“I notice you slammed down on the first Council member who began shouting about how you’d wiped out the Great Paratemporal Crime-Ring,” Vall said.

“Yes.  It isn’t wiped out, and it won’t be wiped out for a long time.  I shall be unspeakably delighted if, when I turn my job over to you, you have it wiped out.  And even then, there’ll be a loose end to pick up every now and then till you retire.”

“We have Council and the Management with us, now,” Vall said.  “This was the first secret session of Executive Council in over two thousand years.  And I thought I’d drop dead when they passed that motion to submit themselves to narco-hypnosis.”

“A few Councilmen are going to drop dead before they can be narco-hypped,” Dalla prophesied over the rim of her glass.

“A few have already.  I have a list of about a dozen of them who have had fatal accidents or committed suicide, or just died or vanished since the news of your raid broke.  Four of them I saw, in the screen, jump up and run out as soon as the news came in, on One-Six-Five Day.  And a lot of other people; our friend Yandar Yadd’s dropped out of sight, for one.  You heard what we got out of those servants of Salgath Trod’s?”

“I didn’t,” Dalla said.  “What?”

“Both spies for the Organization.  They reported to a woman named Farilla, who ran a fortune-telling parlor in the Prole district.  Her occult powers didn’t warn her before we sent a squad of plain-clothes men for her.  That was an entirely illegal arrest, by the way, but it netted us a list of about three hundred prominent political, business and social persons whose servants have been reporting to her.  She thought she was working for a telecast gossipist.”

“That’s why we have a new butler, darling,” Vall interrupted.  “Kandagro was reporting on us.”

“Who did she pass the reports on to?” Dalla asked.

Tortha Karf beamed.  “She thinks more like a cop every time I talk to her,” he told Vall.  “You better appoint her your Special Assistant.  Why, about 1800 every day, some Prole would come in, give the recognition sign, and get the day’s accumulation.  We only got one of them, a fourteen-year-old girl.  We’re having some trouble getting her deconditioned to a point where she can be hypnotized into talking; by the time we do, they’ll have everything closed out, I suppose.  What’s the latest from Abzar Sector?  I missed the last report in the rush to get to this Council session.”

“All stalled.  We’re still boomeranging the sector, but it’s about five billion time-lines deep, and the pattern for the Kholghoor and Esaron Sectors doesn’t seem to apply.  I think they have a lot of these Abzar time lines close together, and they get from one to another via some terminal on Fifth Level.”

Tortha Karf nodded.  It was impossible to make a transposition of less than ten parayears—­a hundred thousand time lines.  It was impossible that the field could build and collapse that soon.