LITMIR.BIZ

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fifteen feet high and thirty across, and in front of him was an oval desk with an instrument-panel over it, and a swivel-chair from which a man was rising. Young, well-built; a white man but, he was sure, not an American. He wore loose green trousers and black ankle-boots and a pale green shirt. There was a shoulder holster under his left arm, and a weapon in his right hand.

      He was sure it was a weapon, though it looked more like an electric soldering-iron, with two slender rods instead of a barrel, joined, at what should be the muzzle, by a blue ceramic or plastic knob. It was probably something that made his own Colt Official Police look like a kid’s cap-pistol, and it was coming up fast to line on him.

      He fired, held the trigger back to keep the hammer down on the fired chamber, and flung himself to one side, coming down, on his left hand and left hip, on a smooth, polished floor. Something, probably the chair, fell with a crash. He rolled, and kept on rolling until he was out of the nacrous dome of light and bumped hard against something. For a moment he lay still, then rose to his feet, letting out the trigger of the Colt.

      What he’d bumped into was a tree. For a moment he accepted that, then realized that there should be no trees here, nothing but low brush. And this tree, and the ones all around, were huge; great rough columns rising to support a green roof through which only a few stray gleams of sunlight leaked. Hemlocks; must have been growing here while Columbus was still conning Isabella into hocking her jewelry. He looked at the little stream he had been about to cross when this had happened. It was the one thing about this that wasn’t completely crazy. Or maybe it was the craziest thing of all.

      He began wondering how he was going to explain this.

      “While approaching the house,” he began, aloud and in a formal tone, “I was intercepted by a flying saucer landing in front of me, the operator of which threatened me with a ray-pistol. I defended myself with my revolver, firing one round. . . .”

      No. That wouldn’t do at all.

      He looked at the brook again, and began to suspect that there might be nobody to explain to. Swinging out the cylinder of his Colt, he replaced the fired round. Then he decided to junk the regulation about carrying the hammer on an empty chamber, and put in another one.

      IV

      Verkan Vall watched the landscape outside the almost invisible shimmer of the transposition-field; now he was in the forests of the Fifth Level. The mountains, of course, were always the same, but the woods around flickered and shifted. There was a great deal of randomness about which tree grew where, from time-line to time-line. Now and then he would catch fleeting glimpses of open country, and the buildings and airport installations of his own people. The red light overhead went off and on, a buzzer sounding each time. The conveyer dome became a solid iridescence, and then a mesh of cold inert metal. The red light turned green. He picked up a sigma-ray needler from the desk in front of him and holstered it. As he did, the door slid open and two men in Paratime Police green, a lieutenant and a patrolman, entered. When they saw him, they relaxed, holstering their own weapons.

      “Hello, Chief’s Assistant,” the lieutenant said. “Didn’t pick anything up, did you?”

      In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor transposition-field was impenetrable; in practice, especially when two paratemporal vehicles going in opposite “directions” interpenetrated, the field would weaken briefly, and external objects, sometimes alive and hostile, would intrude. That was why Paratimers kept weapons ready to hand, and why conveyers were checked immediately upon materializing. It was also why some Paratimers didn’t make it home.

      “Not this trip. Is my rocket ready?”

      “Yes, sir. Be a little delay about an aircar for the rocketport.” The patrolman had begun to take the transposition record-tapes out of the cabinet. “They’ll call you when it’s ready.”

      He and the lieutenant strolled out into the noise and colorful confusion of the conveyer-head rotunda. He got out his cigarette case and offered it; the lieutenant flicked his lighter. They had only taken a few puffs when another conveyer quietly materialized in a vacant circle a little to their left.

      A couple of Paracops strolled over as the door opened, drawing their needlers, and peeped inside. Immediately, one backed away, snatching the handphone of his belt radio and speaking quickly into it. The other went inside. Throwing away their cigarettes, he and the lieutenant hastened to the conveyer.

      Inside, the chair at the desk was overturned. A Paracop lay on the floor, his needler a few inches from his outflung hand. His tunic was off and his shirt, pale green, was darkened by blood. The lieutenant, without touching him, bent over him.

      “Still alive,” he said. “Bullet, or sword-thrust.”

      “Bullet. I smell nitro powder.” Then he saw the hat lying on the floor, and stepped around the fallen man. Two men were entering with an antigrav stretcher; they got the wounded man onto it and floated him out. “Look at this, Lieutenant.”

      The lieutenant looked at the hat—gray felt, wide-brimmed, the crown peaked by four indentations.

      “Fourth Level,” he said. “Europe-American, Hispano-Columbian Subsector.”

      He picked up the hat and glanced inside. The lieutenant was right. The sweat-band was stamped in golden Roman-alphabet letters, JOHN B. STETSON COMPANY. PHILADELPHIA, PA., and, hand-inked, Cpl. Calvin Morrison, Penn’a State Police, and a number.

      “I know that crowd,” the lieutenant said. “Good men, every bit as good as ours.”

      “One was a split second better than one of ours.” He got out his cigarette case. “Lieutenant, this is going to be a real baddie. This pickup’s going to be missed, and the people who’ll miss him will be one of the ten best constabulary organizations in the world, on their time-line. We won’t satisfy them with the kind of lame-brained explanations that usually get by in that sector. And we’ll have to find out where he emerged, and what he’s doing. A man who can beat a Paracop to the draw after being sucked into a conveyer won’t just sink into obscurity on any time-line. By the time we get to him, he’ll be kicking up a small fuss.”

      “I hope he got dragged out of his own subsector. Suppose he comes out on a next-door time-line, and reports to his police post, where a duplicate of himself, with duplicate fingerprints, is on duty.”

      “Yes. Wouldn’t that be dandy, now?” He lit a cigarette. “When the aircar comes, send it back. I’m going over the photo-records myself. Have the rocket held; I’ll need it in a few hours. I’m making this case my own personal baby.”

      Two

       Table of Contents

      I

      Calvin Morrison dangled his black-booted legs over the edge of the low cliff and wished, again, that he hadn’t lost his hat. He knew exactly where he was: he was right at the same place he had been, sitting on the little cliff above the road where he and Larry Stacey and Jack French and Steve Kovac had left the car, only there was no road there now, and never had been one. There was a hemlock, four feet thick at the butt, growing where the farmhouse should have been, and no trace of the stonework of the foundations of house or barn. But the really permanent features, like the Bald Eagles to the north and Nittany Mountain to the south, were exactly as they should be.

      That flash and momentary darkness could have been subjective; put that in the unproven column. He was sure the strangely beautiful dome of shimmering light had been real, and so had the desk and the instrument-panel, and the man with the odd weapon. And there was nothing at all subjective about all this virgin timber where farmlands should have been. So he puffed slowly on his pipe and tried to remember and to analyze what had happened to him.

      He hadn’t been shot and taken to a hospital where he was now lying delirious,

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