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Updated: June 12, 2025
"You're sure of this, of course." It was less a question than a statement. Verkan Vall bent and took cloth-wrapped objects from his bag, unwrapping them and laying them on the desk. They were casts, in hard black plastic, of the footprints of some large three-toed animal. "What do these look like, sir?" he asked. Tortha Karf fingered them and nodded.
Let's have a look at the other one." The man in Proletarian dress must have had his capsule between his molars when he had been killed; it was broken, and there was a brownish discoloration and chemical odor in his mouth. "Second time we've had a witness killed off under our noses," Tortha Karf said. "We're going to have to smarten up in a hurry."
However, Hadron Dalla had never returned to the apartment, the night before." Verkan Vall was sitting motionless, his face expressionless as he ran Tortha Karf's narrative through the intricate semantic and psychological processes of the First Level mentality.
"Not his fault," the Paratime Police agent said. "I'm the one the Company'll be sore at, but I'd rather have them down on me rather than old Tortha Karf. Well, sit on the lid till I get back," he told both of them. "We'll need some kind of a story for the locals.
"Why, what's been happening, Chief?" Tortha Karf swore with weary bitterness. "Salgath Trod's what's been happening. At first, after Yandar Yadd broke the story on the air, there was just a lot of unorganized Opposition sniping in Council; Salgath waited till the middle of the afternoon, when the Management members were beginning to rally, and took the floor.
He handed them to her, while Sothran Barth bent over the prisoner and gave him an injection, then went to the body of the other pseudo-policeman, forcing open his mouth. In his cheek, still unbroken, was a second capsule, which he added to the first. Tortha Karf was watching him. "Same gang that killed that Carera slaver on Esaron Sector?" he asked. "Of course, exactly the same general procedure.
And his report had crawled through channels for fourteen hours, Vall thought. "Well, on my authority, and in the name of Chief Tortha, you message Ranthar Jard at once; send him every scrap of information you have on the subject, and forward additional information as it comes in to you. I doubt he'll find anything on any time-line that's being exploited by any legitimate paratimers.
Tortha Karf began, alphabetically, to blaspheme every god he had ever heard of. He had only gotten as far as a Fourth Level deity named Allah when a red light began flashing in front of Asthar Varn, and the voice of a page-robot, amplified, roared: "Point of special urgency! Point of special urgency! It has been requested that the news telecast screen be activated at once, with playback to 1107.
I went back to find him and return him to his own time-line, but before I could locate him, he'd been arrested by the local authorities as a suspicious character, and got himself shot trying to escape. I felt badly about that, but " Tortha Karf shrugged. "Anything else happen on the trip?" "I ran through a belt of intermittent nucleonic bombing on the Second Level."
"It seems to have failed in this case," Tortha Karf began, then snapped his fingers. "Of course! How blasted silly can I get, when I'm not trying?" "Yes, of course," Verkan Vall agreed. "Find out how these people missed being spotted by psychotesting; that'll lead us to who missed being tested adequately, and also who got into the Bureau of Psychological Hygiene who didn't belong there."
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