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

wouldn’t they be welcome at Careba!
    He looked at the sunlight falling through the window on the still recumbent form of his companion, Faru-hin-Obaran. Outside, he could hear the sounds of the plantation coming to life—an ax thudding on wood, the clatter of pans from the kitchens. Crossing to Faru-hin-Obaran’s bed, he grasped the sleeper by the ankle, tugging.
    “Waken, Faru!” he shouted. “Get up and clear the fumes from your head! We start back to Careba today!”
    Faru swore groggily and pushed himself into a sitting position, fumbling on the floor for his trousers. “What day’s this?” he asked.
    “The day after we went to bed, ninny!” Then Coru-hin-Irigod wrinkled his brow. He could remember, clearly enough, the sale of the slaves, but after that—Oh, well, he’d been drinking; it would all come back to him after a while.
IV
    Verkan Vall rubbed his hand over his face wearily, started to light another cigarette, and threw it across the room in disgust. What he needed was a drink—a long drink of cool, tart white wine, laced with brandy—and then he needed to sleep.
    “We’re absolutely nowhere!” Ranthar Jard said. “Of course they’re operating on time-lines we’ve never penetrated. The fact that they’re supplying the Croutha with guns proves that; there isn’t a firearm on any of the time-lines our people are legitimately exploiting. And there are only about three billion time-lines on this belt of the Croutha invasion—”
    “If we could think of a way to reduce it to some specific area of Paratime—” one of Ranthar Jard’s deputies began.
    “That’s precisely what we’ve been trying to do, Klav,” Vall said. “We haven’t done it.”
    Dalla, who had withdrawn from the discussion and was on a couch at the side of the room, surrounded by reports and abstracts and summaries, looked up. “I took hours and hours of hypno-mech on Kholghoor Sector religions before I went out on that wild-goose chase for psychokinesis and precognition data,” she said. “About six or eight hundred years ago, there were religious wars and heresies and religious schisms all over the Kharanda country. No matter how uniform the Kholghoor Sector may be otherwise, there are dozens and dozens of small belts and sub-sectors of different religions or sects or god-cults.”
    “That’s right,” Ranthar Jard agreed, brightening. “We have hagiologists who know all that stuff; we’ll have a couple of them interrogate those slaves. I don’t know how much they can get out of them—lot of peasants, won’t be up on the theological niceties—but a synthesis of what we get from the lot of them—”
    “That’s an idea,” Vall agreed. “About the first idea we’ve had here—Oh, how about politics, too? Check on who’s the king, what the stories about the royal family are, that sort of thing.”
    Ranthar Jard looked at the map on the wall. “The Croutha have only gotten halfway to Nharkan, here. Say we transpose detectives in at night on some of these time-lines we think are promising, and checkup at the tax-collection offices on a big landowner north of Jhirda named Ghromdour? That might get us something.”
    “Well, I don’t want you to think we’re trying to get out of work, Chief ’s Assistant,” one of the deputies said, “but is there any real necessity for our trying to locate the Wizard Trader time-lines? If you can get them from the Esaron Sector, it’ll be the same, won’t it?”
    “Marv, in this business you never depend on just one lead,” Ranthar Jard told him. “And besides, when Skordran Kirv’s gang hits the base of operations in North America, there’s no guarantee that they may not have time to send off a radio warning to the crowd at the base here in India. We have to hit both places at once.”
    “Well, that, too,” Vall said. “But the main thing is to get these Wizard Trader camps on the Kholghoor Sector cleaned out. How are you fixed for men and equipment for a