Time Crime | Page 8

clerks, or talking to human attendants. Some were in the regulation green uniform; others,
like himself, were in civilian clothes; more were in outtime costumes from all over
paratime. Fringed robes and cloth-of-gold sashes and conical caps from the Second Level
Khiftan Sector; Fourth Level Proto-Aryan mail and helmets; the short tunics and kilts of
Fourth Level Alexandrian-Roman Sector; the Zarkantha loincloth and felt cap and
daggers; there were priestly vestments stiff with gold, and military uniforms; there were
trousers and jackboots and bare legs; blasters, and swords, and pistols, and bows and
quivers, and spears. And the place was loud with a babel of voices and the clatter of
teleprinters.
[Illustration:]
Dalla was looking about her in surprised delight; for her, the vacation had already begun.
He was glad; for a while, he had been afraid that she would be unhappy about it. He
guided her through the crowd to the desk, spoke for a while to one of the human
attendants, and found out which was their conveyer. It was a fixed-destination shuttler,
operative only between Home Time Line and Police Terminal, from which most of the
Paratime Police operations were routed. He put Dall in through the sliding door, followed,
and closed it behind him, locking it. Then, before he closed the starting switch, he drew a
pistollike weapon and checked it.
In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal transposition field was uninfluenced by
material objects outside it. In practice, however, such objects occasionally intruded, and
sometimes they were alive and hostile. The last time he had been in this conveyer room,
he had seen a quartet of returning officers emerge from a conveyer dome dragging a dead
lion by the tail. The sigma-ray needler, which he carried, was the only weapon which
could be used, under the circumstances. It had no effect whatever on any material
structure and could be used inside an activated conveyer without deranging the
conductor-mesh, as, say, a bullet or the vibration of an ultrasonic paralyzer would do, and
it was instantly fatal to anything having a central nervous system. It was a good weapon
to use outtime for that reason, also; even on the most civilized time-line, the most
elaborate autopsy would reveal no specific cause of death.
"What's the Esaron Sector like?" Dalla asked, as the conveyer dome around them
coruscated with shifting light and vanished.
"Third Level; probability of abortive attempt to colonize this planet from Mars about a
hundred thousand years ago," he said. "A few survivors--a shipload or so--were left to
shift for themselves while the parent civilization on Mars died out. They lost all vestiges
of their original Martian culture, even memory of their extraterrestrial origin. About
fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago, a reasonably high electrochemical civilization
developed and they began working with nuclear energy and developed reaction-drive
spaceships. But they'd concentrated so on the inorganic sciences, and so far neglected the
bio-sciences, that when they launched their first ship for Venus they hadn't yet developed
a germ theory of disease."

"What happened when they ran into the green-vomit fever?" Dalla asked.
"About what you could expect. The first--and only--ship to return brought it back to Terra.
Of course, nobody knew what it was, and before the epidemic ended, it had almost
depopulated this planet. Since the survivors knew nothing about germs, they blamed it on
the anger of the gods--the old story of recourse to supernaturalism in the absence of a
known explanation--and a fanatically anti-scientific cult got control. Of course, space
travel was taboo; so was nuclear and even electric power. For some reason, steam power
and gunpowder weren't offensive to the gods. They went back to a low-order
steam-power, black-powder, culture, and haven't gotten beyond that to this day. The
relatively civilized regions are on the east coast of Asia and the west coast of North
America; civilized race more or less Caucasian. Political organization just barely above
the tribal level--thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities and feudal
holdings and robbers' roosts. The principal industries are brigandage, piracy,
slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercommunal warfare. They have a few ramshackle
steam railways, and some steamboats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured
goods, mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and tobacco. Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs
has the sector franchise. That's one of the companies Thalvan Dras gets his money from."
They had run down through the civilized Second and Third Levels and were leaving the
Fourth behind and entering the Fifth, existing in the probability of a world without human
population. Once in a while, around them, they caught brief flashes of buildings and
rocketports and spaceports and landing stages, as the conveyer took them through narrow
paratime belts on which their own civilization had established outposts--Fifth Level
Commercial, Fifth Level Passenger, Industrial Sector,