Astounding Science Fiction, August 1955 (British Edition) — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

ce: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION HADRON DALLA, when he is asked to investigate and evaluate a report that has come in from the barbaric Third Level Esaron Sector. A Paratime Police field-agent, SKORDRAN KIRYV, on leave and employed as guard captain on a Paratime-operated fruit plantation in western North America, has discovered that a hundred slaves recently purchased from a local slave-dealer, CORU- HIN-IRIGOD, are Kharandas, people from the Ganges Valley on the Fourth Level Kholghoor Sector. The obvious implication being that they have been transposed to the Esaron Sector and sold by criminal Paratimers, he has reported his discovery, reverted to police status, and been confirmed in local charge of the investigation. Tortha Karf wants to know if this paratemporal slave trade is an isolated incident, to be dealt with in a routine manner, or a large-scale operation presenting a serious threat to the Paratime Secret at this time. At first resentful, Dalla agrees to accompany Vall to the Esaron Sector, in order that they may begin their vacation as soon as her husband has accom- plished his mission for Tortha Karf. A psychic-researcher, she has spent some time on the Kholghoor Sector, knows the language and mental attitudes of the natives, and is a qualified narco-hypnotic interrogator. While assisting Vall in interviewing the slaves, her resentment is replaced by sympathy for them, and by horror and indignation at the crimes her own people have perpetrated against them. It is, as Tortha Karf had feared, the work of a large and well-organized gang, with a number of outtime bases and considerable air transport and paratemporal transposition equipment, who appear to have been operating unsuspected for a long time. These particular slaves had been serfs on the estate of a Kharanda noble: they had been made captive when Kholghoor Sector India had been over- run by the nomadic Croutha barbarians. Small discrepancies in their stories indicate that they come from at least two different time lines, but all agree that the Croutha have sold them to strangers known as the Wizard Traders, who are obviously First Level Paratimers and who, in return, are supplying the Croutha with some sort of crude firearms, apparently flintlocks. It also appears from their stories that they have been transposed to some other time line, possibly on the uninhabited Fifth Level, airlifted from India to the American West Coast, and then transposed in batches to the Third Level Esaron Sector. On this particular Esaron time line, the slavers’ local outlet is the chief of the Calera brigands, NEBU-HIN-ABENOZ, Coru-hin-Irigod’s uncle. Narco-hypnotic interrogation of the Caleras, who have been detained at the plantation, substantiates this: they describe how Nebu-hin-Abenoz has been obtaining outland slaves speaking strange languages from some mysterious source in the mountains near his town of Careba for years. An operation is planned by which it is hoped to trap the Paratime slavers when they make their next delivery of slaves. Coru-hin-Irigod and his men are to be given hypnotic memory-obliteration of their arrest, and furnished pseudo-memories, so that they will accept a couple of Paratime Police detectives as friendly traders from the north, and will vouch for them as such at Careba. These detectives, carrying midget radios, will maintain contact with a force of Paratime Police in the hills outside Careba, and will alert them when Nebu-hin-Abenoz starts for another rendezvous with the Paratime slavers. BA Choa eveom