Dalla yawned.  “What I get, trying to be a cop,” she said, then caught the other girl’s hands and rose, pulling her up.  “Come on, Zinna; we have to get to work!”

* * * * *

Vall rose from behind the reading-screen in Ranthar Jard’s office, stretching his arms over his head.  For almost an hour, he had sat there pushing buttons and twiddling selector and magnification-adjustment knobs, looking at the pictures the Kholghoor-Nharkan cops had taken with auto-return balls dropped over the spatial equivalent of Sohram.  One set of pictures, taken at two thousand feet, showed the central square of the city.  The effects of the Croutha sack were plainly visible; so were the captives herded together under guard like cattle.  By increasing magnification, he looked at groups of the barbarian conquerors, big men with blond or reddish-brown hair, in loose shirts and baggy trousers and rough cowhide buskins.  Many of them wore bowl-shaped helmets, some had shirts of ring-mail, all of them carried long straight swords with cross-hilts, and about half of them had pistols thrust through their belts or muskets slung from their shoulders.

The other set of pictures showed the Wizard Trader camps and conveyer heads.  In each case, a wide oval had been burned out in the jungle, probably with heavy-duty heat guns.  The camps were surrounded with stout wire-mesh fence:  in each there were a number of metal prefab-huts, and an inner fenced slave-pen.  A trail had been cut from each to a similarly cleared circle farther back in the forest, and in the centers of one or two of these circles he saw the actual conveyer domes.  There was a great deal of activity in all of them, and he screwed the magnification-adjustment to the limit to scrutinize each human figure in turn.  A few of the men, he was sure, were First Level Citizens; more were either Proles or outtimers.  Quite a few of them were of a dark, heavy-featured, black-bearded type.

“Some of these fellows look like Second Level Khiftans,” he said.  “Rush an individual picture of each one, maximum magnification consistent with clarity, to Dhergabar Equivalent to be transposed to Home Time Line.  You get all the dope from Zulthran Torv?”

“Yes; Abzar Sector,” Ranthar Jard said.  “I’d never have thought of that.  Wonder why they used that series system, though.  I’d have tried to spot my operations as completely at random as possible.”

“Only thing they could have done,” Vall said.  “When we get hold of one of their conveyers, we’re going to find the control panel’s just a mess of arbitrary symbols, and there’ll be something like a computer-machine built into the control cabinet, to select the right time line whenever a dial’s set or a button pushed, and the only way that could be done would be by establishing some kind of a numerical series.  And we were trustingly expecting to locate their base from one of their conveyers!  Why, if we give all those people in the pictures narco-hyps, we won’t learn the base-line designation; none of them will know it.  They just go where the conveyers take them.”