He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged print with him to the conveyer room.  There was something odd about the list of time line designations.  They were expressed numerically, in First Level notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exact expression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers.  Vall had only a general-education smattering of mathematics—­enough to qualify him for the chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector—­and he could not identify the peculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort of pattern.  Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of the chairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him, and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished.  He woke, the list of time line designations in his hand, when the conveyor rematerialized on Home Time Line.  Putting it in his pocket, he hurried to an antigrav shaft and floated up to the floor on which Tortha Karf’s office was.

* * * * *

Tortha Karf was asleep in his chair; Dalla was eating a dinner that had been brought in to her—­something better than the sandwich and mug of coffee Vall had mentioned to Thalvan Dras.  Several of the bureau chiefs who had been there when he had gone out had left, and the psychist who had taken charge of the prisoner was there.

“I think he’s coming out of the drug, now,” he reported.  “Still asleep, though.  We want him to waken naturally before we start on him.  They’ll call me as soon as he shows signs of stirring.”

“The Opposition’s claiming, now, that we drugged and hypnotized Salgath into making that visiscreen confession,” Dalla said.  “Can you think of any way you could do that without making the subject incapable of lying?”

“Pseudo-memories,” the psychist said.  “It would take about three times as long as the time between Salgath Trod’s departure from his apartment and the time of the telecast, though—­”

“You know much higher math?” Vall asked the psychist.

“Well, enough to handle my job.  Neuron-synapse inter-relations, memory-and-association patterns, that kind of thing, all have to be expressed mathematically.”

Vall nodded and handed him the time-line designation list.

“See any kind of a pattern there?” he asked.

The psychist looked at the paper and blanked his face as he drew on hypnotically-acquired information.

“Yes.  I’d say that all the numbers are related in some kind of a series to some other number.  Simplified down to kindergarten level, say the difference between A and B is, maybe, one-decillionth of the difference between X and A, and the difference between B and C is one-decillionth of the difference between X and B, and so on—­”

A voice came out of one of the communication boxes: 

“Dr. Nentrov; the patient’s out of the drug, and he’s beginning to stir about.”