Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

16 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION and cloth-of-gold sashes and conical caps from the Second Level Khiftan Sector; Fourth Level Proto-Aryan mail and helmets; the short tunics and kilts of Fourth Level Alexandrian-Roman Sector; the Zarkantha loincloth and felt cap and daggers; there were priestly vestments stiff with gold, and military uniforms; there were trousers and jackboots and bare legs; blasters, and swords, and pistols, and bows and quivers, and spears. And the place was loud with a babel of voices and the clatter of teleprinters. Dalla was looking about her in surprised delight; for her, the vacation had already begun. He was glad; for a while, he had been afraid that she would be unhappy about it. He guided her through the crowd to the desk, spoke for a while to one of the human attendants, and found out which was their conveyer. It was a fixed-destination shuttler, operative only between Home Time Line and Police Terminal, from which most of the Paratime Police operations were routed, He put Dalla in through the sliding door, followed, and closed it behind him, locking it. Then, before he closed the starting switch, he drew a pistollike weapon and checked it. In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal transposition field was uninfluenced by material objects outside it. In practice, however, such objects occasionally intruded, and sometimes they were alive and hostile. The last time he had been in this conveyer room, he had seen a quartet of returning officers emerge from a conveyer dome dragging a dead lion by the tail. The sigma-ray needler, which he carried, was the only weapon which could be used, under the circumstances. It had no effect whatever on any material structure and could be used inside an activated conveyer without deranging the conductor- mesh, as, say, a bullet or the vibration of an ultrasonic paralyzer would do, and it was instantly fatal to anything having a central nervous system. It was a good weapon to use outtime for that reason, also; even on the most civilized - time-line, the most elaborate autopsy would reveal no specific cause of death. “‘What’s the Esaron Sector like?’”’ Dalla asked, as the conveyer dome around them coruscated with shifting light and vanished. “Third Level; probability of abortive attempt to colonize this planet from Mars about a hundred thousand years ago,” he said. “A few survivors—a shipload or so—were left to shift for themselves while the parent civilization on Mars died out. They lost all vestiges of their original Martian culture, even memory of their extraterrestrial origin. About fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago, a reasonably high electrochemical civilization developed and they began working with nuclear energy and developed reaction-drive spaceships. But they’d concentrated so on the inorganic sciences, and so far neglected the bio-sciences, that when they launched their first ship for Venus they hadn’t yet developed a germ theory of disease.” ‘“‘What happened when they ran into the green-vomit fever?” Dalla asked. “About what you could expect. The first—and only—ship to return brought it back to Terra. Of course, nobody knew what it was, and before the epidemic ended, it had almost depopulated this planet. Since the survivors knew nothing about germs, they blamed it on the anger of the gods—the old story of recourse to supernaturalism in the absence of a known explanation—and a fanatically anti-scientific cult got control. Of course, space travel was taboo; so was nuclear and even electric power. For some reason, steam power and gun- powder weren’t offensive to the gods. They went back to a low-order steam- < eS aes 4 as tae <- Sor TIME CRIME 17 power, black-powder, culture, and haven’t gotten beyond that to this day. The relatively civilized regions are on the east coast of Asia and the west coast of North America ; civilized race more or less Caucasian. Political organization ‘Just barely above the tribal level—thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities and feudal holdings and robbers’ roosts. The principal industries are brigandage, piracy, slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercom- munal warfare. They have a few ramshackle steam railways, and some steam- boats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured goods, mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and tobacco. Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs has the fy ranchise. That’s one of the companies Thalvan Dras gets his money rom.” They had run down through the civilized Second and Third Levels and were leaving the Fourth behind and entering the Fifth, existing in the probability of a world without human population. Once in a while, around them, they caught brief flashes of buildings and rocketports and spaceports and landing stages, as the conveyer took them through narrow paratime belts on which their own civilization had established outposts—Fifth Level Commercial, Fifth Level Passenger, Industrial Sector, Service Sector. Finally the conveyer dome around them shimmered into visibility and materialized ; when they emerged, there were policemen in green uniforms who entered to search the dome with drawn needlers to make sure they had picked up nothing dangerous on the way. The room outside was similar to the one they had left on Home Time Line, even to the shifting, noisy crowd in incongruously-mixed costumes, The rocketport was a ten minutes’ trip by aircar from the conveyer head; when they boarded the stubby-winged strato-rocket, Vall saw that two of the passenger-seats had square metal cabinets bolted in place behind them and blue plastic helmets on swinging arms mounted above them. “Everything’s set up,” the pilot told them. “Dr. Hadron, you sit on the left; that cabinet’s loaded with language tape for Acalan. Yours is loaded with a tape of Kharanda; that’s the Fourth Level Kholghoor language you wanted, Chief’s Assistant. Shall I help you get fixed in your seats?” “Yes, if you please. Here, Dalla, I’ll fix that for you.” Dalla was already asleep when the pilot was adjusting his helmet and giving him his injection. He never felt the rocket tilt into firing position, and while he slept, the Kharanda language, with all its vocabulary and grammar, became part of his subconscious knowledge, needing only the mental pronunciation of a trigger-symbol to bring it into consciousness. The pilot was already un- fastening and raising his helmet when he opened his eyes. Dalla, beside him, was sipping a cup of spiced wine. On the landing stage of the Sector-Regional Headquarters at Novilan 2 EN four or five people were waiting for them. Vall recognized the subchief, Vulthor Tharn, who introduced another man, in riding boots and a white cloak, as Skordran Kirv. Vall clasped hands with him warmly. “Good work, Agent Skordran. You got onto this promptly.” “I tried to, sir. Do you want the dope now? We have half an hour’s flight to our spatial equivalent, and another half hour in transposition.” “Give it to me on the way,” he said, and-turred to Vul‘hor Tharn. “O Esaron costumes ready?” ‘e(oyaaliele ooks com