h hypnosis or on a lie
detector, we're no better off than we were before. Dirzed, you have a
great responsibility in guarding the Lady Dallona; some extraordinary
security precautions will be needed."

* * * * *

In his office, in the First Level city of Dhergabar, Tortha Karf,
Chief of Paratime Police, leaned forward in his chair to hold his
lighter for his special assistant, Verkan Vall, then lit his own
cigarette. He was a man of middle age--his three hundredth birthday
was only a decade or so off--and he had begun to acquire a double chin
and a bulge at his waistline. His hair, once black, had turned a
uniform iron-gray and was beginning to thin in front.

"What do you know about the Second Level Akor-Neb Sector, Vall?" he
inquired. "Ever work in that paratime-area?"

Verkan Vall's handsome features became even more immobile than usual
as he mentally pronounced the verbal trigger symbols which should
bring hypnotically-acquired knowledge into his conscious mind. Then he
shook his head.

"Must be a singularly well-behaved sector, sir," he said. "Or else
we've been lucky, so far. I never was on an Akor-Neb operation; don't
even have a hypno-mech for that sector. All I know is from general
reading.

"Like all the Second Level, its time-lines descend from the
probability of one or more shiploads of colonists having come to Terra
from Mars about seventy-five to a hundred thousand years ago, and then
having been cut off from the home planet and forced to develop a
civilization of their own here. The Akor-Neb civilization is of a
fairly high culture-order, even for Second Level. An atomic-power,
interplanetary culture; gravity-counteraction, direct conversion of
nuclear energy to electrical power, that sort of thing. We buy fine
synthetic plastics and fabrics from them." He fingered the material of
his smartly-cut green police uniform. "I think this cloth is Akor-Neb.
We sell a lot of Venusian _zerfa_-leaf; they smoke it, straight and
mixed with tobacco. They have a single System-wide government, a
single race, and a universal language. They're a dark-brown race,
which evolved in its present form about fifty thousand years ago; the
present civilization is about ten thousand years old, developed out of
the wreckage of several earlier civilizations which decayed or fell
through wars, exhaustion of resources, et cetera. They have legends,
maybe historical records, of their extraterrestri