“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 south-west 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 fifty-foot 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.”