." "Oh, my eye!" Dalla exclaimed. "Don't give me that, Vall!" "Look, Dalla. Suppose you get discarnated here," Verkan Vall said. "You say reincarnation is a scientific fact. Well, you'd reincarnate on this sector, and then you'd take a memory-recall, under hypnosis. And when you did, the paratime secret wouldn't be a secret any more." "Oh!"
You've been working very hard, and you and Dalla are entitled to a little time together. I just want you to look into something, before you leave." "It'll have to take some fast looking. Our rocket blasts off in two hours."
She was holding the arm of a man who wore the black tunic and red badge of an Assassin, a handsome specimen of the Akor-Neb race. Trust little Dalla for that, Verkan Vall thought. The figures were moving with exaggerated slowness, as though a very fleeting picture were being stretched out as far as possible.
"Who did it?" she asked, the Stone Age savage who had been her ancestor not ten generations ago peeping out of her eyes. "The men who actually used the needlers are dead," Vall told her. "I killed a couple of them myself. We still have to find the men who planned it. I'd hoped you'd want to help us do that, Zinganna." He side-glanced to Dalla again; she nodded.
She shook her head and sat down in one of the chairs behind the desk; she started to relax and then caught herself and sat erect, her hands on her lap. "This won't interfere with your vacation, Vall," Tortha Karf was saying. "I just need a little help before you transpose out." "We have to catch the rocket for Zarabar in an hour and a half," Dalla reminded him.
"I hope they don't," Vall said to Tortha Karf. "Really, though, I doubt if they do. This is their chance to pick up a lot of slaves cheaply; the Croutha are too busy to bother haggling. I'm going through to PolTerm, now; when Dalla and Zinganna get through, tell them to join me there." On Police Terminal, he found Kostran Galth, the agent who had been selected to impersonate Salgath Trod.
Vall and Dalla went over and stood behind one of the psychists, who had a small flashlight in his hand. "Now, rest for a while," the psychist was saying. "Rest and let the good medicine do its work. You are tired and sleepy. Look at this magic light, which brings comfort to the troubled. Look at the light. Look ... at ... the ... light." They moved to the next table.
Hadron Dalla watched dejectedly as the green crags and escarpments of the Paratime Building loomed above the city in front of them, and began slipping under the aircab. She felt like a prisoner recaptured at the moment when attempted escape was about to succeed. "I knew it," she said. "I knew he'd find something. He's trying to break things up between us, the way he did twenty years ago."
The Kharandas, the people among whom she had once done field-research work, had developed a pre-mechanical, animal-power, handcraft, edge-weapon culture. She could imagine the roads jammed with fugitives from the barbarian invaders, the conveyer hidden among the trees, the lurking slavers Watch it, Dalla! Don't let the old scoundrel play on your feelings! "Well, what do you want me to do, Chief?"
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