Astounding Science Fiction, August 1955 (British Edition) — page 104: what you’re looking at

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

102 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION if they do. This is their chance to pick up a lot of slaves cheaply ; the Croutha are too busy to bother haggling. I’m going through to Pol-Term, now; when Dalla and Zinganna get through, tell them to join me there.” On Police Terminal, he found Kostran Galth, the agent who had been .- selected to impersonate Salgath Trod. After calling Zulthran Torv, the mathematician in charge of the Computer Office and giving him the Esaron time-line designations and Nentroy Dard’s ideas about them, he spent about an hour briefing Kostran Galth on the role he was to play. Finally, he undressed and went to bed on a couch in the rest room behind the office. It was noon when he woke. After showering, shaving and dressing hastily, he went out to the desk for breakfast, which arrived while he was putting a call through to Ranthar Jard, at Nharkan Equivalent. “Your idea paid off, Chief’s Assistant,” the Kholghoor SecReg Subchief told him. ““The slaves gave us a lot of physical description data on the estate, and told us about new fields that had been cleared, and a dam this Lord Ghromdour was building to flood some new rice-paddies. We located a belt of about five parayears where these improvements had been made; we started boomeranging the whole belt, time line by time line. So far, we have ten or fifteen pictures of the main square at Sohram showing Croutha with firearms, and pictures of Wizard Trader camps and conveyer heads on the same time lines. Here, let me show you; this is from an airboat over the forest outside the equivalent of Sohram.”’ There was no jungle visible when the view changed; nothing but clusters of steel towers and platforms and buildings that marked conveyer heads, and a large rectangle of red-and-white antigrav buoys moored to warn air traffic out of the area being boomeranged. The pickup seemed to be pointed downward from the bow of an airboat circling at about ten thousand feet. ‘‘Balls ready to go,”’ a voice called, and then repeated a string of time line designations. “Estimated return, 1820, give or take four minutes.” “Varth,’’ Ranthar Jard said, evidently out of the boat’s radio. “Your telecast is being beamed on Dhergabar Equivalent; Chief’s Assistant Verkan is watching. When do you estimate your next return?” “Any moment, now, sir; we’re holding this drop till they rematerialize.”’ Vall watched unblinkingly, his fork poised halfway to his mouth. Suddenly, about a thousand feet below the eye of the pickup, there was a series of blue flashes, and, an instant later, a blossoming of red-and-white parachutes, ejected from the photo-reconnaissance balls that had returned from the Kholghoor Sector. “All right; drop away,” the boat captain called. There was a gush, from underneath, of eight-inch spheres, their conductor-mesh twinkling golden- bright in the sunlight. They dropped in a tight cluster for a thousand or so feet and then flashed and vanished. From the ground, six or eight aircars rose to meet the descending parachutes and catch them. The screen went cubist for a moment, and then Ranthar Jard’s swarthy, wide-jawed face looked out of it again. He took his pipe from his mouth. “We'll probably get a positive out of the batch you just saw coming in,” he said. ““We get one out of about every two drops.” : | COMMGCOOOKS. COR)