“If we could think of a way to reduce it to some specific area of paratime—­” one of Ranthar Jard’s deputies began.

“That’s precisely what we’ve been trying to do, Klav,” Vall said.  “We haven’t done it.”

Dalla, who had withdrawn from the discussion and was on a couch at the side of the room, surrounded by reports and abstracts and summaries, looked up.

“I took hours and hours of hypno-mech on Kholghoor Sector religions, before I went out on that wild-goose chase for psychokinesis and precognition data,” she said.  “About six or eight hundred years ago, there were religious wars and heresies and religious schisms all over the Kharanda country.  No matter how uniform the Kholghoor Sector may be otherwise, there are dozens and dozens of small belts and sub-sectors of different religions or sects or god-cults.”

“That’s right,” Ranthar Jard agreed, brightening.  “We have hagiologists who know all that stuff; we’ll have a couple of them interrogate those slaves.  I don’t know how much they can get out of them—­lot of peasants, won’t be up on the theological niceties—­but a synthesis of what we get from the lot of them—­”

“That’s an idea,” Vall agreed.  “About the first idea we’ve had, here—­Oh, how about politics, too?  Check on who’s the king, what the stories about the royal family are, that sort of thing.”

Ranthar Jard looked at the map on the wall.  “The Croutha have only gotten halfway to Nharkan, here.  Say we transpose detectives in at night on some of these time lines we think are promising, and check up at the tax-collection offices on a big landowner north of Jhirda named Ghromdour?  That might get us something.”

“Well, I don’t want you to think we’re trying to get out of work, Chief’s Assistant,” one of the deputies said, “but is there any real necessity for our trying to locate the Wizard Trader time lines?  If you can get them from the Esaron Sector, it’ll be the same, won’t it?”

“Marv, in this business you never depend on just one lead,” Ranthar Jard told him.  “And beside, when Skordran Kirv’s gang hits the base of operations in North America, there’s no guarantee that they may not have time to send off a radio warning to the crowd at the base here in India.  We have to hit both places at once.”

“Well, that, too,” Vall said.  “But the main thing is to get these Wizard Trader camps on the Kholghoor Sector cleaned out.  How are you fixed for men and equipment, for a big raid, Jard?”

Ranthar Jard shrugged.  “I can get about five hundred men with conveyers, including a couple of two-hundred-footers to carry airboats,” he said.

“Not enough.  Skordran Kirv has one complete armored brigade, one airborne infantry brigade, and an air cavalry regiment, with Ghaldron-Hesthor equipment for a simultaneous transposition,” Vall said.

“Where in blazes did he get them all?” Ranthar Jard demanded.

“They’re guard troops, from Service Sector and Industrial Sector.  We’ll get you the same sort of a force.  I only hope we don’t have another Prole insurrection while they’re away—­”