TIME PRIME by H. Beam Piper & John F. Carr

you show us a copy of that claim?”
    “Well, let me explain, off the record—” the official begged.
    “Huh-uh! Huh-uh! I had that off-the-record gag worked on me when I was about Larv’s age, fifty years ago. Anything I get, I put on the air or not at my own discretion.”
    “All right,” Varkar Klav surrendered, pointing to a reading screen and twiddling a knob. “But when you read it, I hope you have enough discretion to keep quiet about it.”
    The screen lit, and Yandar Yadd automatically pressed a button for a photocopy. The two newsmen stared for a moment, and then even Yandar Yadd’s shell of drowsy negligence cracked and fell from him. His hand brushed the switch as he snatched the hand-phone from his belt.
    “Marva!” he barked, before the girl at the news office could do more than acknowledge. “Get this recorded for immediate telecast! Ready? Beginning: The existence of a huge paratemporal slave trade came to light on the afternoon of One- Five-Nine Day, on a time-line of the Third Level Esaron Sector, when Field Agent Skordran Kirv, Paratime Police, discovered, at an orange plantation of Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs—”
II
    Salgath Trod sat alone in his private office, his half-finished lunch growing cold on the desk in front of him as he watched the teleview screen across the room, tuned to a pickup behind the Speaker’s Chair in the Executive Council Chamber ten stories below. The two thousand seats had been almost all empty at 1000, when Council had convened. Fifteen minutes later, the news had broken; now, at 1430, a good three quarters of the seats were occupied. He could see, in the aisles, the goldplated robot pages gliding back and forth, receiving and delivering messages. One had just slid up to the seat of Councilman Hasthor Flan, and Hasthor was speaking urgently into the recorder mouthpiece. Another message for him, he supposed; he’d gotten at least a score of such calls since the crisis had developed.
    People were going to start wondering, he thought. This situation should have been perfect for his purposes; as leader of the Opposition he could easily make himself the next General Manager, if he exploited this scandal properly. He listened for a while to the Centrist-Management member who was speaking; he could rip that fellow’s arguments to shreds in a hundred words—but he didn’t dare. The Management was taking exactly the line Salgath Trod wanted the whole Council to take: treat this affair as an isolated and extraordinary occurrence, find a couple of convenient scapegoats, cobble up some explanation acceptable to the public and forget it. He wondered what had happened to the imbecile who had transposed those Kholghoor Sector slaves onto an exploited time-line. Ought to be shanghaied to the Khiftan Sector and sold to the priests of Fasif!
    A buzzer sounded, and for an instant he thought it would be the message he had seen Hasthor Fan recording. Then he realized that it was the buzzer for the private door, which could only be operated by someone with a special identity sign. He pressed a button and unlocked the door.
    The young man in the loose wrap-around tunic who entered was a stranger. At least, his face and his voice were strange, but voices could be mechanically altered, and a skilled cosmetician could render any face unrecognizable. He looked like a student, or a minor commercial executive, or an engineer, or something like that. Of course, his tunic bulged slightly under the left armpit, but even the most respectable tunics showed occasional weapon-bulges.
    “Good afternoon, councilman,” the newcomer said, sitting down across the desk from Salgath Trod. “I was just talking to...somebody we both know.”
    Salgath Trod offered cigarettes, lit his visitor’s and then his own. “What does Our Mutual Friend think about all this?” he asked, gesturing toward the screen.
    “Our Mutual Friend isn’t at all happy about it.”
    “You think, perhaps, that I’m