Temple Trouble | Page 6

him powerful enough to aid and protect them; when they lose that confidence, he is
discarded and the god of some neighboring people is adopted instead." He turned to
Brannad Klav. "Didn't Stranor report this situation to you when it first developed?" he
asked. "I know he did; he speaks of receiving shipments of grain by conveyer for temple
distribution. Then why didn't you report it to Paratime Police? That's what we have a
Paratime Police Force for."
"Well, yes, of course, but I had enough confidence in Stranor Sleth to think that he could
handle the situation himself. I didn't know he'd gone slack--"
"Look, I can't make weather, even if my parishioners think I can," Stranor Sleth defended

himself. "And I can't make a great military genius out of a blockhead like Kurchuk. And I
can't immunize all the rabbits on this time-line against tularemia, even if I'd had any
reason to expect a tularemia epidemic, which I hadn't because the disease is unknown on
this sector; this is the only outbreak of it anybody's ever heard of on any Proto-Aryan
time-line."
"No, but I'll tell you what you could have done," Verkan Vall told him. "When this
Kurchuk started to apostatize, you could have gone to him at the head of a procession of
priests, all paratimers and all armed with energy-weapons, and pointed out his spiritual
duty to him, and if he gave you any back talk, you could have pulled out that needler and
rayed him down and then cried, 'Behold the vengeance of Yat-Zar upon the wicked king!'
I'll bet any sum at any odds that his successor would have thought twice about going over
to Muz-Azin, and none of these other kings would have even thought once about it."
"Ha, that's what I wanted to do!" Stranor Sleth exclaimed. "And who stopped me? I'll
give you just one guess."
"Well, it seems there was slackness here, but it wasn't Stranor Sleth who was slack,"
Verkan Vall commented.
"Well! I must say; I never thought I'd hear an officer of the Paratime Police criticizing me
for trying to operate inside the Paratime Transposition Code!" Brannad Klav exclaimed.
Verkan Vall, sitting on the edge of Stranor Sleth's desk, aimed his cigarette at Brannad
Klav like a blaster.
"Now, look," he began. "There is one, and only one, inflexible law regarding outtime
activities. The secret of paratime transposition must be kept inviolate, and any activity
tending to endanger it is prohibited. That's why we don't allow the transposition of any
object of extraterrestrial origin to any time-line on which space travel has not been
developed. Such an object may be preserved, and then, after the local population begin
exploring the planet from whence it came, there will be dangerous speculations and
theories as to how it arrived on Terra at such an early date. I came within inches, literally,
of getting myself killed, not long ago, cleaning up the result of a violation of that
regulation. For the same reason, we don't allow the export, to outtime natives, of
manufactured goods too far in advance of their local culture. That's why, for instance,
you people have to hand-finish all those big Yat-Zar idols, to remove traces of machine
work. One of those things may be around, a few thousand years from now, when these
people develop a mechanical civilization. But as far as raying down this Kurchuk is
concerned, these Hulguns are completely nonscientific. They wouldn't have the least idea
what happened. They'd believe that Yat-Zar struck him dead, as gods on this plane of
culture are supposed to do, and if any of them noticed the needler at all, they'd think it
was just a holy amulet of some kind."
[Illustration:]
"But the law is the law--" Brannad Klav began.

Verkan Vall shook his head. "Brannad, as I understand, you were promoted to your
present position on the retirement of Salvan Marth, about ten years ago; up to that time,
you were in your company's financial department. You were accustomed to working
subject to the First Level Commercial Regulation Code. Now, any law binding upon our
people at home, on the First Level, is inflexible. It has to be. We found out, over fifty
centuries ago, that laws have to be rigid and without discretionary powers in
administration in order that people may be able to predict their effect and plan their
activities accordingly. Naturally, you became conditioned to operating in such a climate
of legal inflexibility.
"But in paratime, the situation is entirely different. There exist, within the range of the
Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal-field generator, a number of time-lines of the order of
ten to the hundred-thousandth power. In effect, that many different worlds. In the past ten
thousand years, we have visited only the tiniest fraction