“Ha, that’s our new rookie cop’s idea!” Tortha Karf chuckled, nodding toward Dalla.  “We got Zortan Harn to introduce an urgent-business motion to appoint a committee to investigate BuPsychHyg, this morning.  The motion passed, and this is the reaction to it.  The Organization’s scared.  Just as Dalla predicted, they don’t want us finding out how people with potentially criminal characteristics missed being spotted by psychotesting.  Salgath Trod is being sacrificed to block or delay that.”

Vall nodded as the wheels bumped on the landing stage and the antigrav field went off.  That was the sort of thing that happened when you started on a really fruitful line of investigation.  They got out and hurried over under the marquee, the car lifting and moving off toward the hangars.  This was the real break; no matter how this Organization might be compartmented, a man like Salgath Trod would know a great deal.  He would name names, and the bearers of those names, arrested and narco-hypnotized, would name other names, in a perfect chain reaction of confessions and betrayals.

Another police car had landed just ahead of them, and three men were climbing out; two were in Paratime Police green, and the third, hand-cuffed, was in Service Sector Proletarian garb.  At first, Vall though that Salgath Trod had been brought in disguised as a Prole prisoner, and then he saw that the prisoner was short and stocky, not at all like the slender and elegant politician.  The two officers who had brought him in were talking to a lieutenant, Sothran Barth, outside the antigrav shaft kiosk.  As Vall and Tortha Karf and Dalla walked over, the car which had brought them lifted out.

“Something that just came in from Industrial Twenty-four, Chief,” Lieutenant Sothran said in answer to Tortha Karf’s question.  “May be for Assistant Verkan’s desk.”

“He’s a Prole named Yandragno, sir,” one of the policemen said.  “Industrial Sector Constabulary grabbed him peddling Martian hellweed cigarettes to the girls in a textile mill at Kangabar Equivalent.  Captain Jamzar thinks he may have gotten them from somebody in the Organization.”

* * * * *

A little warning bell began ringing in the back of Verkan Vall’s mind, but at first he could not consciously identify the cause of his suspicions.  He looked the two policemen and their prisoner over carefully, but could see nothing visibly wrong with them.  Then another car came in for a landing and rolled over under the marquee; the door opened, and a police officer got out, followed by an elegantly dressed civilian whom he recognized at once as Salgath Trod.  A second policeman was emerging from the car when Vall suddenly realized what it was that had disturbed him.

It had been Salgath Trod, himself, less than half an hour ago, who had introduced the term, “the Organization,” to the Paratime Police.  At that time, if these people were what they claimed to be, they would have been in transposition from Industrial Twenty-four, on the Fifth Level.  Immediately, he reached for his needler.  He was clearing it of the holster when things began happening.