The brown girl squeezed a little golden globe that hung on a chain around her neck; a tiny voice, inside it, repeated:  “Eighteen twenty-three ten, eighteen twenty-three eleven, eighteen twenty-three twelve—­”

“In half an hour.  It’s still in the robo-chef,” she told him.

He downed half the goblet-full, set it down, and went to a painting, a brutal scarlet and apple-green abstraction, that hung on the wall.  Swinging it aside and revealing the safe behind it, he used his identity-sigil, took out a wad of Paratemporal Exchange Bank notes and gave them to the girl.

“Here, Zinganna; take these, and take Nindrandigro and Calilla out for the evening.  Go where you can all have a good time, and don’t come back till after midnight.  There will be some business transacted here, and I want them out of this.  Get them out of here as soon as you can; I’ll see to the dinner myself.  Spend all of that you want to.”

The girl riffled through the wad of banknotes.  “Why, thank you, Trod!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him enthusiastically.  “I’ll go tell them at once.”

“And have a good time, Zinganna; have the best time you possibly can,” he told her, embracing and kissing her.  “Now, get out of here; I have to keep my mind on business.”

When she had gone, he finished his drink and poured another.  He drew and checked his needler.  Then, after checking the window-shielding and activating the outside viewscreens, he lit a cheroot and sat down at the desk, his goblet and his needler in front of him, to wait until the servants were gone.

There was only one way out alive.  He knew that, and yet he needed brandy, and a great deal of mental effort, to steel himself for it.  Psycho-rehabilitation was a dreadful thing to face.  There would be almost a year of unremitting agony, physical and mental, worse than a Khiftan torture rack.  There would be the shame of having his innermost secrets poured out of him by the psychotherapists, and, at the end, there would emerge someone who would not be Salgath Trod, or anybody like Salgath Trod, and he would have to learn to know this stranger, and build a new life for him.

In one of the viewscreens, he saw the door to the service hallway open.  Zinganna, in a black evening gown and a black velvet cloak, and Calilla, the housemaid, in what she believed to be a reasonable facsimile of fashionable First Level dress, and Nindrandigro, in one of his master’s evening suits, emerged.  Salgath Trod waited until they had gone down the hall to the antigrav shaft, and then he turned on the visiphone, checked the security, set it for sealed beam communication, and punched out a combination.

A girl in a green tunic looked out of the screen.

“Paratime Police,” she said.  “Office of Chief Tortha.”

“I am Executive Councilman Salgath Trod,” he told her.  “I am, and for the past fifteen years have been, criminally involved with the organization responsible for the slave trade which recently came to light on Third Level Esaron.  I give myself up unconditionally; I am willing to make full confession under narco-hypnosis, and will accept whatever disposition of my case is lawfully judged fit.  You’ll have to send an escort for me; I might start from my apartment alone, but I’d be killed before I got to your headquarters—­”