Police Operation, Page 3

medicated the needle prick,all in one almost painless operation. He put the blood-drop on a slideand inserted it at one side of a comparison microscope, nodding. Itshowed the same distinctive permanent colloid pattern as the sample hehad ready for comparison; the colloid pattern given in infancy byinjection to the man in front of him, to set him apart from all themyriad other Verkan Valls on every other probability-line of paratime.

  "Right, sir," the clerk nodded.

  The two policemen came out of the dome, their needlers holstered andtheir vigilance relaxed. They were lighting cigarettes as they emerged.

  "It's all right, sir," one of them said. "You didn't bring anything inwith you, this trip."

  The other cop chuckled. "Remember that Fifth Level wild-man who came inon the freight conveyor at Jandar, last month?" he asked.

  If he was hoping that some of the girls would want to know, whatwild-man, it was a vain hope. With a blue-seal mavrad around, whatchance did a couple of ordinary coppers have? The girls were alreadyconverging on Verkan Vall.

  "When are you going to get that monstrosity out of our restroom," thelittle redhead in green coveralls was demanding. "If it wasn't for thatthing, I'd be taking a shower, right now."

  "You were just finishing one, about fifty paraseconds off, when I camethrough," Verkan Vall told her.

  The girl looked at him in obviously feigned indignation.

  "Why, you--You _parapeeper_!"

  Verkan Vall chuckled and turned to the clerk. "I want a strato-rocketand pilot, for Dhergabar, right away. Call Dhergabar Paratime PoliceField and give them my ETA; have an air-taxi meet me, and have the chiefnotified that I'm coming in. Extraordinary report. Keep a guard overthe conveyor; I think I'm going to need it, again, soon." He turned tothe little redhead. "Want to show me the way out of here, to the rocketfield?" he asked.

  * * * * *

  Outside, on the open landing field, Verkan Vall glanced up at the sky,then looked at his watch. It had been twenty minutes since he had backedthe jeep into the barn, on that distant other time-line; the samedelicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue above. Theconstancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand parayears ofperpendicular time, never failed to impress him. The long curve of themountains was the same, and they were mottled with the same autumncolors, but where the little village of Rutter's Fort stood on thatother line of probability, the white towers of an apartment-cityrose--the living quarters of the plant personnel.

  The rocket that was to take him to headquarters was being hoisted witha crane and lowered into the firing-stand, and he walked briskly towardit, his rifle and musette slung. A boyish-looking pilot was on theplatform, opening the door of the rocket; he stood aside for VerkanVall to enter, then followed and closed it, dogging it shut while hispassenger stowed his bag and rifle and strapped himself into a seat.

  "Dhergabar Commercial Terminal, sir?" the pilot asked, taking theadjoining seat at the controls.

  "Paratime Police Field, back of the Paratime Administration Building."

  "Right, sir. Twenty seconds to blast, when you're ready."

  "Ready now." Verkan Vall relaxed, counting seconds subconsciously.

  The rocket trembled, and Verkan Vall felt himself being pushed gentlyback against the upholstery. The seats, and the pilot's instrument panelin front of them, swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicatorswept slowly over a ninety-degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled.By then, the high cirrus clouds Verkan Vall had watched from the fieldwere far below; they were well into the stratosphere.

  There would be nothing to do, now, for the three hours in which therocket sped northward across the pole and southward to Dhergabar; thenavigation was entirely in the electronic hands of the robot controls.Verkan Vall got out his pipe and lit it; the pilot lit a cigarette.

  "That's an odd pipe, sir," the pilot said. "Out-time item?"

  "Yes, Fourth Probability Level; typical of the whole paratime belt I wasworking in." Verkan Vall handed it over for inspection. "The bowl'snatural brier-root; the stem's a sort of plastic made from the sap ofcertain tropical trees. The little white dot is the maker's trademark;it's made of elephant tusk."

  "Sounds pretty crude to me, sir." The pilot handed it back. "Niceworkmanship, though. Looks like good machine production."

  "Yes. The sector I was on is really quite advanced, for anelectro-chemical civilization. That weapon I brought back withme--that solid-missile projector--is typical of most Fourth Levelculture. Moving parts machined to the closest tolerances, andinterchangeable with similar parts of all similar weapons. The missileis a small bolt of cupro-alloy coated lead, propelled by expandinggases from the ignition of some nitro-cellulose compound. Most oftheir scientific advance occurred within the past century, and mostof that in the past forty years. Of course, the life-expectancy onthat level is only about seventy years."

  "Humph! I'm seventy-eight, last birthday," the boyish-looking pilotsnorted. "Their medical science must be mostly witchcraft!"

  "Until quite recently, it was," Verkan Vall agreed. "Same story thereas in everything else--rapid advancement in the past few decades, afterthousands of years of cultural inertia."

  "You know, sir, I don't really understand this paratime stuff," thepilot confessed. "I know that all time is totally present, and thatevery moment has its own past-future line of event-sequence, and thatall events in space-time occur according to maximum probability, but Ijust don't get this alternate probability stuff, at all. If somethingexists, it's because it's the maximum-probability effect of priorcauses; why does anything else exist on any other time-line?"

  Verkan Vall blew smoke at the air-renovator. A lecture on paratimetheory would nicely fill in the three-hour interval until the landingat Dhergabar. At least, this kid was asking intelligent questions.

  "Well, you know the principal of time-passage, I suppose?" he began.

  "Yes, of course; Rhogom's Doctrine. The basis of most of our psychicalscience. We exist perpetually at all moments within our life-span; ourextraphysical ego component passes from the ego existing at one momentto the ego existing at the next. During unconsciousness, the EPC is'time-free'; it may detach, and connect at some other moment, with theego existing at that time-point. That's how we precog. We take anautohypno and recover memories brought back from the future momentand buried in the subconscious mind."

  "That's right," Verkan Vall told him. "And even without the autohypno,a lot of precognitive matter leaks out of the subconscious and intothe conscious mind, usually in distorted forms, or else inspires'instinctive' acts, the motivation for which is not brought to the levelof consciousness. For instance, suppose, you're walking along NorthPromenade, in Dhergabar, and you come to the Martian Palace Cafe, andyou go in for a drink, and meet some girl, and strike up an acquaintancewith her. This chance acquaintance develops into a love affair, anda year later, out of jealousy, she rays you half a dozen times witha needler."

  "Just about that happened to a friend of mine, not long ago," the pilotsaid. "Go on, sir."

  "Well, in the microsecond or so before you die--or afterward, for thatmatter, because we know that the extraphysical component survivesphysical destruction--your EPC slips back a couple of years, andre-connects at some point pastward of your first meeting with thisgirl, and carries with it memories of everything up to the moment ofdetachment, all of which are indelibly recorded in your subconsciousmind. So, when you re-experience the event of standing outside theMartian Palace with a thirst, you go on to the Starway, or Nhergal's,or some other bar. In both cases, on both time-lines, you follow theline of maximum probability; in the second case, your subconsciousfuture memories are an added causal factor."

  "And when I back-slip, after I've been needled, I generate a newtime-line? Is that it?"

  Verkan Vall made a small sound of impatience. "No such thing!" heexclaimed. "It's semantically inadmissible to talk about the totalpresence of time with one breath and about generating new time-lineswith the ne
xt. _All_ time-lines are totally present, in perpetualco-existence. The theory is that the EPC passes from one moment, on onetime-line, to the next moment on the next line, so that the true passageof the EPC from moment to moment is a two-dimensional diagonal. So, inthe case we're using, the event of your going into the Martian Palaceexists on one time-line, and the event of your passing along to theStarway exists on another, but both are events in real existence.

  "Now, what we do, in paratime transposition, is to build up ahypertemporal field to include the time-line we want to reach, and thenshift over to it. Same point in the plenum; same