Time line, and at least one air
freighter of around five thousand tons. They are operating on a number
of Kholghoor and Esaron time lines."

Verkan Vall nodded. "I didn't think it was any petty larceny," he
said.

"Wait till you hear the rest of it. On the Kholghoor Sector, this gang
is known as the Wizard Traders; we've been using that as a convenience
label. They pose as sorcerers--black robes and hood-masks covered with
luminous symbols, voice-amplifiers, cold-light auras, energy-weapons,
mechanical magic tricks, that sort of thing. They have all the Croutha
scared witless. Their procedure is to establish camps in the forest
near recently conquered Kharanda cities; then they appear to the
Croutha, impress them with their magical powers, and trade
manufactured goods for Kharanda captives. They mainly trade firearms,
apparently some kind of flintlocks, and powder."

Then they were confining their operations to unpenetrated time lines;
there had been no reports of firearms in the hands of the Croutha
invaders.

"After they buy a batch of slaves," Skordran Kirv continued, "they
transpose them to this presumably Fifth Level base, where they have
concentration camps. The slaves we questioned had been airlifted to
North America, where there's another concentration camp, and from
there transposed to this Esaron Sector time line where I found them.
They say that there were at least two to three thousand slaves in
this North American concentration camp and that they are being
transposed out in small batches and replaced by others airlifted in
from India. This lot was sold to a Calera named Nebu-hin-Abenoz, the
chieftain of a hill town, Careba, about fifty miles south-west of the
plantation. There were two hundred and fifty in this batch; this
Coru-hin-Irigod only bought the batch he sold at the plantation."

* * * * *

The aircar lost speed and altitude; below, the countryside was dotted
with conveyer heads, each spatially coexistent with some outtime
police post or operation. There were a great many of them; the western
coast of North America was a center of civilization on many
paratemporal sectors, and while the conveyer heads of the commercial
and passenger companies were scattered over hundreds of Fifth Level
time lines, those of the Paratime Police were concentrated upon one.
The anti-grav-car circled around a three-hundred-foot steel tower that
supported a conveyer head spatially c