TIME PRIME

by H. Beam Piper

  “What’s the Esaron Sector like?” Dalla asked, as the conveyer dome around them coruscated with shifting light and vanished.

  “Third Level; probability of abortive attempt to colonize this planet from Mars about a hundred thousand years ago,” he said. “A few survivors—a shipload or so—were left to shift for themselves while the parent civilization on Mars died out. They lost all vestiges of their original Martian culture, even memory of their extraterrestrial origin. About fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago, a reasonably high electrochemical civilization developed and they began working with nuclear energy and developed reaction-drive spaceships. But they’d concentrated so much on the inorganic sciences, and so far neglected the bio-sciences, that when they launched their first ship for Venus they hadn’t yet developed a germ theory of disease.”

  “What happened when they ran into the green-vomit fever?” Dalla asked.

  “About what you could expect. The first—and only—ship to return brought it back to Terra. Of course, nobody knew what it was, and before the epidemic ended, it had almost depopulated this planet. Since the survivors knew nothing about germs, they blamed it on the anger of the gods—the old story of recourse to supernaturalism in the absence of a known explanation—and a fanatically anti-scientific cult got control. Of course, space travel was taboo; so was nuclear and even electric power. For some reason, steam power and gunpowder weren’t offensive to the gods. They went back to a low-order steam-power, black-powder culture, and haven’t gotten beyond that to this day.

  “The relatively civilized regions are on the east coast of Asia and the west coast of North America; civilized race more or less Caucasian. Political organization just barely above the tribal level—thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities and feudal holdings and robbers’ roosts. The principal industries are brigandage, piracy, slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercommunal warfare. They have a few ramshackle steam railways and some steamboats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured goods, mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and tobacco. Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs has the sector franchise. That’s one of the companies Thalvan Dras gets his money from.”

  They had run down through the civilized Second and Third Levels and were leaving the Fourth behind and entering the Fifth, existing in the probability of a world without human population. Once in a while, around them, they caught brief flashes of buildings and rocket ports and spaceports and landing stages, as the conveyer took them through narrow paratime belts on which their own civilization had established outposts—Fifth Level Commercial, Fifth Level Passenger, Industrial Sector, Service Sector. Finally the conveyer dome around them shimmered into visibility and materialized; when they emerged, there were policemen in green uniforms who entered to search the dome with drawn needlers to make sure they had picked up nothing dangerous on the way. The room outside was similar to the one they had left on Home Time Line, even to the shifting, noisy crowd in incongruously-mixed costumes.

  The rocketport was a ten minute trip by aircar from the conveyer head; when they boarded the stubby-winged strato-rocket, Vall saw that two of the passenger- seats had square metal cabinets bolted in place behind them and blue plastic helmets on swinging arms mounted above them.

  “Everything’s set up,” the pilot told them. “Dr. Hadron, you sit on the left; that cabinet’s loaded with language tape for Acalan. Yours is loaded with a tape of Kharanda; that’s the Fourth Level Kholghoor language you wanted, Chief ’s Assistant. Shall I help you get fixed in your seats?”

  “Yes, if you please. Here, Dalla, I’ll fix that for you.”

  Dalla was already asleep when the pilot was adjusting his helmet and giving him his injection. He never felt the rocket tilt into firing position, and while he slept, the Kharandas language, with all its vocabulary and grammar, became part of his subconscious knowledge, needing only the mental pronunciation of a trigger- symbol to bring it into consciousness. The pilot was already unfastening and raising his helmet when he opened his eyes. Dalla, beside him, was sipping a cup of spiced wine.

  On the landing stage of the Sector-Regional Headquarters at Novilan Equivalent, four or five people were waiting for them. Vall recognized the subchief, Vulthor Tharn, who introduced another man, in riding boots and a white cloak, as Skordran Kirv.

  Vall clasped hands with him warmly. “Good work, Agent Skordran. You got onto this promptly.”

  “I tried to, sir. Do you want the dope now? We have half an hour’s flight to our spatial equivalent, and another half hour in transposition.”

  “Give it to me on the way,” he said, and turned to Vulthor Tharn. “Our Esaron costumes ready?”

  “Yes. Over there in the control tower. We have a temporary conveyer head set up about two hundred miles south of here, which will take you straight through to the plantation.”

  “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.

  “Well, sir, it seems that this is more serious than we had anticipated. Field Agent Skordran, who will give you the particulars, says that there is every indication that a large and well-organized gang of paratemporal criminals, our own people, are at work. He says that he’s found evidence of activities on Fourth Level Kholghoor that don’t agree with any information we have about conditions on that sector.” “Besides transmitting Agent Skordran’s report to Dhergabar through the robot report-system, what have you done about it?”

  “I confirmed Agent Skordran in charge of the local investigation, and gave him two detectives and a psychist, sir. As soon as we could furnish hypno-mech indoctrination in Kharanda to other psychists, I sent them along. He now has four of them and eight detectives. By that time, we had a conveyer head right at this Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs plantation.”

  “Why didn’t you just borrow psychists from SecReg for Kholghoor, Eastern India?” Vall asked. “Subchief Ranthar would have loaned you a few.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t call on another SecReg for men without higher-echelon authorization. Especially not from another Sector Organization, even another Level Authority,” Vulthor Tharn said. “Besides, it would have taken longer to bring them here than to hypno-mech our own personnel.”

  He was right about the second point. Vall agreed mentally; however, his real reason was procedural.

  “Did you alert Ranthar Jard to what was going on in his SecReg?” he asked.

  “Gracious, no!” Vulthor Tharn was scandalized. “I have no authority to tell people of equal echelon in other Sector and Level organizations what to do. I put my report through regular channels; it wasn’t my place to go outside my own jurisdiction.”

  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. This gang probably works exclusively on unpenetrated time-lines; this business Skordran Kirv came across was a bad blunder on some underling’s part.”

  He saw Dalla emerge from the control tower in breeches and boots and a white cloak, buckling on a heavy revolver. “I’ll go change; you get busy calling Ranthar Jard. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  II

  “Are you taking over, Chief ’s Assistant?” 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, Assistant Verkan, or just a condensation?”

  “Give me what you think it indicates, remembering that you’re probably trying to analyze 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-hundredfoot 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, voiceamplifiers, 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 southwest of the plantation. There were two hundred and fifty in this batch; this Coru-hin-Irigod only bought the batch he sold at the plantation.”

  The aircar lost speed and altitude; 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 passenger 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 fiftyfoot 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-Irigod, 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-Irigod, 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.

  III

  They emerged into the interior of a long shed, adobe-walled and thatchroofed, 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.”

  “These people,” Skordran Kirv explained, “were all peons on the estate of a Kharanda noble 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 kidnapped 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 whi
te 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. “It will have to be decided by the Paratime Commission. I doubt if your company will suffer. You bought them innocently, in conformity with local custom. Ever buy slaves from this Coru-hin-Irigod 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 Institute, she had been working on the problem of the return of a discarnate personality from outtime.