“That’s it,” the psychist said.  “I have to run.”  He handed the sheet back to Vall, took a last drink from his coffee cup, and bolted out of the room.

Dalla picked up the sheet of paper and looked at it.  Vall told her what it was.

“If those time lines are in regular series, they relate to the base line of operations,” she said.  “Maybe you can have that worked out.  I can see how it would be; a stated interval between the Esaron Sector lines, to simplify transposition control settings.”

“That was what I was thinking.  It’s not quite as simple as Dr. Nentrov expressed it, but that could be the general idea.  We might be able to work out the location of the base line from that.  There seems to be a break in the number sequence in here; that would be the time line Skordran Kirv found those slaves on.”  He reached for the pipe he had left on the desk when he had gone to Police Terminal and began filling it.

A little later, a buzzer sounded and a light came on on one of the communication boxes.  He flipped the switch and said, “Verkan Vall here.”  Sothran Barth’s voice came cut of the box.

“They’ve just brought in Salgath Trod’s servants.  Picked them up as they came out of the house conveyer at the apartment building.  I don’t believe they know what’s happened.”

Vall flipped a switch and twiddled a dial; a viewscreen lit up, showing the landing stage.  The police car had just landed:  one detective had gotten out, and was helping the girl, Zinganna, who had been Salgath Trod’s housekeeper and mistress, to descend.  She was really beautiful.  Vall thought:  rather tall, slender, with dark eyes and a creamy light-brown skin.  She wore a black cloak, and, under it, a black and silver evening gown.  A single jewel twinkled in her black hair.  She could have very easily passed for a woman of his own race.

The housemaid and the butler were a couple of entirely different articles.  Both were about four or five generations from Fourth Level Primitive savagery.  The maid, in garishly cheap finery, was big-boned and heavy-bodied, with red-brown hair; she looked like a member of one of the northern European reindeer-herding peoples who had barely managed to progress as far as the bow and arrow.  The butler was probably a mixture of half a dozen primitive races; he was wearing one of his late master’s evening suits, a bright mellow-pink, which was distinctly unflattering to his complexion.

The sound-pickup was too far away to give him what they were saying, but the butler and maid were waving their arms and protesting vehemently.  One of the detectives took the woman by the arm; she jerked it loose and aimed a backhand slap at him.  He blocked it on his forearm.  Immediately, the girl in black turned and said something to her, and she subsided.  Vall said, into the box: 

“Barth, have the girl in the black cloak brought down to Number Four Interview Room.  Put the other two in separate detention cubicles; we’ll talk to them later.”  He broke the connection and got to his feet.  “Come on, Dalla.  I want you to help me with the girl.”