y. Fratska swung his blaster after them blasting again and again. He hit a fourth with a blast of energy, knocking it to pieces and then the fifth was out of range. He blasted at it twice but without effect. A hand blaster was only good for a thousand yards at the most. Holstering his weapon he hurried away following the stream and keeping under the cover of trees. The last of the attacking aircraft had gone away but the little scout plane was still circling about well out of blaster range. In the next place Fratska was compelled to stay hidden for some time, not knowing the nature of the pilot's ability to detect him. It was during one of these waits that the next phase of attack developed. It began, like the last one, with a distant roar that swelled in volume until it seemed to fill the whole world. Then, fifteen or twenty thousand feet out of blaster range, the new attackers swept into sight. There must have been fifty of them, huge tapered things with widespread wings, flying in close formation, wave after V-shaped wave. He stood and stared at them, amazed. He had never imagined that such aircraft existed in the first century. Then a high-pitched screaming sound cut through the roar of the propellers and for an instant he saw countless small specks of sky falling downward. The first bomb salvo landed in the young pines where he had fought against the first air attack. Great gouts of flame shot upward and smoke and flying earth and debris. Fratska turned and started to run. Another salvo fell in front of him. He veered to the left and plunged on through the undergrowth. Now the bombs were falling all about him, with their thunder shaking him with concussion. He dodged, frightened, as the trunk of a tree came crashing down beside him. Then something hit him across the back, knocking him flat. For a moment he lay stunned. Then tried to rise. As he did, a searing light filled his eyes and a wave of intolerable heat swept over him. Then darkness. Those of us, Paul, Krazizago repeated, Fratska will not return, the time machine was sabotaged. So, by you, the soldier asked. The scientist nodded. I knew the purpose for which he intended it. Fratska was not content with having enslaved a whole solar system. He hungered to bring tyranny and serfdom to all the past and all the future as well. He wanted to be master not only of the present, but of the centuries that were and were to be as well. I never took part in politics, Zarbis Paul. I had no hand in this revolt. But I could not be party to such a crime as Fratska contemplated when it lay within my power to prevent it. The machine will take him out of our space-time continuum or back to a time when this planet was a swirling cloud of flaming gas, Zarbis Paul asked. Krazi Zago shook his head. No, the unit is not powerful enough for that. It would only take him about ten thousand years into the past. But then, when it stops, the machine will destroy itself. It may destroy Fratska with it or he may escape. But if he does, he will be left stranded ten thousand years ago when he can do us no harm. Actually, it did not operate as he imagined, and there is an infinitely small chance that he could have returned to our time in any event. But I want to ensure against even so small a chance. We can't be sure of that, Zarbis Paul objected. He may know more about the machine than you think. Enough more to build another like it. So you must build me a machine and I'll take back a party of volunteers and hunt him down. That would not be necessary and you would only share his fate. Then, apparently changing the subject, Kradzi Zago asked, Tell me, Zarbis Paul, have you never heard the legends of the deadly radiations? General Zarbis smiled. Who is not? Every cadet at the officer's college dreams of rediscovering them to use as a weapon, but nobody ever has. So in the early days, atomic engines and piles and fission bombs emitted particles which were utterly deadly, which would make anything with which they came in contact deadly, which would bring a horrible death to any human being. But these are only myths. All the ancient experiments have been duplicated time and again and the deadly radiation effect has never been observed. Some say that it is a mere fear of atomic energy when it was still unfamiliar. Others contend that the fundamental nature of atomic energy has altered by the degeneration of fissionable matter.  The old one smiled wanly. None of these theories are correct. In the beginning of the atomic era, the deadly radiations existed. They still exist. But they are no longer deadly because all life on this planet has adapted itself to such radiations and all living things are now immune to them. And Haradzka has returned to a time when such immunity did not exist. But would that not be to his advantage? Remember, General, that man has been using atomic energy for ten thousand years. Our whole world has become drenched with radioactivity. These, the atmosphere, and every living thing are all radioactive now. Radioactivity is as natural to us as the air we breathe. Now, you remember hearing of the great wars of the first centuries of the atomic era in which whole nations were wiped out, leaving only hundreds of survivors out of millions.  To tell you, they are literally true. It was not the blast effect of a few bombs that created such holocausts, but the radiations were leased by the bombs. And those who survived to carry on the race were men and women whose systems resisted the radiations, and they transmitted to their progeny that power of resistance. In many cases their children were mutants, not monsters, although there were many of them too who could not survive, but humans who were immune to radioactivity. An interesting theory, Krazi Zago, the soldier commented, and one which conforms both to what we know of atomic energy and to the ancient legends. Then would you say that those radiations are still deadly, to the non-immune? Exactly. And Horazka, his body emitting those radiations, has returned to the first century of the atomic era, to a world without immunity. General Zarva's smile vanished. Man, he cried in horror, you have loosed a carrier of death among those innocent people of the past. Krazi Zago nodded. That is true. I estimate that Horazka will probably cause the death of a hundred or so people before he has dealt with. But dealt with he will be. Tell me, General, if a man should appear now, out of nowhere, spreading a strange and horrible plague wherever he went, what would you do?  Not for anything he did, but for the menace he was. And then I'd cover his body with a mass of concrete bigger than this palace. Precisely. Krazi Zago smiled. The military commanders and the political leaders of the first century were no less ruthless or efficient than you. You know how atomic energy was first used. There was an ancient nation, upon the ruins of whose cities we have built our own, which was famed for its idealistic humanitarianism. Yet that nation, treacherously attacked, created the first atomic bombs in self-defense and used them. It is among the people of that nation that Haradzka has emerged. But would they recognize him as the cause of the calamity he brings among them? Of course. He will emerge at the time when atomic energy is first being used. They will have detectors for the deadly radiations. Detectors we know nothing of today for a detection instrument must be free from the thing it is intended to detect, and today everything is radioactive. It will be a day or so when we discover what is happening to them, and not a few will die in that time, I fear. But once they have found out what is killing their people, Haradzka's days, no, his hours, will be numbered. A mass of concrete bigger than this palace, Tob the slave repeated General Sarva's words. The ancient spaceport. Prince Brvani clapped him on the shoulder. Tob, man, you hid it. You mean, Krautsy Zago began. Yes, you all know of it. It stood for nobody knows how many millennia, and nobody's ever decided what it was to begin with, except that somebody once filled a valley with concrete, level from mountaintop to mountaintop. The accepted theory is that it was done for a firing stand for the first moon rocket. But gentlemen, our friend Tob's explained it. It's the Tomb of Haradzka, and it's been the Tomb of Haradzka for 10,000 years before Haradzka was born. End of Flight From Tomorrow by H.B. Piper, read by Mark Nelson. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org Reading by Mark Nelson. Police operation by H.B.Piper Part 1 John Strawmeyer stood an irate figure in faded overalls and sweat-whitened black shirt, apart from the others, his back to the weathered farm buildings and the line of yellowing woods and the cirrus-streaked blue October sky. He thrust out a work-narled hand accusingly. That there heifer was worth two hundred, two hundred and fifty dollars, he clamored, and that there dog was just like one of the family, and now look at him. I don't like to use profane language, but Ewn's got to do something about this. Steve Parker, the district game protector, aimed his lyca at the carcass of the dog and snapped the shutter. We're doing something about it, he said shortly. Then he stepped ten feet to the left and edged around the mangled heifer, choosing an angle for his camera shot. The two men in grey whip-cores of the state police, seeing that Parker was through with the dog, moved in and squatted to examine it. The one with the triple chevrons took it by both four feet and flipped it over on its back. It had been a big brute of nondescript breed with a rough black and brown coat. Something had clawed it deeply about the head. Its throat was slashed transversely several times and it had been disemboweled by a single slash that had opened its belly from breastbone to tail. They looked at it carefully and then went to stand beside Parker while he photographed the dead heifer. Like the dog it had been talon-raked on either side of the head and its throat had been slashed deeply several times. In addition, flesh had been torn from one flank in great strips.  Strawmyre continued his plate. But a bear comes and kills my stalk and my dog and that there's all right. That's the kind of deal a farmer always gets in this state. I don't like to use profane language. Then don't, Parker barked at him impatiently. Don't use any kind of language.  He turned to the man in whip-cords and gray stetsons.  He asked. Then let's go. They walked briskly back to the barnyard, strawmyre following them, still vociferating about the wrongs of the farmer at the hands of a cynical and corrupt state government. They climbed into the state police car, the sergeant and the private in front and Parker into the rear, laying his camera on the seat beside a Winchester carbine. Weren't you pretty short with that fellow back there, Steve? The sergeant asked as the private started the car. Not too short. I don't like to use profane language. Parker mimicked the bereaved heifer owner and then he went on to specify I'm morally certain that he shot at least four illegal deer in the last year. When and if I ever get anything on him he's going to be sorry for himself than he is now. There are the characters that always beef their heads off, the sergeant agreed. Do you think that whatever did this was the same as the others? Yes. The dog must have jumped it while it was eating at the heifer. Some superficial scratches about the head and deep cuts on the throat or belly. The bigger the animal, the farther front the big slashes occur. Evidently something grabs them by the head with front claws and slashes with hind claws. That's why I think it's a bobcat. You know, the private said, I saw a lot of wounds like that during the war. My outfit landed on Mindanao where the gorillas had been active and this looks like Bolo work to me. The surplus stores are full of machetes and jungle knives, the sergeant considered. I think I'll call up Doc Winters at the county hospital and see if all his squirrel fodder is present and accounted for. But most of the livestock was eaten at like the heifer Parker objected. By definition, nuts have abnormal tastes, the sergeant replied. Or the eating might have been done later by foxes. I hope so. That'll let me out, Parker said. Ha! Listen to the man, the private howled, stopping the car at the end of the lane. He thinks a nut with a machete at Tarzan complex is just good clean fun. Which way now? Well, let's see. The sergeant had unfolded a quadrangle sheet. The game protector leaned forward to look at it over his shoulder. The sergeant ran a finger from one to another of a series of variously colored crosses which had been marked on the map. Monday night, over here on Copperhead Mountain, that cow was killed, he said. The next night, about ten o'clock, that sheep flock was hit on this side of Copperhead, right about here. Early Wednesday night that mule got slashed up in the woods back of the western farm. It was only slightly injured. Must have kicked the watsit and got away. But the watsit wasn't too badly hurt because a few hours later it hit that turkey flock on the rhymer farm. And last night it did that. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the strawmire farm. See, following the ridges, working toward the southeast, avoiding open ground, killing only at night. Could be a bobcat at that. Or jinxed as maniac with the machete, Parker agreed. Let's go up by Hinman's Gap and see if we can see anything. They turned after a while into a rutted dirt road which deteriorated steadily into a grass-grown track through the woods. Finally they stopped and the private backed off the road. The three men got out, Parker with his Winchester, the sergeant checking the drum of a Thompson, and the private pumping a buckshot shell into the chamber of a riot gun. For half an hour they followed the brush-grown trail beside the little stream. Once they passed a dark gray commercial model jeep back to one side. Then they came to the head of the gap.  He had a bolt-action rifle across his knees and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed about thirty years old, and any Bobby Soxer's idol of the screen would have envied him the handsome regularity of his strangely immobile features. As Parker and the two state policemen approached he rose, slinging his rifle, and greeted them. Sergeant Haynes, isn't it? He asked pleasantly. Are you gentlemen out hunting the critter, too? Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. I thought that was your jeep I saw down the road a little. The sergeant turned to the others. Mr. Richard Lee, staying at the old Kinchwater Place, the other side of Rudder's Fort. This is Mr. Parker, the district game protector, and Private Zinkowski. He glanced at the rifle. Are you out hunting Fort, too? Yes, I thought I might find something up here. What do you think it is? I don't know, the sergeant admitted. It could be a bobcat. Canada Lynx. Jink here has a theory that it's some escapee from the paper doll factory with a machete. Me, I hope not, but I'm not ignoring the possibility. The man with the matinee idol's face nodded. It could be a Lynx. I understand they're not unknown in this section. We paid bounties on, too, in this county in the last year, Parker said. Odd rifle you have there. Mind if I have a look at it? Not at all. The man who had been introduced as Richard Lee unslung and handed it over. The chamber's loaded, he cautioned. I never saw one like this, Parker said. Foreign? I think so. I don't know anything about it. It belongs to a friend of mine who loaned it to me. I think the action's German, or Czech. The rest of it's a custom job by some West Coast gunmaker. It's chambered for some ultra-velocity Wildcat load. The rifle passed from hand to hand. The three men examined it in turn, commenting admiringly. You find anything, Mr. Lee? The sergeant asked, handing it back. Not a trace. The man called Lee slung the rifle and began to dump the ashes from his pipe. I was along the top of this ridge for about a mile on either side of the gap, and down the other side as far as Hinman's run. I didn't find any tracks, or any indication of where it had made a kill. The game protector nodded, turning to sergeant Haynes. There's no use us going any farther, he said. Ten to one it followed that line of woods back of strawmires and crossed over to the other ridge. I think our best bet would be the hollow at the end of Lowry's run. What do you think? The sergeant agreed. The man called Richard Lee began to refill his pipe methodically. I think I shall stay here for a while, but I believe you're right. Lowry's run, or across Lowry's gap into Coon Valley, he said. After Parker and the state policeman had gone, the man whom they had addressed as Richard Lee returned to his log and sat smoking, his rifle across his knees. From time to time he glanced at his wristwatch and raised his head to listen. At length, faint in the distance, he heard the sound of a motor starting. Instantly he was on his feet. From the end of the hollow log in which he had been sitting, he produced a canvas musette bag. Walking briskly to a patch of damp ground beside the little stream, he leaned the rifle against a tree and opened the bag. First he took a pair of gloves of some greenish rubber-like substance and put them on, drawing the long gauntlets up over his coat-sleeves. Then he produced a bottle and unscrewed the cap. Being careful to avoid splashing his clothes, he went about pouring a clear liquid upon the ground in several places. Where he poured, white vapors rose, and twigs and grass crumbled into brownish dust. After he had replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the bag, he waited for a few minutes, then took a spatula from the musette and dug where he had poured the fluid, prying loose four black, irregular-shaped lumps of matter, which he carried to the running water and washed carefully before wrapping them and putting them in the bag along with the gloves. Then he slung the bag and rifle and started down the trail to where he had parked the jeep. Half an hour later, after driving through the little farming village of Rutter's Fort, he pulled into the barnyard of a run-down farm and backed through the open doors of the barn. He closed the double doors behind him and barred them from within. Then he went to the rear wall of the barn, which was much closer the front than the outside dimensions of the barn would have indicated. He took from his pocket a black object like an automatic pencil. Hunting over the rough plank wall, he found a small hole and inserted the pointed end of the pseudo-pencil, pressing on the other end. For an instant nothing happened. Then a ten-foot square section of the wall receded two feet and slid noiselessly to one side. The section which had slid inward had been built of three-inch steel, masked by a thin covering of boards. The wall around it was two-foot concrete, similarly camouflaged. He stepped quickly inside. Fumbling at the right side of the opening, he found a switch and flicked it. Instantly the massive steel plate slid back into place with a soft, oily click. As it did, lights came on within the hidden room, disclosing a great semi-globe of some fine metallic mesh. Thirty feet in diameter and fifteen in height. There was a sliding door at one side of this. The man called Richard Lee opened and entered through it, closing it behind him.  The gauges and dials on the panel, and the levers and switches and buttons on the desk control board, were all lettered and numbered with characters not of the Roman alphabet or the Arabic notation, and within instant reach of the occupant of the chair a pistol-like weapon lay on the desk. It had a conventional index finger trigger and a hand-fit grip. But instead of a tubular barrel, two slender parallel metal rods extended about four inches forward of the receiver, joined together at what would correspond to the muzzle by a streamlined knob of some light blue ceramic or plastic substance. The man with the handsome, immobile face deposited his rifle and musette on the floor beside the chair and sat down. First he picked up the pistol-like weapon and checked it. And then he examined the many instruments on the panel in front of him. Finally he flicked a switch on the control board. At once a small humming began from some point overhead. It wavered and shrilled and mounted in intensity and then fell to a steady monotone. The dome about him flickered with a queer, cold iridescence and slowly vanished. The hidden room vanished and he was looking into the shadowy interior of a deserted barn. The barn vanished. Blue sky appeared above, streaked with wisps of high cirrus cloud. The autumn landscape flickered unreally. Buildings appeared and vanished and other buildings came and went in a twinkling. All around him half-seen shapes moved briefly and disappeared. Once the figure of a man appeared inside the circle of the dome.  And there was an insignia composed of a cross and thunderbolt on his cap. He held an automatic pistol in his hand. Instantly the man at the desk snatched up his own weapon and thumbed off the safety. But before he could lift and aim it, the intruder stumbled and passed outside the force field which surrounded the chair and instruments. For a while there were fires raging outside, and for a while the man at the desk was surrounded by a great hall with a high, vaulted ceiling through which figures flitted and vanished. For a while there were vistas of deep forests, always set in the same background of mountains and always under the same blue cirrus-laced sky. There was an interval of flickering blue-white light of unbearable intensity. Then the man at the desk was surrounded by the interior of vast industrial works. The moving figures around him slowed and became more distinct. For an instant the man in the chair grinned as he found himself looking into a big washroom where a tall blonde girl was taking a shower-bath and a pert little redhead was vigorously drying herself with a towel. The dome grew visible, coruscating with many colored lights, and then the humming died and the dome became a cold and inert mesh of fine white metal. A green light above flashed on and off slowly. He stabbed a button and flipped a switch. Then got to his feet, picking up his rifle and musette and fumbling under his shirt for a small mesh bag from which he took an inch-wide disc of blue plastic.  Then he slid open the door and emerged into his own dimension of space-time. Outside was a wide hallway with a pale green floor, hailer green walls, and a ceiling of greenish off-white. A big hole had been cut to accommodate the dome and across the hallway a desk had been set up and at it set a clerk in a pale blue tunic who was just taking the audio plugs of a music box out of his ears. A couple of policemen in green uniforms, with ultrasonic paralyzers dangling by thongs from their left wrists, and holstered sigma-ray needlers, like the one on the desk inside the dome. We're kidding with some girls in vivid orange and scarlet and green smocks. One of these, in bright green, was a duplicate of the one he had seen rubbing herself down with a towel. Here comes your boss-man, one of the girls told the cops as he approached. They both turned and saluted casually. The man who had lately been using the name of Richard Lee responded to their greeting and went to the desk. The policemen grasped their paralyzers, drew their needlers, and hurried into the dome. Taking the disk of blue plastic from his packet, he handed it to the clerk at the desk, who dropped it into a slot in the voter in front of him. Instantly a mechanical voice responded. Birkenvall, Blue Seal Noble, Hereditary Mavradov-Narrows, Special Chief's Assistant, Paratime Police, Special Assignment. Subject to no orders below those of Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, to be given all courtesies and cooperation within the Paratime Transposition Code and the Police Powers Code. Further particulars? The clerk pressed the No button. The blue sigil fell out of the release slot and was handed back to its bearer, who was drawing up his left sleeve. You'll want to be sure I'm your Birkenvall, I suppose?" he said, extending his arm. Yes, quite so. The clerk touched his arm with a small instrument, which swabbed it with antiseptic, drew a minute blood sample, and medicated the needle prick all in one almost painless operation. He put the blood sample on a slide and inserted it at one side of a comparison microscope, nodding. It showed the same distinctive permanent colloid pattern as the sample he had ready for comparison. The colloid pattern given in infancy by injection to the man in front of him, to set him apart from all the myriad other Birkenvalls on every other probability line of paratime. There the clerk nodded. The two policemen came out of the dome, their needlers holstered and their vigilance relaxed. They were lighting cigarettes as they emerged. It's all right, sir, one of them said. You didn't bring anything in with you this trip. The other cop chuckled. Remember that fifth level wild man who came in on the freight conveyor at Jandar last month? He asked. If he was hoping that some of the girls would want to know what wild man, it was a vain hope. With a blue-sealed maverad around, what chance did a couple of ordinary coppers have? The girls were already converging on Birkenvall. When are you going to get that monstrosity out of our restroom? The little redhead in green coveralls was demanding. If it wasn't for that thing, I'd be taking a shower right now. You were just finishing one about fifty periseconds off when I came through, Birkenvall told her. The girl looked at him in obviously feigned indignation. Why, Hugh, Hugh, para-peeper? Birkenvall chuckled and turned to the clerk. I went a strato rocket and pilot for Durgabar right away, called Durgabar paratime police field and give them my ETA, have an air taxi meet me, and have the chief notified that I'm coming in. Extraordinary report. Keep a guard over the conveyor, I think I'm going to need it again soon. He returned to the little redhead. Want to show me the way out of here to the rocket field? He asked. Outside, on the open landing field, Birkenvall glanced up at the sky, then looked at his watch. It had been twenty minutes since he had backed the jeep into the barn on that distant other timeline. The same delicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue above. The constancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand para-years of perpendicular time, never failed to impress him. The long curve of the mountains was the same, and they were modeled with the same autumn colors. But where the little village of Rutters Fort stood on that other line of probability, the white towers of an apartment city rose, the living quarters of the plant personnel, and of police operation part one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson Police Operation by H. B. Piper Part Two The rocket that was to take him to headquarters was being hoisted with a crane and lowered into the firing stand, and he walked briskly toward it, his rifle and musette slung. A boyish-looking pilot was on the platform, opening the door of the rocket. He stood aside for a verken wall to enter, then followed and closed it, dogging it shut while his passenger stowed his bag and rifle and strapped himself into a seat. Durgobar commercial terminal, sir, the pilot asked, taking the adjoining seat at the controls. Paratime police field, back of the Paratime administration building. Right, sir, twenty seconds to blast when you're ready. Ready now! Verken wall relaxed, counting seconds subconsciously. The rocket trembled, and Verken wall felt himself being pushed gently back against the upholstery. The seats and the pilot's instrument panel in front of them swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicator swept slowly over a ninety degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled. By then the high cirrus clouds Verken wall had watched from the field were far below. They were well into the stratosphere. There would be nothing to do now for the three hours in which the rocket sped northward across the pole and southward to Durgobar. The navigation was entirely in the electronic hands of robot controls. Verken wall got out his pipe and lit it, the pilot lit a cigarette. That's an odd pipe, sir, the pilot said. Out-time item? Yes, fourth probability level. Typical of the whole Paratime belt I was working in. Verken wall handed it over for inspection. The bowl's natural briar root. The stems are sort of plastic made from the sap of certain tropical trees. The little white dot is the maker's trademark. It's made of elephant tusk. Sounds pretty crude to me, sir. The pilot handed it back. Nice workmanship, though. Looks like good machine production. Yes, the sector I was on is really quite advanced for an electrochemical civilization. That weapon I brought back with me, that solid missile projector, is typical of most fourth-level culture. Moving parts machine to the closest tolerances and interchangeable with similar parts of all similar weapons. The missile is a small bolt of cupro alloy coated lead, propelled by expanding gases from the ignition of some nitrocellulose compound. Most of their scientific advance occurred within the past century, and most of that in the past forty years. Of course, the life expectancy on that level is only about seventy years. Huh! I'm seventy-eight, last birthday, the boys' looking pilot snorted. Their medical science must be mostly witchcraft. Until quite recently it was, Verkanvall agreed. Same story there as in everything else. Rapid advancement in the past few decades, after thousands of years of cultural inertia. You know, sir, I don't really understand this paradigm stuff, the pilot confessed. I know that all time is totally present, and that every moment has its own past future line of event sequence. And that all events in space-time occur according to maximum probability. But I just don't get this alternate probability stuff at all. If something exists, it's because it's the maximum probability effect of prior causes. Why does anything else exist on any other timeline? Verkanvall blew smoke at the air renovator. A lecture on paradigm theory would nicely fill in the three-hour interval until the landing at Durgabar. At least this kid was asking intelligent questions. Well, you know the principle of time passage, I suppose, he began. Yes, of course. Rogam's doctrine. The basis of most of our psychical science. We exist perpetually at all moments within our lifespan. Our extra-physical ego component passes from the ego existing at one moment to the ego existing at the next. During unconsciousness, the EPC is time-free. It may detach and connect at some other moment with the ego existing at that time point. That's how we precog. We take an auto-hypno and recover memories brought back from the future moment and buried in the subconscious mind. That's right, Verkanvall told him. And even without the auto-hypno, a lot of precognitive matter leaks out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind, usually in distorted forms. Or else inspires instinctive acts, the motivation for which is not brought to the level of consciousness.  This chance acquaintance develops into a love affair and, a year later, out of jealousy, she raise you half a dozen times within either. Just about happened to a friend of mine not long ago, the pilot said. Go on, sir. Well, in the microsecond or so before you die, or afterward for that matter, because we know that the extra physical component survives physical destruction, your EPC slips back a couple of years and reconnects at some point, password, of your first meeting with this girl and carries with it memories of everything up to the moment of detachment, all of which are indelibly recorded in your subconscious mind. So when you re-experience the event of standing outside the Martian Palace with a thirst, you go on to the Starway, or Nurgals, or some other bar. In both cases, on both timelines, you followed the line of maximum probability. In the second case, your subconscious future memories are an added causal factor. And when I backslip after I've been needled, I generate a new timeline, is that it? No such thing, he exclaimed. It's semantically inadmissible to talk about the total presence of time with one breath, and about generating new timelines with the next. All timelines are totally present in perpetual coexistence. The theory is that the EPC passes from one moment on one timeline to the next moment on the next timeline, so that the true passage of the EPC from moment to moment is a two-dimensional diagonal. So, in the case we're using, the event of your going into the Martian Palace exists on one timeline, and the event of your passing along to the Starway exists on another. But both are events in real existence. Now what we do in paratime transposition is to build up a hyper-temporal field to include the timeline we want to reach, and then shift over to it. Same point in the plenum, same point in primary time, plus primary time it lapsed during mechanical and electronic lag in the relays, but a different line of secondary time. Then why don't we have past future time travel on our own timeline, the pilot wanted to know. That was a question every paratimer has to answer every time he talks paratime to the laity. Verkan Vahl had been expecting it. He answered patiently.  It can operate only in the area of primary time in which it exists. It can transpose to any other timeline and carry with it anything inside its field. But it can't go outside its own temporal area of existence. Any more than a bullet from that rifle can hit a target a week before it's fired. Verkan Vahl pointed out. Anything inside the field is supposed to be unaffected by anything outside. Supposed to be is the way to put it, it doesn't always work. Once in a while something pretty nasty gets picked up in transit. He thought briefly of the man in the black tunic. That's why we have armed guards at terminals. Suppose you'll pick up a blast from a nucleonic bomb, the pilot asked, or something red hot or radioactive. We have a monument at Paratime Police Headquarters in Durgabar bearing the names of our own personnel who didn't make it back. It's a large monument. Over the past ten thousand years it's been inscribed with quite a few names. You can have it. I'll stick to rockets, the pilot replied. Tell me another thing though. What's all this about levels and sectors and belts? What's the difference? Here are the arbitrary terms. There are five main probability levels derived from the five possible outcomes of the attempt to colonize this planet 75,000 years ago. We're on the first level. Complete success and colony fully established. The fifth level is the probability of complete failure. No human population established on this planet and indigenous quasi-human life evolved indigenously. On the fourth level the colonists evidently met with some disaster and lost all memory of their extraterrestrial origin. As well as all extraterrestrial culture. As far as they know they are an indigenous race. They have a long prehistory of stone age savagery. Sectors are areas of Paratime on any level in which the prevalent culture has a common origin and common characteristics. They are divided more or less arbitrarily into sub-sectors. Belts are areas within sub-sectors where conditions are the result of recent alternate probabilities. For instance, I've just come from the Europo-American sector of the fourth level, an area of about 10,000 peri-years in depth. In which the dominant civilization developed on the northwest continent of the major landmass and spread from there to the minor landmass. The line on which I was operating is also part of a sub-sector of about 3,000 peri-years depth and a belt developing from one of several probable outcomes of a war concluded about three elapsed years ago. On that timeline the field at the Hagriban synthetics works, where we took off, is part of an abandoned farm. On the side of Hagriban city is a little farming village. Those things are there, right now, both in primary time and in the plenum. They are about 250,000 peri-years perpendicular to each other, and each is of the same general order of reality. The red light overhead flashed on. The pilot looked into his visor and put his hands to the manual controls in case of failure of the robot controls. The rocket landed smoothly, however. There was a slight jar as it was grappled by the crane and hoisted upright, the seats turning in their gimbals. Pilot and passenger unstrapped themselves and hurried through the refrigerated outlet and away from the glowing hot rocket. An air taxi, emblazoned with the device of the paratime police, was waiting. Verkanvall said good-bye to the rocket pilot and took his seat beside the pilot of the air cab. The latter lifted his vehicle above the building level and then set it down on the landing stage of the paratime police building in a long, side-swooping glide. An express elevator took Verkanvall down to one of the middle stages, where he showed his sigil to the guard outside the door of Tortha Karf's office and was admitted at once. The paratime police chief rose from behind his semi-circular desk with its array of keyboards and viewing screens and communicators. He was a big man well past his two hundredth year. His hair was iron gray and thinning in front. He had begun to grow thick at the waist and his calm features bore the lines of middle age. He wore the dark green uniform of the paratime police. Well, Val, he greeted. Everything secure? Not exactly, sir. Verkanvall came around the desk, deposited his rifle and bag on the floor and sat down in one of the spare chairs. I'll have to go back again. So his chief lit a cigarette and waited. He traced Gavron Sarn, Verkanvall got out his pipe and began to fill it. But that's only the beginning. I have to trace something else. Gavron Sarn exceeded his paratime permit and took one of his pets along. A Venusian nighthound. Tortha Karf's expression did not alter. It merely grew more intense. He used one of the short, semantically ugly terms which serve in place of profanity as the emotional release of a race that has forgotten all the taboos and terminologies of supernaturalistic religion and sex inhibition. You're sure of this, of course? It was less a question than a statement. Verkanvall bent and took cloth-wrapped objects from his bag, unwrapping them and laying them on the desk. They were casts in hard black plastic of the footprints of some large three-toed animal. What do these look like, sir? He asked. Tortha Karf fingered them and nodded. Then he became as visibly angry as a man of his civilization and culture level ever permitted himself. What does that fool think we have a paratime code for, he demanded? It's entirely illegal to transpose any extraterrestrial animal or object to any timeline on which space travel is unknown. I don't care if he is a green seal, Thavrad. He'll face charges when he gets back for this. He was a green seal, Thavrad, Verkanvall corrected, and he won't be coming back. I hope you didn't have to deal summarily with him, Tortha Karf said. With his title and social position and his family's political importance, that might make difficulties. Not that it wouldn't be all right with me, of course, but we never seem to be able to make either the management or the public realize the extremities to which we are forced at times. Besides, we probably never shall. Verkanvall smiled faintly. Oh no, sir, nothing like that. He was dead before I transposed to that timeline. He was killed when he wrecked a self-propelled vehicle he was using, one of those fourth-level automobiles. I posed as a relative and tried to claim his body for the burial ceremony observed on that cultural level, but I was told that it had been completely destroyed by fire when the fuel tank of his automobile burned. I was given certain of his effects which had passed through the fire. I found his sigil concealed inside what appeared to be a cigarette case. He took a green disk from the bag and laid it on the desk. There's no question, Gavran Sarn died in the wreck of that automobile. And the night hound. It was in the car with him, but it escaped. You know how fast those things are. I found that track, he indicated one of the black castes, in some dried mud near the scene of the wreck. As you see, the cast is slightly defective. The others were fresh this morning when I made them. And what have you done so far? I rented an old farm near the scene of the wreck and installed my field generator there. It runs through to the Hagraban Synthetics Works, about a hundred miles east of Thalna Jarvazar. I have my this-line terminal in the girl's restroom at the Durable Plastics Factory. Handled that on a local police power writ. Since then, I've been hunting for the night hound. I think I can find it, but I'll need some special equipment and a hypnomech indoctrination. And that's why I came back. Has it been attracting any attention, Torthekarf asked anxiously? Killing cattle in the locality, causing considerable excitement. Fortunately, it's a locality of forested mountains and valley farms, rather than a built-up industrial district. Local police and wild game protection officers are concerned. All the farmers excited and going armed. The theory is that it's either a wildcat of some sort, or a maniac armed with a cutlass. Either theory would conform, more or less, to the nature of its depredations. Nobody has actually seen it. That's good, Torthekarf was relieved. Well, you'll have to go and bring it out, or kill it and obliterate the body. You know why as well as I do. Certainly, sir, Birkenball replied. In a primitive culture, things like this would be assigned supernatural explanations, and embedded in the locally accepted religion. But this culture, while nominally religious, is highly rationalistic in practice. Typical lag effect, characteristic of all expanding cultures. And this Europo-American sector really has an expanding culture. A hundred and fifty years ago, the inhabitants of this particular timeline didn't even know how to apply steam power. Now they've begun to release nuclear energy in a few crude forms. Torthekarf whistled softly. That's quite a jump. There's a sector that'll be in for trouble in the next few centuries. That is, realized locally, sir. Birkenball concentrated on relighting his pipe for a moment, then continued. I would predict space travel on that sector within the next century. Maybe the next half-century, at least to the moon. And the art of taxidermy is very highly developed. Now, suppose some farmer shoots that thing. What would he do with it, sir? Torthekarf grunted. Nice logic ball. On a most uncomfortable possibility. He'd have it mounted, and it'd be put in a museum somewhere. And as soon as the first spaceship reaches Venus, and they find those things in a wild state, they'll have the mounted specimen identified. Exactly. And then, instead of beating their brains about where their specimen came from, they'll begin asking when it came from. They're quite capable of such reasoning, even now. A hundred years isn't a particularly long time, Torthekarf considered. I'll be retired then, but you'll have my job, and it'll be your headache. You'd better get this cleaned up now while it can be handled. What are you going to do? I'm not sure now, sir. I want a hypno-mech indoctrination first. Verkanvall gestured toward the communicator on the desk. May I, he asked. Certainly, Torthekarf stood the instrument across the desk. Anything you want. Thank you, sir. Verkanvall, snapped on the code index, hung the symbol he wanted, and then punched it on the keyboard. Special Chief's assistant, Verkanvall, he identified himself, speaking from the office of Torthekarf Chief Paratime Police. I want a complete hypno-mech on Venusian nighthounds, emphasis on wild state. Special emphasis domesticated nighthounds reverted to wild state and terrestrial surroundings. Extra special emphasis hunting techniques applicable to same. The word nighthound will do for trigger symbol. He turned to Torthekarf. Can I take it here? Torthekarf nodded, pointing to a row of booths along the far wall of the office. Make setup for wired transmission. I'll take it here. Very well, sir, in fifteen minutes. A voice replied out of the communicator. Verkanvall slid the communicator back. By the way, sir, I had a hitchhiker on the way back. Carried him about a hundred or so para-years. Picked him up about three hundred para-years after leaving my other-line terminal. Nasty-looking fellow in a black uniform. Look like one of those private army stormtroopers you find all through that sector. Armed and hostile. I thought I'd have to ray him, but he blundered outside the field almost at once. I have a record if you'd care to see it. Yes, put it on. Torthekarf gestured toward the solidograph projector. It's set for a miniature reproduction here on the desk. That'll be all right? Verkanvall nodded, getting out the film and loading it into the projector. When he pressed a button, a dome of radiance appeared on the desktop, two feet in width and a foot in height. In the middle of this appeared a small solidograph image of the interior of the conveyor, showing the desk and the control board and the figure of Verkanvall seated at it. The little figure of the stormtrooper appeared, pistol in hand. The little Verkanvall snatched up his tiny needler. The stormtrooper moved into one side of the dome and vanished. Verkanvall flipped a switch and cut out the image. Yes. I don't know what causes that, but it happens now and then, Torthekarf said, usually at the beginning of a transposition. I remember when I was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago, a hundred and thirty-nine to be exact, I picked up a fellow on the fourth level, just about where you're operating, and dragged him a couple of hundred pair of years. I went back to find him and return him to his own timeline, but before I could locate him, he'd been arrested by the local authorities as a suspicious character and got himself shot trying to escape. I felt badly about that, but Torthekarf shrugged. Anything else happen on the trip? I ran through a belt of intermittent nucleonic bombing on the second level. Verkanvall mentioned an approximate paratime location. Ugh, that kiften civilization. By courtesy so called, Torthekarf pulled a rye face. I suppose the intra-family enmities on the Vodka dynasty have reached critical mass again. They'll fool around till they blast themselves back to the Stone Age. Intellectually, they're about there now. I had to operate in that sector once. Oh yes, another thing. This rifle. Verkanvall picked it up, emptied the magazine, and handed it to his superior. The supplies office slipped up on this. It's not appropriate to my line of operation. It's a lovely rifle, but it's about two hundred percent in advance of existing arms design on my line. It excited the curiosity of a couple of police officers and a game protector who should be familiar with the weapons of their own timeline. I evaded by disclaiming ownership or intimate knowledge, and they seemed satisfied, but it worried me. Yes, that was made in our duplicating shops here in Durgabar. Torthekarf carried it to a photographic bench behind his desk. I'll have it checked while you're taking your hypnomech. Want to exchange it for something authentic? Why, no, sir. It's been identified to me, and I'd excite less suspicion with it than I would if I abandoned it and mysteriously acquired another rifle. I just wanted to check and supplies warned to be more careful in the future. Torthekarf nodded approvingly. The young Maverad of Naros was thinking as a paratimer should. What's the designation of your line again? Verkanvall told him. It was a short numerical term of six places, but it expressed a number of the order of ten to the fortieth power, exact to the last digit. Torthekarf repeated it into his steno-memograph with explanatory comment. There seems to be quite a few things going wrong in that area, he said. Let's see now. He punched the designation on a keyboard. Instantly it appeared on a translucent screen in front of him. He punched another combination and at the top of the screen under the number there appeared, events past elapsed five years. He punched again below this line appeared the subheading. Events involving paratime transposition. Another code combination added a third line, attracting public notice among inhabitants. He pressed the start button. The headings vanished to be replaced by page after page of print, succeeding one another on the screen as the two men read. They told strange and apparently disconnected stories of unexplained fires and explosions, of people vanishing without trace, of unaccountable disasters to aircraft. There were many stories of an epidemic of mysterious, disc-shaped objects seen in the sky, singly or in numbers. To each account was appended one or more reference numbers. Sometimes Torthekarf or Verkanvall would punch one of these and read, on an adjoining screen, the explanatory material referred to. Finally Torthekarf leaned back and lit a fresh cigarette. Yes, indeed, Val. Very definitely we will have to take action in the matter of the runaway night-hound of the late Gavron Sarn, he said. I'd forgotten that that was the timeline onto which the Ardrath expedition launched those anti-grave discs. If this extraterrestrial monstrosity turns up on the heels of that flying saucer business, everybody above the order of intelligence of a cretin will suspect some connection. What really happened in the Ardrath matter, Verkanvall inquired? I was on the third level on that Louverian Empire operation at the time. That's right, you missed that. Well, it was one of these joint operation things. The Paratime Commission and the Space Patrol were experimenting with a new technique for throwing a spaceship into Paratime. They used the cruiser Ardrath, Calzarn Jan commanding. Went into space about halfway to the moon and took up orbit, keeping on the sunlit side of the planet to avoid being observed. That was all right. But then Captain Calzarn ordered away a flight of anti-grave discs, a man to take pictures, and finally authorized a landing in the western mountain range, northern continent, minor landmass. That's when the trouble started. He flipped the run-back switch till he had recovered the page he wanted. Verkanvall read of a fourth-level aviator in his little air-screw drive craft, citing nine high-flying saucer-like objects. That was how it began, Torthacarf told him. Before long, as other incidents of the same sort occurred, our people on that line began sending back to know what was going on. Naturally, from the different descriptions of these saucers, they recognized the objects as anti-grave landing discs from a spaceship. So I went to the commission and raised atomic blazes about it, and the Ardrath was ordered to confine operations to the lower areas of the fifth level. Then our people on that timeline went to work with corrective action. Here. He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious discs, and each report was more fantastic than the last. The standard smother-out technique, Verkanvall grinned. I only heard a little talk about the flying saucers, and all of that was in a joke. In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it. Wasn't that the timeline the Tharmax Trading Corporation almost lost their paratime license on? That's right, it was. They bought up all the cigarettes and caused a conspicuous shortage after fourth-level cigarettes had been introduced on this line and had become popular. They should have spread their purchases over a number of lines and kept them within the local supply-demand frame. And they also got into trouble with the local government for selling unrationed petrol and automobile tires. We had to send in a special operations group, and they came closer to having to engage in out-time local politics than I care to think of. Forthekarf quoted a line from a currently popular song about the sorrows of a policeman's life.  Trying to prevent panics and disturbances and dislocations of local economy as a result of our operations. Trying to keep out of out-time politics and at all times at all costs and hazards by all means guarding the secret of paratime transposition. Sometimes I wish Galdron Karth and Hester Grom had strangled in their cradles. Birken Waal shook his head. No, chief, he said. You don't mean that, not really, he said. We've been paratiming for the past ten thousand years. When the Galdron Historic Trans-Temporal Field was discovered, our ancestors had pretty well exhausted the resources of this planet. We had a world population of half a billion, and it was all they could do to keep alive. After we began paratime transposition, our population climbed to ten billion, and there it stayed for the last eight thousand years. Just enough of us to enjoy our planet and the other planets of our system to the fullest. Enough of everything for everybody that nobody needs to fight anybody for anything. We've tapped the resources of those other worlds on other timelines, a little here, a little there, and not enough to really hurt anybody. We've left our mark in a few places, the Dakota Badlands and the Gobi on the fourth level, for instance, but we've done no great damage to any of them. Except the time they blew up half the southern island continent over about five hundred peri-years on the third level, like a carf mentioned. Regrettable accident, to be sure, Birkenwald conceded. And look how much we've learned from the experiences of those other timelines. During the crisis, after the fourth interplanetary war, we might have adopted Palnar Sarnes' Dictatorship of the Chosen scheme, if we hadn't seen what an exactly similar scheme had done on the Jack Haka civilization on the second level. When Palnar Sarnes was told about that, he went into paratime to see for himself, and when he returned, he renounced his proposal in horror. Torthakarf nodded. He wouldn't be making any mistake in turning his post over to the Mavrad of Neros on his retirement. Yes, Val, I know, he said, but when you've been at this desk as long as I have, you'll have a sour moment or two now and then too. A blue light flashed over one of the booths across the room. Birkenwald got to his feet, removing his coat and hanging it on the back of his chair, and crossed the room, rolling up his left shirt sleeve. There was a relaxer chair in the booth with a blue plastic helmet above it. He glanced at the indicator screen to make sure he was getting the indoctrination he called for, and then sat down in the chair and lowered the helmet over his head, inserting the earplugs and fasting the chin strap. Then he touched his left arm with an injector which was lying on the arm of the chair, and at the same time flipped the starter switch. Soft, slow music began to chant out of the earphones. The insidious fingers of the drug blocked off his senses one by one. The music diminished and the words of the hypnotic formula lulled him to sleep. He woke, hearing the lively strains of dance music. For a while he lay relaxed. Then he snapped off the switch, took out the earplugs, removed the helmet, and rose to his feet. Deep in his subconscious mind was the entire body of knowledge about the Venusian nighthound. He mentally pronounced the word, and at once it began flooding into his conscious mind. He knew the animal's evolutionary history, its anatomy, its characteristics, its dietary and reproductive habits, how it hunted, how it fought its enemies, how it eluded pursuit, and how best it could be tracked down and killed. He nodded. Already a plan for dealing with Gavron Sarn's renegade pet was taking shape in his mind. He picked up a plastic cup from the dispenser, filled it from a cooler tap with amber-colored spiced wine and drank, tossing the cup into the disposal bin. He placed a fresh injector on the arm of the chair, ready for the next user of the booth. Then he emerged, glancing at his fourth-level wristwatch and mentally translating to the first-level timescale. Three hours had passed. There had been more to learn about his quarry than he had expected. Fourth the car was sitting behind his desk, smoking a cigarette. It seemed as though he had not moved since Virk and Val had left him. Though the special agent knew that he had dined, attended several conferences, and done many other things. I checked up on your hitchhiker, Val, the chief said. We won't bother about him. He's a member of something called the Christian Avengers, one of those typical Europo-American race and religious hate groups. He belongs in a belt that is the outcome of the Hitler victory of 1940, whatever that was. Something unpleasant, I daresay. We don't owe him anything. People of that sort should be stepped on, like cockroaches. And he won't make any more trouble on the line where you dropped him than they have there already. It's in a belt of complete social and political anarchy. Somebody probably shot him as soon as he emerged because he wasn't wearing the right sort of uniform. 1940 what, by the way? He lapsed years since the birth of some religious leader, Virk and Val explained. And did you find out about my rifle? Oh, yes. It's reproduction of something that's called a Sharps Model 37-235 Electrospeed Express. Made on an adjoining paratime belt by a company that went out of business 67 years ago, elapsed time, on your line of operation. What made the difference was the second war between the states. I don't know what that was either. I'm not too well up on fourth-level history. But whatever, your line of operation didn't have it. Probably just as well for them, though they very lightly had something else, as bad or worse. I put in a complaint to supplies about it, and you got some more ammunition and reloading tools. Now, tell me what you're going to do about this nighthound business. Fourth of Karth was silent for a while after Virk and Val had finished. You're taking some awful chances, Val, you said at length. The way you plan doing it, the advantages will all be with the nighthound. Those things can see as well at night as you can in daylight. I suppose you know that, though. You're the nighthound specialist now. Yes, but they're accustomed to Venus hotland marshes. It's been dry weather for the last two weeks, all over the northeastern section of the northern continent. I'll be able to hear it, long before it gets close to me. And I'll be wearing an electric headlamp. When I snap that on, it'll be dazzled for a moment. Well, as I said, you're the nighthound specialist. There's the communicator, order anything you need. He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the old one before crushing it out. But be careful, Val. It took me close to 40 years to make a paratimer out of you. I don't want to have to repeat the process with somebody else before I can retire. End of Police Operation Part 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson. Police Operation by H. B. Piper. Part 3. The grass was wet as Wurkenvall, who reminded himself that here he was called Richard Lee, crossed the yard from the farmhouse to the ramshackle barn in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining that morning when the straddle rocket from Durgabar had landed him at the Hegraban Synthetic Works on the first level. Unaffected by the probabilities of human history, the same rain had been coming down on the old Kinchwalter farm near Rutter's Fort on the fourth level, and it had persisted all day in a slow, deliberate drizzle. He didn't like that. The woods would be wet, muffling his quarry's footsteps and canceling his only advantage over the night-prower he hunted. He had no idea, however, of postponing the hunt. If anything, the rain had made it all the more imperative that the night-hound be killed at once. At this season a falling temperature would speedily follow. The night-hound, a creature of the hot Venus Marshes, would suffer from the cold and, taught by years of domestication to find warmth among human habitations, it would invade some isolated farmhouse, or worse, one of the little valley villages. If it were not killed tonight, the incident he had come to prevent would certainly occur. Going to the barn he spread an old horse-blanket on the seat of the jeep, laid his rifle on it, and then backed the jeep outside. Then he took off his coat, removing his pipe and tobacco from the pockets, and spread it on the wet grass. He unwrapped a package and took out a small plastic spray-gun he had brought with him from the first level, aiming it at the coat and pressing the trigger until it blew itself empty. A sickening rancid feather tainted the air, the scent of the giant poison-roach of Venus, the one creature for which the night-hound bore an inborn, implacable hatred.  He remembered that the Gavron family derived their title from their vast Venus hotlands estates. That Gavron Sarn, the man who had brought this thing to the fourth level, had been born on the inner planet. When Verkanvall donned that coat, he would become his own living bait for the murderous fury of the creature he sought. At that moment, mastering his queasiness and putting on the coat, he objected less to that danger than to the hideous stench of the scent, to obtain which a valuable specimen had been sacrificed at the Durgabar Museum of Extraterrestrial Zoology the evening before. Carrying the wrapper and the spray gun to an outside fireplace, he snapped his lighter to them and tossed them in. They were highly inflammable, blazing up and vanishing in a moment. He tested the electric headlamp on the front of his cap, checked his rifle, drew the heavy revolver, an authentic product of his line of operation, and flipped the cylinder out and in again. Then he got into the jeep and drove away. For half an hour he drove quickly along the valley roads. Now and then he passed farmhouses and dogs, puzzled and angered by the alien scent his coat bore, and embarked furiously. At length he turned into a back road and from this to the barely discernable trace of an old log road. The rain had stopped and in order to be ready to fire in any direction at any time he had removed the top of the jeep. Now he had to crouch below the windshield to avoid overhanging branches.  He was driving slowly now, laying behind him a reeking trail of scent. There had been another stock-killing the night before while he had been on the first level. The locality of the latest depredation had confirmed his estimate of the beast's probable movements and indicated where it might be prowling tonight. He was certain that it was somewhere near. Sooner or later it would pick up the scent. Finally he stopped snapping out his lights. He had chosen this spot carefully while studying the geological survey map that afternoon. He was on the grade of an old railroad line, now abandoned and its track long removed, which had served the logging operations of fifty years ago. On one side the mountain slanted sharply upward, on the other it fell away sharply. If the night-hound were below him it would have to climb that forty-five degree slope and could not avoid dislodging loose stones or otherwise making a noise. He would get out on that side. If the night-hound were above him the jeep would protect him when it charged. He got to the ground thumbing off the safety of his rifle and an instant later he knew that he had made a mistake which could easily cost him his life. A mistake from which neither his comprehensive logic nor his hypnotically acquired knowledge of the beast's habits had saved him. As he stepped to the ground facing toward the front of the jeep he heard a low, whining cry behind him and a rush of padded feet. He whirled, snapping on the headlamp with his left hand and thrusting out his rifle pistol-wise in his right. For a split second he saw the charging animal, its long, lizard-like head split in a toothy grin, its talent-tipped forepaws extended. He fired and the bullet went wild. The next instant the rifle was knocked from his hand. Instinctively he flung up his left arm to shield his eyes. Claws raked his left arm and shoulder. Something struck him heavily along the left side and his caplight went out as he dropped and rolled under the jeep, drawing in his legs and fumbling under his coat for the revolver. In that instant he knew what had gone wrong. His plan had been entirely too much of a success. The nighthound had winded him as he had driven up the old railroad grade and had followed. Its best-running speed had been just good enough to keep it a hundred or so feet behind the jeep and the motor-noise had covered the padding of its feet. In the few moments between stopping the little car and getting out the nighthound had been able to close the distance and spring upon him. It was characteristic of first-level mentality that Verkanvall wasted no moments on self-reproach or panic. While he was still rolling under his jeep his mind had been busy with plans to retrieve the situation. Something touched the heel of one boot and he froze his leg into immobility, at the same time trying to get the big smith and wesson free. The shoulder holster he found was badly torn, though made of the heaviest skirting leather, and the spring which retained the weapon in place had been wrenched and bent until he needed both hands to draw.  The nighthound was prowling around the jeep, whining frantically. It was badly confused. It could see quite well even in the close darkness of the starless night. Its eyes were of a nature capable of perceiving infrared radiations as light. There were plenty of these, the jeep's engine, lately running on four-wheel drive, was quite hot. Had he been standing alone, especially on this raw, chilly night, Verkan Vall's own body heat would have lighted him up like a jack-o'-lantern. Now, however, the hot engine above him massed his own radiations. Moreover, the poison-roach scent on his coat was coming up through the floorboard and mingling with the scent on the seat. Yet the nighthound couldn't find the two-and-a-half-foot insect-like thing that should have been producing it. Verkan Vall lay motionless, wondering how long the next move would be in coming. Then he heard a thud above him, followed by a furious tearing as the nighthound ripped the blanket and began rending at the seat cushion. Hopa gets a paw full of seat-springs, Verkan Vall commented mentally. He had already found a stone about the size of his two fists, and another slightly smaller, and had put one in each of the side pockets of the coat. Now he slipped his revolver into his waist-belt and writhed out of the coat, shedding the ruined shoulder holster at the same time. Wiggling on the flat of his back, he squirmed between the rear wheels until he was able to sit up behind the jeep. Then, swinging the weighted coat, he flung it forward over the nighthound and the jeep itself at the same time drawing his revolver. Immediately the nighthound, lured by the sudden movement of the principal source of the scent, jumped out of the jeep and bounded after the coat. And there was considerable noise in the brush on the lower side of the railroad grade. At once Verkan Vall swarmed into the jeep and snapped on the lights. His stratagem had succeeded beautifully. The stinking coat had landed on the top of a small bush about ten feet in front of the jeep and ten feet from the ground. The nighthound, erect on its haunches, was reaching out with its front paws to drag it down and slashing angrily at it with its single-clawed intermediary limbs. Its back was to Verkan Vall. His sights clearly defined by the lights in front of him the paratimer centered them on the base of the creature's spine, just above its secondary shoulders, and carefully squeezed the trigger. The big 357 magnum bucked in his hand and belched flame and sound, if only these fourth-level weapons weren't so confoundedly boisterous, and the nighthound screamed and fell. Re-cocking the revolver, Verkan Vall waited for an instant, then nodded in satisfaction. The beast's spine had been smashed, and its hindquarters and even its intermediary fighting limbs had been paralyzed. He aimed carefully for a second shot and fired into the base of the thing's skull. It quivered and died. Getting a flashlight, he found his rifle, sticking muzzle down in the mud a little behind and to the right of the jeep, and swore briefly in the local fourth-level idiom. Verkan Vall was a man who loved good weapons, be they sigma-ray needlers, neutron disruption blasters, or the solid missile projectors of the lower levels. By this time, he was feeling considerable pain from the claw wounds he had received. He peeled off his shirt and tossed it over the hood of the jeep. Torthakarf had advised him to carry a needler, or a blaster, or a Neurostat gun, but Verkan Vall had been unwilling to take such arms onto the fourth level. In event of mishap to himself, it would be all too easy for such a weapon to fall into the hands of someone able to deduce from it scientific principles too far in advance for the general fourth-level culture. But there had been one first-level item which he had permitted himself. Mainly because, suitably packaged, it was not readily identified as such. Digging a respectable fourth-level leatherette case from under the seat, he opened it and took out a pint bottle with a red poison label and a towel. Saturating the towel with the contents of the bottle, he rubbed every inch of his torso with it, so as not to miss even the smallest break made in his skin by the septic claws of the nighthound. Whenever the lotion-soaked towel touched raw skin, a pain like the burn of a hot iron shot through him. Before he was through, he was in agony. Satisfied that he had disinfected every wound, he dropped the towel and clung weakly to the side of the jeep. He grunted out a string of English oaths, and capped them with an obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the fourth-level inhabitants of his island home of Narrows to the south, and a thundering curse in the name of Maga Fire-god of Duel in a third-level tongue. He even mentioned Fasif, great-god of Kift, in a manner which would have gotten him an acid bath if the Kiften priests had heard him. He alluded to the Baroque amatory practices of the third-level Ilyala people, and soothed himself in the classic Dar-Helmetung with one of those rambling genealogical insults favored in the Indo-Terranian sector of the fourth level. By this time the pain had subsided to an overall smarting itch. He'd have to bear with that until his work was finished and he could enjoy a hot bath. He got another bottle out of the first aid kit, a flat pint labeled Old Overhold, containing a locally manufactured specific for inward and subjective wounds, and medicated himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail.  Its secondary limbs, about a third of the way back from its front shoulders, were long and slender. Normally they were carried folded closely against the body, and each was armed with a single curving claw. The revolver bullet had gone in at the base of the skull and emerged under the jaw. The head was relatively undamaged. Verkan Vahl was glad of that. He wanted that head for the trophy room of his home on Narrows. Grunting and straining he got the thing into the back of the jeep and flung his almost shredded tweed coat over it. A last look around assured him that he'd left nothing unaccountable or suspicious. The brush was broken where the nighthound had been tearing at the coat. A bear might have done that. There were splashes of the viscid stuff the thing had used for blood, but they wouldn't be there long. Terrestrial rodents liked nighthound blood, and the woods were full of mice. He climbed in under the wheel, backed, turned, and drove away. Inside the paratime transposition dome Verkan Vahl turned from the body of the nighthound, which he had just dragged in, and considered the inert form of another animal, a stump-tailed, tough-eared, tawny Canada lynx. That particular animal had already made two paratime transpositions. Captured in the vast wildlands of fifth level North America, it had been taken to the first level and placed in the Durgabar Zoological Gardens. And then, requisitioned on authority of Torthacarf, it had been brought to the fourth level by Verkan Vahl. It was almost at the end of all its travels. Verkan Vahl prodded the supine animal with the toe of his boot. It twitched slightly. Its feet were cross-bound with straps, but when he saw that the narcotic was wearing off, Verkan Vahl snatched a syringe, parted the fur at the base of its neck, and gave it an injection. After a moment he picked it up in his arms and carried it out to the jeep. All right, pussycat, he said, placing it under the rear seat. This is a one-way ride. The way you're doped up, it won't hurt a bit. He went back and rummaged in the debris of the long-deserted barn. He picked up a hoe and discarded it as too light. An old plowshare was too unhandy. He considered a great bar from a heating furnace, and then he found the poleaxe, lying among a pile of worm-eaten boards. Its handle had been shortened at some time to about twelve inches, converting it into a heavy hatchet. He weighed it and tried it on a block of wood, and then, making sure that the secret door was closed, he went out again and drove off. An hour later he returned. Opening the secret door, he carried the ruined shoulder holster and the straps that had bound the bobcat's feet and the ax, now sploshed with blood and tawny cat hairs into the dome. Then he closed the secret room and took a long drink from the bottle on his hip. The job was done. He would take a hot bath and sleep in the farmhouse till noon. And then he would return to the first level. Maybe Tortha Karth would want him to come back here for a while. The situation on this timeline was far from satisfactory, even if the crisis threatened by Gavran Sarn's renegade pet had been averted. The presence of a chief's assistant might be desirable. At least he had a right to expect a short vacation. He thought of the little redhead at the Hagraban Synthetics Works. What was her name? Something Kara. Morvan Kara, that was it. She'd be coming off shift about the time he'd make first level, tomorrow afternoon. The claw wounds were still smarting vexatiously. A hot bath and a night's sleep. He took another drink, lit his pipe, picked up his rifle, and started across the yard to the house. Private Zinkowski cradled the telephone and got up from the desk, stretching. He left the orderly room and walked across the hall to the recreation room, where the rest of the boys were loafing. Sergeant Haynes, in a languid gin rummy game with Corporal Connor, a sheriff's deputy, and a mechanic from the service station down the road looked up. Well, Sarge, I think we can write off those stock killings, the Private said. Yeah? The sergeant's interest quickened. Yeah. I think the watsets had it. I just got a buzz from the railroad cops at Logan's Port. It seems a track walker found a dead bobcat on the Logan River Ranch, about a mile or so below MMY Signal Tower. Looks like it tangled with that night freight upriver and came off second best. It was near chop to hamburger. MMY Signal Tower. That's right below Yoder's Crossing, the sergeant considered. The Strawmire Farm, night before last. The Amrine Farm last night. Yeah. That would be about right. That'll suit Steve Parker. Steve Parker, bobcats aren't protected, so it's not his trouble. And they're not a violation of state law, so it's none of our worry, Connor said. Your deal, isn't it, Sarge? Yeah. Wait a minute. The sergeant got to his feet. I promised Sam Cain, the AP man at Logan's Port, that I'd let him in on anything new. He got up and started for the phone. Phantom killer. He blew an impolite noise. Well, it was just a lot of excitement while it lasted, the deputy sheriff said. Just like that flying saucer thing. The end of police operation by H. Beam Piper, read by Mark Nelson. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson. Graveyard of Dreams by H. Beam Piper. Standing at the armor-glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Ron Maxwell gripped the metal handrail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes. Twenty-six and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to, until he'd have to face it. Then, realizing that he never, in his own thoughts, addressed himself as Sir, he turned. I beg your pardon? That was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about ten regulation changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere. Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir, the ship's officer repeated. You'll go off by the midship gangway on the starboard side. Yes, I know. Thank you. The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. Would you mind checking over this, Mr. Maxwell?  Certainly. He glanced at the slip of paper. Velices, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two. Trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two. Microbook case, one fifty kilos, one. The last item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him. Not at any person, even himself, but at the situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing. Yes, that's everything. I have no hand luggage, just this stuff. He noticed that this was the only baggage list under the clip. The other papers were all freight and express manifests. Not many passengers left aboard, are there? You're the only one in first class, sir," the mate replied. About forty farm laborers on the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield's the end of the run. You know anything about the place? I was born there. I've been away at school for the last five years. On Balder? Tara. University of Montevideo. Once, Khan would have said it almost boastfully. The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. Of course, I should have known. You're Rodney Maxwell's son, aren't you? Your father's one of our regular freight-shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately. He looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said, Sorry, I've got to go. Lot of things to attend to before landing. He touched the visor of his cap and turned away. The mountains were closer when Khan looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five years and two space voyages ago, seen from the after-deck of this ship, or one of our sisters, the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-mellon fields had been in pink blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past. But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Tara. The things he would learn, microbook case, one fifty kilos, one.  Maybe they, at least, would have some value. The woods were autumn tinted now, and the fields were bare and brown. They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing. That extra-hands were needed for that met a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized. That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the seventh century, atomic era. The name of the planet, Poitem, told that. The Sir Romanticist movement. When the critics and professors were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Funny how much was coming back to him now. Things he had picked up from the minimal liberal arts and general humanities courses he had taken, and then forgotten, in his absorption with the science and tech studies. The first extra-solder planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology. Odin and Balder and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the seventh century they were naming planets for almost anything. Anything that is, but actual persons. Their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the son of Poitem, and Beta Gartner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight on the other side of the world. All named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets. Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane giants on Gamma, two airless little things with one sixth-terrain gravity. Alpha Two had been the only one in the tri-system with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poitem, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storacenda. Thirty years later Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp grow to a metropolis and was buried under a massive monument. Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmosphere domed factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue culture foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poitem had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poitem had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it. Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the tri-system and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-fraiding. Below the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile square desert of crumbling concrete, empty and ruthless sheds, and warehouses and barracks. Brush choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poitem's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation's Third Fleet Army Force had occupied the Gartner Tri-System during the System State's War. Millions of troops had been stationed on or routed through Poitem. Tens of thousands of spacecraft had been based on the tri-system. The mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had spent trillions of sols on Poitem, piling up mountains of stores and arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with installations.  The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind. Even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal. Ever since, Poitem had been living on salvage. The uniform the officer was wearing was forty years old, and it was barely a month out of the original packing. On Terra, Kahn had told his friends that his father was a prospector, and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles. The old replacement depot, or classification center, or training area, or whatever it had been, vanished under the ship now, and it was all forest back to the mountains. With an occasional cluster of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose. Bands of farm traps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight, and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range. The valley beyond was sloping away and widening out in the distance. It was time he began thinking of what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course. He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family. Lynn Fawzy, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and Kurt Fawzy would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynn and himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father would regard him now. But, however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth. The ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight. Litchfield was inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city. Three minutes and the ship began to cut speed and lose altitude. The hot jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the coal jet rotors. Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the airport building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candle stump in a puddle of its own grease. The other buildings under the carapace of terraces and landing stages seemed to have flowed away from it. And there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and high-garden terrace, and the mall. At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty were littered with rubbish, gardens untended and choked with wild growth, windows staring blindly, walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them. For a moment he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father's letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield, but in himself. After five years he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to him now. Or Lynn. The ship was coming in over the mall. He could see the cracked paving sprouting grass, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing. And then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had learned at the university. Oh yes, one of the second-century Martian colonial poets, Iverson, or somebody like that. The fountains are dusty in the graveyard of dreams. The hinges are rusty, and swing with tiny screams. There was more to it, but he couldn't remember. Something about empty gardens under an empty sky. There must have been colonies inside the sol system before the interstellar era that hadn't turned out any better than Poitem. Then he stopped trying to remember as the ship turned toward the airport building, and a couple of tugs, Terran Federation Contra Gravity Tanks, with Derrick Booms behind, and push-polls where the guns had been, came up to bring her down. He walked along the starboard promenade to the gangway, which the first mate and a couple of airmen were getting open. Most of the population of top-level Litchfield was in the crowd on the dock. He recognized old Colonel Zareff with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above the others. It took a few seconds for him to pick out his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and then to realize that the handsome young man beside Flora was his brother, Charlie. Charlie had been thirteen when Khan had gone away. And there was Kurt Fawzy, the mayor of Litchfield, and there was Lynn beside him. Her red-lipped face tilted upward with a cloud of bright hair behind it. He waved to her, and she waved back, jumping in excitement, and then everybody was waving, and they were pushing his family to the front and making way for them. The ship touched down lightly and gave a lurch as she went off Contra Gravity, and they got the gangway open and the steps swung out, and he started down toward the people who had gathered to greet him. His father was wearing the same black best suit he had worn when they had parted five years ago. It had been new then, now it was shabby, and had acquired a permanent wrinkle across the right hip over the pistol-butt. Charlie was carrying a gun, too. The belt and holster looked as though he had made them himself. His mother's dress was new, and so was Flora's, probably made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the Terran Federation's services had provided the material, but Charlie's shirt was Medical Service Sterilon. A shame that he was noticing and thinking of such things at a time like this, he clasped his father's hand and kissed his mother in Flora. Everybody was talking at once, saying things that he heard only as happy sounds. His brother's words were the first that penetrated as words. You did know me, Charlie was accusing. Don't deny it. I saw you standing there wondering if I was far as new boyfriend or what. Well, how in Niflheim do you expect me to? You've grown up since the last time I saw you. You're looking great, kid." He caught the gleam of Lynn's golden hair behind Charlie's shoulder, and pushed him gently aside. Lynn! Con, you look just wonderful! Her arms were around his neck, and she was kissing him. Am I still your girl, Con? He crushed her against him and returned her kisses, assuring her that she was. He wasn't going to let it make a bit of difference how her father took the news, if she didn't. She babbled on. You didn't get mixed up with any of those girls on Tara, did you? If you did, don't tell me about it. All I care about is that you are back. Oh, Con, you don't know how much I missed you. Mother, Dad, doesn't he look just splendid?  I'm just as glad to see you as anybody, Con, he said. Even if I'm not being as demonstrative about it as Lynn. Judge, what do you think of our returned wanderer? Friends, shake hands with him, but save the interview for the news for later. Professor, here's one student Litchfield Academy won't need to be ashamed of. He shook hands with them. Old Judge Liddo, Franz Weltren, the newsman, Professor Kelton, a dozen others, some of whom he had not thought of in five years. They were all cordial and happy. How much, he wondered, because he was their neighbor, Con Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Tara, and how much because of what they hoped he would tell them. Kurt Fawzy, edging him out of the crowd, was the first to voice that. Con, what did you find out? He asked breathlessly. Do you know where it is? Con hesitated, looking about desperately. This was no time to start talking to Kurt Fawzy about it. His father was turning toward him from one side, and from the other, Tom Brangwin and Colonel Zariff were approaching more slowly, the older man leaning on a silver-headed cane. Don't bother him about it now, Kurt, Rodney Maxwell scolded the mayor. He's just gotten off the ship. He hasn't had time to say hello to everybody yet. But Rod, I've been waiting to hear what he's found out ever since he went away, Fawzy protested in a hurt tone. Brangwin and Colonel Zariff joined them. They were close friends, probably because neither of them was a native of Poitem. The town marshal had always been reticent about his origins, but Con guessed it was Hathor. Brangwin's heavy-muscled body, and his ease and grace in handling it, mark him as a man of a heavy gravity planet. Besides, Hathor had a permanent cloud envelope, and Tom Brangwin's skin had turned boiled lobster red under the dim-orange sunlight of Alpha Gartner. Old Clem Zariff never hesitated to tell anybody where he came from. He was from Ashmodai, one of the system's state's planets, and he had commanded a division that had been blasted down to about regimental strength in the Alliance Army. Hello, boy! he croaked, extending a trembling hand. Glad you're home. We all missed you. We sure did, Con. The town marshal agreed, clasping Con's hand as soon as the old man had released it. Find out anything definite! Kurt Fawzy looked at his watch. Con, we've planned a little celebration for you. We only had since day before yesterday, when the spaceship came into radio range, but we're having a dinner party for you at Centa's this evening. You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzy. I'd have to have a meal at Centa's before really feeling that I'd come home. Well, here's what I have in mind. It'll be three hours till dinner's ready. Suppose we all go up to my office in the meantime. It'll give the ladies a chance to go home and fix up for the party, and we can have a drink and a talk. You want to do that, Con? His father asked, a trifle doubtfully. If you'd rather go home first... Something in his father's voice and manner disturbed him vaguely. However, he nodded agreement. After a couple of drinks he'd be better able to tell them. Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzy, Con said. I know you're all anxious, but it's a long story. This'll be a good chance to tell you. Fawzy turned to his wife and daughter, interrupting himself to shout instructions to a couple of dock hands who were floating the baggage off the ship on a contra-gravity lifter. Con's father had sent Charlie off with a message to his mother and Flora. Con turned to Colonel Zareff. I noticed extra workers coming out from the hiring agencies in Storacenda, and the crop was all in across the caulders. Big wine-pressing this year? Yes, we're up to our necks in melons, the old planter grumbled. The henna of a big crop! Price'll drop like a brick of Collapsium, and this time next year we'll be using Brandy to wash our feed-in. If you can't get good prices, hang on to it and age it. I wish you could see what the bar's on Tara charge for a drink of ten-year-old Poitem. This isn't Tara, and we aren't selling it by the drink. Only place we can sell Brandy is at the Storacenda spaceport, and we have to take what the trading ship captains offer. You've been on a rich planet for the last five years, Con. You've forgotten what it's like to live in a poor house, and that's what Poitem is. Things'll be better from now on, Clem," the Mayor said, putting one hand on the old man's shoulder and the other on Con's. Our boy's home. With what he can tell us, we'll be able to solve all our problems. Come on, let's go up and hear about it. They entered the wide doorway of the warehouse on the dock-level floor of the airport building and crossed to the lift. About a dozen others had joined them, all the important men of Litchfield. Inside, Kurt Fawzy's laborers were floating out cargo for the ship, casks of Brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates painted light blue and marked with the wreath globe of the Terran Federation, and the gold triangle of the Third Fleet Army Force, and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance Service, long cases of rifles, square boxes of ammunition, machine guns, crated autocannon, and rockets. Where'd that stuff come from? Con asked his father. You dig it up? His father chuckled. That happened since the last time I wrote you. Remember the big underground headquarters complex in the Calder's? Everybody thought it had been cleaned out years ago. You know, it's never a mistake to take a second look at anything that everybody believes. I found a lot of sealed-off sections over there that had never been entered. This stuff's from one of the headquarters' defense armories. I have a gang getting the stuff out. Charlie and I flew in after lunch, and I'm going back the first thing tomorrow. But there's enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private army for every man, woman, and child on Poitem, Con objected. Where are we going to sell this? Stores sent to Spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newly colonized planets that haven't been industrialized yet. They don't pay much, but it doesn't cost much to get it out, and I've been clearing about three hundred sols a ton on the Spaceport docks. That's not bad, you know. Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-504 submachine guns. Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even a used one was worth a hundred sols. Con started to say something about that, but then they came to the lift and were crowding onto it. He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office a few times, always with his father, and he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of gentile conviviality and rambling conversations, with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays. Fawzi's warehouse and brokerage business, and the airline agency, and the government, such as it was, of Litchfield, combined, made few demands on his time and did not prevent the office from becoming a favored loafing center for the town's elders. The lights were bright only over the big table that served, among other things, as a desk, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begun speaking more softly. Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi's office. Tom Brangwin went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and laying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their weapons to his. That was something else Con was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he had carried a gun, and he was wondering why any of them bothered.  Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn't count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it. Maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainly wasn't because of anything the planetary government at Storescenda did to maintain order. After divesting himself of his gun, Tom Brangwin took over the bartending, getting out glasses and filling a pitcher of brandy from a keg in the corner. Everybody supplied, Fawzi was asking? Well, let's drink to our returned emissary. We're all anxious to hear what you found out, Con. Gentlemen, here's to our friend, Con Maxwell. Welcome home, Con. Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi. No, let's not have any of this Mr. foolishness. You're one of the gang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if we don't have anything else. You telling us, Kurt? When this crop gets pressed and fermented... When I start pressing, I don't know where in Guyana I'm going to vat the stuff till it ferments, Colonel Zareff said. Or why? You won't be able to handle all of it. Now, now, Fawzi reproved, let's not start moaning about our troubles. Not the day Con's come home. I don't know where in Guyana are troubles. Not the day Con's come home. Not when he's going to tell us how to find a third fleet army force brain.  Brangwin asked, anxiously. That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down after the toast. Now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward, looking at Con fixedly. What did you find out, Con? It's still here on Poitam, isn't it? Did you find out where it is? He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. He couldn't. Any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger of a pistol he knew would blow up in his hand. Wait a minute, gentlemen. He finished the brandy and held out the glass to Tom Brangwin, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drink had warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throat and the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. I hope none of you expect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it where the brain is. I can't. I can't even give the approximate location of the thing. Much of the happy eagerness drained out of the faces around him. Some of them were looking troubled. Colonel Zareff was gnawing the bottom of his mustache and Judge Ladoo's hand shook as he tried to relight his cigar. Kahn stole a quick side glance at his father. Rodney Maxwell was watching him curiously as though wondering what he was going to say next. But it is still here on Poitam, Fawzi questioned. They didn't take it away when they evacuated, did they? Kahn finished his second drink. This time he picked up the pitcher and refilled for himself. I'm going to have to do a lot of talking, he said, and it's going to be thirsty work. I'll have to tell you the whole thing from the beginning. And if you start asking questions at random you'll get me mixed up and I'll miss the important points. By all means, Judge Ladoo told him, give it in your own words, in what you think is the proper order. Thank you, Judge. Kahn drank some more, Brandy, hoping he could get his courage up without getting drunk. After all, they had a right to a full report. All of them had contributed something towards sending him to Tara. The main purpose in my going to the university was to learn computer theory and practice. It wouldn't do any good for us to find the brain if none of us were able to use it. Well, I learned enough to be able to operate, program and service any computer in existence and train assistants. During my last year at the university I had a part-time paid job programming the big positron neutrino photon computer in the astrophysics department. When I graduated I was offered a position as instructor in positronic computer theory. You never mentioned that in your letter, son, as Father said. It was too late for any letter except one that would come on the same ship I did. Besides, it wasn't very important. I think it was. There was a catch in old Professor Kelton's voice. One of my boys from the academy offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo on Tara. He poured himself a second drink, something he almost never did. Khan means it wasn't important because it didn't have anything to do with the brain, Fawzi explained, and then looked at Khan expectantly. All right, now he'd tell them. I went over all the records of the 3rd Fleet Army Forces occupation of Poitem that are open to the public. On one pretext or another I got permission to examine the non-classified files that aren't open to public examination. I even got a few peeps at some of the stuff that's still classified secret. I have maps and plans of all the installations that were built on this planet, literally thousands of them, many still undiscovered. Why, we haven't more than scratched the surface of what the Federation left behind here. For instance, all the important installations exist in duplicate, some even in triplicate, as a precaution against Alliance space attack. Space attack! Colonel Zareff was indignant. There never was a time when the Alliance could have taken the offensive against Poitem, even if an offensive outside our space area had been part of our policy. We just didn't have the ships. It took over a year to move a million and a half troops from Ashmo die to Marduk, and the fleet that was based on Amaterasu was blasted out of existence in the space ports and in orbit. Hell, at the time of the surrender, we didn't have. They weren't taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want to make is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any official record, a single word about the giant computer we call the Third Fleet Army Force Brain. For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny, insectile humming of the electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kelton set his glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer blow. Nothing, Khan? Kurt Fawzy was incredulous, and for the first time frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. But you must have. A thing like that? Of course. I've been one of the closest secrets during the war, somebody else said. But in forty years you'd expect something to leak out. Why, during the war it was all through the Third Force. Even the Alliance knew about it. That's how Clem heard of it. Well, Khan couldn't just walk into the secret files and read whatever he wanted to, just because he couldn't find anything. Don't tell me about security, when Clem's air of snorted. Certainly they still have it classified. Staff Brass had rather lose an eye than declassify anything. If you'd seen the links our staff went to, hell, we'd lost battles because the staff wouldn't release information the troops in the field needed. I remember once. But there was a brain, Judge Lidoux was saying, to reassure himself and draw agreement from the others. It was capable of combining data, and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and forming association patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It was more than a positronic brain, it was a positronic supermind. We'd have won the war except for the brain. We had ninety systems, a hundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people, and we were on the defensive in our own space area. Every move we made was known and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done that without something like the brain? Con, from what you've heard of computers, how large of a volume of space would you say the brain would have to occupy? Professor Kelton asked. Professor Kelton was the most unworldly of the lot, yet he was asking the most practical question. Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the university occupies a total of about one million cubic feet. Con began. This was his chance. They'd take anything he told them about computers as gospel. It was only designed to handle problems in astrophysics. The brain, being built for space war, would have to handle any such problem. And if half the stories about the brain are anywhere near true, it handled any other problem. Mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic, psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I'd say that a hundred million cubic feet would be the smallest even conceivable. They all nodded seriously. They were willing to accept that, or anything else, except one thing. Lots of places on this planet where a thing that size could be hidden, Tom Brangwen said, undismayed. A planet's a mighty big place. It could be underwater, in one of the seas, Piat Dawes, the banker suggested.  It might even BEYOND two-balkane, a melon-planter said. A biowatha or even one of the beta or gamma planets. The third force was occupying the whole trisystem, you know. He thought for a moment. If I had been in charge, I'd have put it on one of the moons of Pantagruel. But that's clear out in the Alpha system, Judge Liddo objected. We don't have a spaceship on the planet. Certainly nothing with a hyperdrive engine. It would take a lifetime to get out to the gamma system and back on Reaction Drive. Khan put his empty brandy-glass on the table and sat erect. A new thought had occurred to him, chasing out of his mind all the worries and fears he had brought with him all the way from Terra. Then, we'll have to build a ship, he said calmly. I know, when the Federation evacuated Poitem, they took every hyperdrive ship with them. But they had plenty of shipyards and spaceports on this planet, and I have maps showing the locations of all of them, and barely a third of them have been discovered so far. I'm sure we can find enough hulks and enough hyper-fuel generator parts to assemble a ship or two. And I know we'll find the same or better on some of the other planets. And here's another thing, he added. When we start looking into some of the Dome City plants like the Blue Balcane and Hiawatha and Maruna and Koshai, we may find the plant, or plants, where the components for the brain were fabricated. And if we do, we may find records of where they were shipped, and that'll be it.  Professor Kelton cried, quivering with excitement. We've been hunting at random for the brain, so it would only be an accident if we found it. We'll have to do this systematically, and with Khan to help us. Khan, why not build a computer? I don't mean another brain. I mean a computer to help us find the brain. We can, but we may not even need to build one. When we get out to the industrial planets, we may find one ready except for perhaps some minor alterations. But how are we going to finance all this? Clem Zareff demanded querilously. We're poorer than snakes, and even one hyperdrive ship's going to cost like a henna. I've been thinking about that, Clem, Fawzi said. If we can find material at these shipyards Khan knows about, most of our expense will be labor. Well, haven't we ten workmen competing for every job? They don't really need money. Only the things money can buy. We can raise food on the farms, and provide whatever else they need out of Federation supplies. Sure, as soon as it gets around that we're really trying to do something about this, everybody'll want in on it, Tom Brangwyn predicted. And I have no doubt that the planetary government at Stor-Senda will give us assistance. Once we show that this is a practical and productive enterprise, Judge Ladoe put in, I have some slight influence with the President, and I'm not too sure we want the government getting into this, Kurt Fawzi replied. Give them half a chance, and that gang at Stor-Sendal squeeze us right out. We can handle this ourselves, Brangwyn agreed. And when we get some kind of a ship and get out to the other two systems, or even just a two-bulking or Hayawatha, first thing you know, we'll be the planetary government. Well now, Tom, Fawzi began piously. The brain is too big a thing for a few of us to try to monopolize. It'll be for all poitème. Of course, it's only proper that we, who are making the effort to locate it, should have the direction of that effort. While Fawzi was talking, Rodney Maxwell went to the table, rummaged his pistol out of the pile, and buckled it on. The mayor stopped short. You leaving us, Rod? Yes, it's getting late. Con and I are going for a little walk. We'll be at Centus in half an hour. The fresh air will do both of us good, and we have a lot to talk about. After all, we haven't seen each other for over five years. They were silent, however, until they were away from the airport building and walking along High Garden Terrace in the direction of them all. Con was glad. His own thoughts were weighing too heavily within him. I didn't do it. I was going to do it every minute. I was going to do it, and I didn't. And now it's too late. That was quite a talk you gave them, son, as Father said. They believed every word of it. A couple of times I even caught myself starting to believe it. Con stopped short. His father stopped beside him and stood looking at him. Why didn't you tell them the truth, Rodney Maxwell asked? The question angered Con. It was what he had been asking himself. Why didn't I just grab a couple of pistols off the table and shoot a lot of them, he retorted? It would have killed them quicker and wouldn't have hurt as much. His father took the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip of it. The truth must be pretty bad then. There is no brain. Is that it, son? There never was one. I'm not saying that only because I know it would be impossible to build such a computer. I'm telling you what the one man in the galaxy who ought to know told me, the man who commanded the Third Force during the war. Fox Travis? I didn't know he was still alive. You actually talked to him? Yes, he's on Luna, keeping himself alive at low gravity. It took me a couple of years and I was afraid he'd die before I got to him, but I finally managed to see him. What did he tell you? That no such thing as the brain ever existed. They started walking again, more slowly, toward the far edge of the terrace, with the sky red and orange in front of them. The story was all through the Third Force, but it was just one of those wild tales they get started. Nobody knows how among troops. The High Command never denied or even discouraged it. It helped morale, and letting it leak to the enemy was good psychological warfare. Clem Zariff says that everybody in the Alliance Army heard of the brain, as Father said. That was why he came here in the first place. He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar.  Why? Wouldn't it be just another computer, only a lot bigger and a lot smarter? Dad, computer men don't like to hear computers called smart, Khan said. They aren't. The people who build them are smart. A computer only knows what's fed into it. They can hold more information in their banks than a man can in his memory. They can combine it faster. They don't get tired or absent-minded. But they can't imagine. They can't create.  You know, I'd wondered about just that, said his father. And none of the histories of the war even as much as mentioned the brain. And I couldn't see why, after the war, they didn't build dozens of them to handle all these galactic political and economic problems that nobody seems able to solve.  The people here aren't trying to find it for war purposes. You didn't mention any of these doubts to the others, did you? They were just doubts. You knew for sure. And you couldn't tell them. I'd come home intending to. Tell them there was no brain. Tell them to stop wasting their time hunting for it. And start trying to figure out the answers themselves. But I couldn't. They don't believe in the brain as a tool to use. It's a machine god that they can bring all their troubles to. You can't take a thing like that away from people without giving them something better. I noticed you suggested building a spaceship and agreed with the professor about building a computer. What was your idea? To take their minds off hunting for the brain and keep them busy? Khan shook his head. I'm serious about the ship. Ships. You and Colonel Zerov gave me that idea. His father looked at him in surprise. I never said a word in there and Clem didn't even once mention. Not in Kurt's office. Before we went up from the docks. There was Clem moaning about a good year for melons as though it were a plague. And you selling arms in ammunition by the ton. Why, on Tara, or Balder, or Uldre, a glass of our brandy brings more than those freighter captains give us for a cask. And what do you think a colonist on a grandma, or sect, or hatchiman, would fight for his life against savages and wild animals who would pay for one of those rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition? His father objected. We can't base the whole economy of a planet on brandy. Only about ten percent of the arable land on Poitem will grow wine melons. And if we started exporting Federation salvage the way you talk of, we'll be selling pieces instead of job lots. We'll net more, but... That's just to get us started. The ships will be used, after that, to go to Tubal Cane and Hiawatha and the planets of the Beta and Gamma systems. What I want to see is the mines and factories reopened, people employed, wealth being produced. And where will we sell what we produce? Remember, the mines closed down because there was no more market. No more interstellar market, that's true. But there are a hundred and fifty million people on Poitem. That's a big enough market and a big enough labour force to exploit the wealth of the Gartner Trisystem. We can have prosperity for everybody on our own resources. Just what do we need that we have to get from the outside now? His father stopped again and sat down on the edge of a fountain. The same one, possibly, from which Khan had seen dust blowing as the airship had been coming in. Khan, that's a dangerous idea. That was what brought on the System State's war. The Alliance planets took themselves outside the Federation economic orbit and the Federation crushed them. Khan swore impatiently, you've been listening to old Clem Zereth ranting about the lost cause and the greedy Terran robber barons holding the galaxy in economic serfdom while they piled up profits. The Federation didn't fight that war for profits. There weren't any profits to fight for. They fought it because if the System State's had won, half of them would be at war among themselves now. Make no mistake about it. Politically, I'm all for the Federation. But economically, I want to see our people exploiting their own resources for themselves instead of grieving about the lost interstellar trade and bewailing bumper crops and searching for a mythical robot god. You think, if you can get something like that started, that they'll forget about the brain, his father asked skeptically. That crowd up in Kurt Fawzi's office, Niflheim know, they'll go on hunting for the brain as long as they live and every day they'll be expecting to find it tomorrow. That'll keep them happy. But they're all old men. The ones I'm interested in are the boys of Charlie's age. I'm going to give them too many real things to do. Building ships, exploring the rest of the tri-system, opening mines and factories, producing wealth for them to get caught in that empty old dream. He looked down at the dusty fountain on which his father sat. That ghost-dream haunts this graveyard. I want to give them living dreams that they can make come true. Khan's father sat in silence for a while, his cigar smoke red in the sunset. If you can do all that, Khan, you know, I believe you can. I'm with you as far as I can help. And we'll have a talk with Charlie. He's a good boy, Khan, with a lot of influence among the other youngsters. He looked at his watch. We'd better be getting along. You don't want to be late for your own coming-home party. Rodney Maxwell slid off the edge of the fountain to his feet, hitching at the gun-belt under his coat. Have to dig out his own gun and start wearing it, Khan thought. A man simply didn't go around in public without a gun in Litchfield. It wasn't decent. He'd be spending a lot of time out in the brush, where he'd really need one. First thing in the morning, he'd unpack that trunk and go over all those maps. There were a half a dozen spaceports and maintenance shops and shipyards within a half day by airboat, none of which had been looted. He'd look them all over. That would take a couple of weeks. Pick the best shipyard and concentrate on it. Kurt Fawzy be the man to recruit labor. Professor Kelton was a scholar, not a scientist. He didn't know beans about hyperdrive engines, but he knew how to do library research. They came to the edge of the high garden terrace at the escalator, long motionless, its moving parts rusted fast, that led down to the mall and at the bottom of it was Centus, the tables under the open sky. A crowd was already gathering. There was Tom Brangwin, and there was Kurt Fawzy and his wife and Lynn. And there was Santa herself, fat and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red and purple dresses, bustling about, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the next. The dinner, Khan knew, would be the best he had eaten in five years. And afterward they would sit in the dim glow of Beta Gartner, sipping coffee and liqueurs, smoking and talking and visiting back and forth from one table to another, as they always did in the evenings at Centus. Another bit from Iverson's poem came back to him. We sit in the twilight, the shadows among, and we talk of the happy days when we were brave and young. That was for the old ones, for Colonel Zareff and Judge Liddo and Dolph Kelton, and maybe even for Tom Brangwin and Franz Weltren and for his father, but his brother Charlie and the boys of his generation would have a future to talk about. And so would he and Lynn Fawzy. End of Graveyard of Dreams by H. Beam Piper, read by Mark Nelson. This recording is in the public domain.