“It’s also a lot of grief for all of us,” the young man in the wrap-around tunic added.  “I don’t want my psychotests reviewed by some duty-struck bigot who can’t be reasoned with, and neither do you.”

“I’m getting something organized to counter that,” Salgath Trod said.  “I’m going to attack the whole scientific basis of psychotesting.  There’s Dr. Frasthor Klav; he’s always contended that what are called criminal tendencies are the result of the individual’s total environment, and that psychotesting and personality-analysis are valueless, because the total environment changes from day to day, even from hour to hour—­”

“That won’t do,” the nameless young man who was the messenger of somebody equally nameless retorted.  “Frasthor’s a crackpot; no reputable psychologist or psychist gives his opinions a moment’s consideration.  And besides, we don’t want to attack Psychological Hygiene.  The people in it with whom we can do business are our safeguard; they’ve given all of us a clean bill of mental health, and we have papers to prove it.  What we have to do is to make it appear that that incident on the Esaron Sector is all there is to this, and also involve the Paratime Police themselves.  The slavers are all paracops.  It isn’t the fault of BuPsychHyg, because the Paratime Police have their own psychotesting staff.  That’s where the trouble is; the paracops haven’t been adequately testing their own personnel.”

“Now how are you going to do that?” Salgath Trod asked disdainfully.

“You’ll take the floor, the first thing tomorrow, and utilize these new revelations about the Wizard Traders.  You’ll accuse the Paratime Police of being the Wizard Traders themselves.  Why not?  They have their own paratemporal transposition equipment shops on Police Terminal, they have facilities for manufacturing duplicates of any kind of outtime items, like the firearms, for instance, and they know which time lines on which sectors are being exploited by legitimate paratime traders and which aren’t.  What’s to prevent a gang of unscrupulous paracops from moving in on a few unexploited Kholghoor time lines, buying captives from the Croutha, and shipping them to the Esaron Sector?”

“Then why would they let a thing like this get out?” Salgath Trod inquired.

“Somebody slipped up and moved a lot of slaves onto an exploited Esaron time line.  Or, rather, Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs established a plantation on a time line they were shipping slaves to.  Parenthetically, that’s what really did happen; the mistake our people made was in not closing out that time line as soon as Consolidated Foodstuffs moved in,” the young man said.

“So, this Skordran Kirv, who is a dumb boy who doesn’t know what the score is, found these slaves and blatted about it to this Golzan Doth, and Golzan reported it to his company, and it couldn’t be hushed up, so now Tortha Karf is trying to scare the public with ghost stories about a gigantic paratemporal conspiracy, to get more appropriations and more power.”