This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. The answer by H. Beam Piper. For a moment after the screen door snapped and wakened him, Lee Richardson sat breathless and motionless. His eyes still closed, trying desperately to cling to the dream and printed upon his conscious memory before it faded. Are you there, Lee? He heard Alexis Petov's voice. Yes, I'm here. What time is it? He asked and then added, I fell asleep. I was dreaming. It was all right. He was going to be able to remember. He could still see the slim woman with the graying blonde hair, playing with the little doxen among the new fallen leaves on the lawn. He was glad they both been in his dream together. These dream glimpses were all he'd had for the last fifteen years, and they were too precious to lose. He opened his eyes. The Russian was sitting just outside the light from the open door of the bungalow lighting a cigarette. For a moment he could see the blocky, high-cheeked face, now pouched and wrinkled, and then the flame went out and there was only the red coal glowing in the darkness. He closed his eyes again and the dream picture came back to him, the woman catching the little dog and raising her head as though to speak to him. Time yet? Pitoff was speaking German instead of Spanish, as they always did between themselves. They're still counting down from minus three hours. I just phoned the launching site for a jeep. Eugenio's been there ever since dinner.  He chuckled. This would be something new for Eugenio Galvez, for which he could be thankful. I hope the generators don't develop any last-second bugs, he said. We'll only be a mile and a half away, and that'll be too close to fifty kilos of negamatter if the field collapses. It'll be all right, Pitoff assured him. The bugs have all been chased out years ago. Not out of those generators in the rocket, they're new. He fumbled in his coat pocket for his pipe and tobacco. I never thought I'd run another nuclear bomb test as long as I lived. Lee! Pitoff was shocked. You mustn't call it that. It isn't that at all. It's purely a scientific experiment. Wasn't that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments like this, back before 1969. The memories of all those other tests, each ending in an everest high mushroom column, rose in his mind. And the end result, the United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble a whole hemisphere pushed back into the Dark Ages a quarter of a billion dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde hair and a little red dog. And a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitoff had been going to marry. Forgive me, Alexis. I just couldn't help remembering. I suppose it's this shot we're going to make tonight. It's so much like the other ones before—he hesitated slightly—before the all-burn bomb. There he'd come out and said it. In all the years they'd worked together at the Instituto Argentina de Ciencia Física, that had been unmentioned between them. The families of hanged cutthroats avoid mention of ropes and knives. He thumbed the old-fashioned American lighter and held it to his pipe. Across the veranda, in the darkness, he knew that Pitoff was looking intently at him. You've been thinking about that lately, haven't you, the Russian asked, and then timidly, was that what you were dreaming of? Oh, no, thank heaven. I think about it too, always. I suppose he seemed relieved now that it had been brought out into the open and could be discussed. You saw it fall, didn't you? That's right, from about thirty miles away. A little closer than it will be to this shot tonight. I was in charge of the investigation at Auburn, until we had New York and Washington and Detroit and Mobile and San Francisco to worry about. Then what had happened to Auburn wasn't important any more. We were trying to get evidence to lay before the United Nations. We kept at it for about twelve hours after the United Nations had ceased to exist. I could never understand about that, Lee. I don't know what the truth is. I probably never shall. But I know that my government did not launch that missile. During the first days after yours began coming in, I talked to people who had been in the Kremlin at the time. One had been in the presence of Klesenko himself when the news of your bombardment arrived. He said that Klesenko was absolutely stunned. We always believed that your government decided upon the preventive surprise attack and picked out a town, Auburn, New York, that had been hit by one of our first retaliation missiles and claimed that it had been hit first. He shook his head. Auburn was hit an hour before the first American missile was launched. I know that to be a fact. We could never understand why you launched just that one and no more until hours began landing on you, why you threw away the advantage of surprise and priority of attack. Because we didn't do it, Lee, the Russian's voice trembled with earnestness. You believe me when I tell you that? Yes, I believe you. After all that happened and all that you and I and the people you worked with and the people I worked with and your government and mine have been guilty of, it would be a waste of breath for either of us to try to lie to the other about what happened fifteen years ago. He drew slowly on his pipe. But who launched it then? It had to be launched by somebody. Don't you think I've been tormenting myself with that question for the last fifteen years, Pitov demanded? No, there were people inside the Soviet Union, not many, and they kept themselves well hidden who were dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet regime. They or some of them might have thought that the devastation of both our countries and the obliteration of civilization in the northern hemisphere would be a cheap price to pay for the ending of the rule of the Communist Party. Could they have built an ICBM with a thermonuclear warhead in secret? He asked. There were also fanatical nationalist groups in Europe, both sides of the Iron Curtain, who might have thought our mutual destruction would be worth the risks involved. There was China and India.  In the end, they all went down with us. But what criminal ever expects to fall? We have too many suspects and the trail's too cold, Alexis. That rocket wouldn't have had to have been launched anywhere in the northern hemisphere. For instance, our friends here in the Argentine have been doing very well by themselves since El Coloso del Norte went down. And there were the Australians picking themselves up bargains in real estate in the East Indies at gunpoint. And there were the Boers trekking north again in tanks instead of ox wagons. And Brazil, with a not too implausible pretender to the Braganza throne, calling itself the Portuguese Empire and looking eastward. And to complete the picture, here were Professor Dr. Lee Richardson and Comrade Professor Alexis Petrovich Petrov getting ready to test a missile with a matter annihilation warhead. No, this thing just wasn't a weapon. A jeep came around the corner, lighting the dark roadway between the bungalows, its radio on and counting down. Twenty-two minutes, twenty-one fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven. It came to a stop in front of their bungalow at exactly minus two hours, twenty-one minutes, fifty-four seconds. The driver called out in Spanish. Dr. Richardson, Dr. Petrov, are you ready? Yes, ready. We're coming. They both got to their feet, Richardson pulling himself up reluctantly. The older you get, the harder it is to leave a comfortable chair. He settled himself beside his colleague and former enemy, and the jeep started again, rolling between the buildings of the living quarters area and out onto the long straight road across the pompas toward the distant blaze of electric lights. He wondered why he had been thinking so much, lately, about the Auburn bomb. He'd questioned, at times, indignantly, of course, whether Russia had launched it. But it wasn't until tonight, until he had heard what Petov had had to say, that he seriously doubted it. Petov wouldn't lie about it, and Petov would have been in position to have known the truth, if the missile had been launched from Russia. Then he stopped thinking about what was water, or blood, a long time over the dam. The special policeman at the entrance to the launching site reminded them that they were both smoking. When they extinguished, respectively, their cigarette and pipe, he waved the jeep on and went back to his argument with a carload of tourists who wanted to get a good view of the launching. There now, Lee, do you need anything else to convince you that this isn't a weapon project? Petov asked. No. Now that you mention it, I don't. You know, I don't believe I've had to show an identity card the whole time I've been here. I don't believe I have an identity card, Petov said. Think of that. The lights blazed everywhere around them, but mostly about the rocket that towered above everything else, so thick that it seemed squat. The gantry cranes had been hauled away now, and it stood alone, but it was still wreathed in thick electric cables. They were pouring enough current into that thing to light half the streetlights in Buenos Aires. When the cables were blown free by separation charges at the blast-off, the generators powered by the rocket engines had better be able to take over, because if the magnetic field collapsed and that 50 kilo chunk of negative proton matter came in contact with natural positive proton matter, an old-fashioned H-bomb would be a firecracker to what would happen. Just 100 kilos of pure 200-proof MC2. The driver took them around the rocket, dodging assorted trucks and mobile machinery that were being hurried out of the way. The countdown was just beyond two hours, five minutes. The jeeps stopped at the edge of a crowd around three more trucks, and Dr. Eugenio Galvez, the director of the institute, left the crowd and approached at an awkward half-run as they got down. Is everything checked, gentlemen? He wanted to know. It was this afternoon at seventeen-thirty, he'd oft told him, and nobody's been burning my telephone to report anything different. Are the balloons and the drone planes ready? The Air Force just finished checking. They're ready. Captain Urquiola flew one of the planes over the course and made a guidance tape. That's been duplicated, and all the planes are equipped with copies. How's the wind, Richardson asked? Still steady. We won't have any trouble about fallout or with the balloons. Then we'd better get back to the bunker and make sure everybody there is on the job. The loudspeaker was counting down to two hours, one minute. Could you spare a few minutes to talk to the press, Eugenio Galvez asked, and perhaps say a few words for telecast? This last is most important. We can't explain too many times the purpose of this experiment. There is still much hostility arising from fear that we are testing a nuclear weapon. The press and telecast services were well represented. There were close to a hundred correspondents from all over South America, from South Africa and Australia, even one from Ceylon. They had three trucks, with mobile telecast pickups, and when they saw who was approaching, they released the two rocketry experts they had been quizzing and pounced on the new victims. Was there any possibility that negative proton matter might be used as a weapon? Anything can be used as a weapon. You could stab a man to death with that lead pencil you're using, Petov replied, but I doubt if mega matter will ever be so used. We are certainly not working on weapons design here. We started six years ago with the ability to produce negative protons, reverse spin neutrons, and positrons, and the theoretical possibility of assembling them into mega matter. We have just gotten a 50 kilogram mass of mega iron assembled. In those six years, we had to invent all our techniques and design all our equipment. If we'd been insane enough to want to build a nuclear weapon, after what we went through up north, we could have done so from memory and designed a better, which is to say a worse, one from memory in a few days. Yes, and building a mega matter bomb for military purposes would be like digging a 50 foot shaft to get a rock to bash somebody's head in when you could do the job better with the shovel you were digging with, Richardson added. The time, money, energy, and work we put in on this thing would be ample to construct 20 thermonuclear bombs, and that's only a small part of it. He went on to tell them about the magnetic bottle inside the rocket's warhead, mentioning how much electric current was needed to keep up the magnetic field that insulated the mega matter from contact with Poza matter. And what was the purpose of this experiment, Dr. Richardson? Oh, we were just trying to find out a few basic facts about natural structure. Long ago it was realized that the nucleonic particles, protons, neutrons, mesons, and so forth, must have structure of their own. Since we started constructing negative proton matter, we found out a few things about nucleonic structure. Some rather odd things, including fractions of Planck's constant. A couple of the correspondents, a man from La Prensa and an Australian, whistled softly. The others looked blank. Pitov took over. You see, gentlemen, most of what we learned, we learned from putting mega matter atoms together. We annihilated a few of them, over there in that little concrete building. We have one of the most massive steel vaults in the world where we do that. But we assembled millions of them for every one we annihilated, and that chunk of mega iron inside the magnetic bottle kept growing. And when you have a piece of mega matter you don't want, you can't just throw it out on the scrap pile. We might have rocketed it into a scape velocity and let it blow up in space, away from the moon or any of the artificial satellites, but why waste it? So, we're going to have the rocket ejected, and when it falls we can see by our telemetered instruments just what happens. Well, won't it be annihilated by contact with atmosphere, somebody asked? That's one of the things we want to find out, Pitov said. We estimate about 20% lost from contact with atmosphere, but the mass that actually lands on the target area should be about 40 kilos. It should be something of a spectacle coming down. You say you had to assemble it after creating the negative protons and neutrons and positrons. Doesn't any of this sort of matter exist in nature? The man who asked that knew better himself, he just wanted the answer on the record. Oh no, not on this planet, and probably not in the galaxy. There may be whole galaxies composed of nothing but negamatter. There may even be isolated stars and planetary systems inside our galaxy composed of negamatter, though I think that very improbable. But when negamatter and posamatter come into contact with one another, the result is immediate mutual annihilation. They managed to get away from the press and returned as far as the bunkers, on my own a half away. Before they went inside, Richardson glanced up at the sky, fixing the location of a few of the more conspicuous stars in his mind. There were almost a hundred men and women inside, each at his or her instruments, view screens, radar indicators, detection instruments of a dozen kinds. The reporters and telecast people arrived shortly afterward, and Eugenio Galvez took them in tow. While Richardson and Petov were making their last-minute rounds, the countdown progressed past minus one hour, and at minus twenty minutes all the overhead lights went off and the small instrument operator's lights came on. Petov turned on a couple of view screens, one from a pickup on the roof of the bunker and another from the launching pad. They sat down side by side and waited. Richardson got his pipe out and began loading it. The loudspeaker was saying, minus two minutes, one fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven. He led his mind drift away from the test, back to the world that had been smashed around his ears in the autumn of 1969. He was doing that so often now, when he should be thinking about two seconds, one second, firing. It was a second later that his eyes focused on the left-hand view screen. Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of the rocket and it was beginning to tremble. Then the upper jets, the ones that furnished power for the generators, began firing. He looked anxiously at the meters. The generators were building up power. Finally, when he was sure that the rocket would be blasting off anyhow, the separator charges fired and the heavy cables fell away. An instant later the big missile started inching upward, gaining speed by the second, first slowly and jerkily, and then more rapidly until it passed out of the field of the pickup. He watched the rising spout of fire from the other screen until it passed from sight. By that time, Petov had twisted a dial and gotten another view on the left-hand screen, this time from close to the target. That camera was radar-controlled. It had fastened onto the approaching missile, which was still invisible. The stars swung slowly across the screen until Richardson recognized the ones he had spotted at the zenith. In a moment now, the rocket, a hundred miles overhead, would be nosing down and then the warhead would open and the magnetic field inside would alter and the mass of Negamatter would be ejected. The stars were blotted out by a sudden glow of light. Even at a hundred miles there was enough atmospheric density to produce considerable energy release. Petov beside him was muttering, partly in German and partly in Russian. Most of what Richardson caught was figures, trying to calculate how much of the mass of unnatural iron would get down for the ground blast. Then the right-hand screen broke into a wriggling orgy of color and at the same time every scrap of radio-transmitted apparatus either went out or began reporting erratically. The left-hand screen, connected by wiring to the pickup on the roof, was still functioning. For a moment Richardson wondered what was going on and then shocked recognition drove that from his mind as he stared at the ever-brightening glare in the sky. It was the Auburn bomb again. He was back, in memory, to the night on the shore of Lake Ontario, the party breaking up in the early hours of morning, he and Janet and the people with whom they had been spending a vacation week standing on the lawn as the guests were getting into their cars. And then the sudden light in the sky, the cries of surprise and then of alarm as it seemed to be rushing straight down upon them. He and Janet clutching each other and staring up in terror at the falling blaze from which there seemed no escape. Then relief as it curved away from them and fell to the south. And then the explosion lighting the whole southern sky. There was a similar explosion in the screen when the mass of nega-iron landed, a sheet of pure white light, so bright and so quick as to almost pass the limit of visibility. And then a moment's darkness that was in his stunned eyes more than in the screen and then the rising glow of up-drawn incandescent dust. Before the sound waves had reached them, he had been legging it into the house. The television had been on and it had been acting as insanely as a screen on his right now. He had called the state police, the telephones had been working all right, and told them who he was and they had told him to stay put and they'd send a car for him. They did within minutes.  He had seen her and the dog like that every day of his life for the last fifteen years. What kind of radiation are you getting? He could hear Alexis Petov asking into a phone. What? Nothing else? Oh yes, of course. But mostly cosmic. That shouldn't last long. He turned from the phone. A devil's own dose of cosmic and some gamma. It was the cosmic radiation that put the radios and telescreens out. That's why I insisted that the drone planes be independent of radio control. They always got cosmic radiation from the micro-annihilations in the test vault. Well, now they had an idea of what produced natural cosmic rays. There must be quite a bit of negamatter and posamatter going into mutual annihilation and total energy release through the universe. Of course there were no detectors set up in advance around Auburn, he said. We didn't really begin to find anything out for an hour. By that time the cosmic radiation was over and we weren't getting anything but gamma. What? What has Auburn to do? The Russians stopped short. You think this was the same thing? He gave it a moment's consideration. Lee, you're crazy! There wasn't an atom of artificial negamatter in the world in 1969. Nobody had made any before us. We gave each other some scientific surprises then but nobody surprised both of us. You and I between us knew everything that was going on in nuclear physics in the world and you know as well as I do a voice came out of the public address speaker. Some of the radio equipment around the target area that wasn't knocked out by blast is beginning to function again. There is an increasingly heavy gamma radiation but no more cosmic rays. They were all prompt radiation from the annihilation. The gamma is secondary effect. Wait a moment. Captain Urquiola of the Air Force says that the first drone plane is about to take off. It had been two hours after the blast that the first drones had gone over what had been Auburn, New York. He was trying to remember as exactly as possible what had been learned from them. Gamma radiation, a great deal of gamma. But it didn't last long. It had been almost down to a safe level by the time the investigation had been called off and two months after there had been no more missiles and no way of producing more and no targets to send them against if they had had them rather he had been back at Auburn on his hopeless quest and there had been almost no trace of radiation. Nothing but a wide shallow crater almost 200 feet in diameter and only 15 at its deepest already full of water and a circle of flattened and scattered rubble for a mile and a half all around it. He was willing to bet anything that that was what they'd find where that chunk of nega-iron had landed 50 miles away on the pompas. Well, the first drone ought to be over the target area before long and at least one of the balloons that had been sent up was of course by radio. The radios and the others were silent and the recording counters had probably jammed in all of them. There'd be something of interest when the first drone came back. He dragged his mind back to the present and went to work with Alexis Petov. They were at it all night checking, evaluating, making sure that the masses of data that were coming in were being processed for programming the computers. At each of the increasingly frequent coffee breaks he noticed Petov looking curiously. He said nothing, however, until long after dawn they stood outside the bunker waiting for the jeep that would take them back to their bungalow and watching the line of trucks. Argentine army engineers, locally hired laborers, load after load of prefab huts and equipment going down toward the target area where they would be working for the next week. Lee, were you serious? Petov asked. I mean about this being like the one at Auburn. It was exactly like Auburn. Even that blazing light that came rushing down out of the sky. I wondered about that at the time. What kind of a missile would produce an effect like that? Now I know. We just launched one like it. But that's impossible. I told you, between us we know everything that was happening in nuclear physics then. Nobody in the world knew how to assemble atoms of negamatter and build them into masses. Nobody and nothing on this planet built that massive negamatter. I doubt if it even came from this galaxy. But we didn't know that then. When that negamatter meteor fell the only thing anybody could think of was that it had been a Soviet missile. If it had hid around Leningrad or Moscow or Karkov who would you have blamed it on? The end of The Answer by H. Beam Piper. 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 Temple Trouble by H. Beam Piper Part 1 Through a haze of incense and altar smoke Yatszar looked down from his golden throne at the end of the dusky many-pillared temple. Yatszar was an idol of gigantic size and extraordinarily good workmanship. He had three eyes made of turquoise as big as doorknobs and six arms. In his three right hands from top to bottom he held a sword with a flame-shaped blade a jeweled object of vaguely phallic appearance and, by the ears, a rabbit. In his left hands were a bronze torch with burnished copper flames a big goblet and a pair of scales with an egg in one pan balanced against a skull in the other. He had a long bifurcate beard made of gold wire feet like a bird's and other rather startling anatomical features. His throne was set upon a stone plinth about twenty feet high into the front of which a doorway opened. Behind him was a wooden screen elaborately gilded and painted.   He was intoning a prayer and holding up in both hands for divine inspection and approval a long curved knife. Behind him about thirty feet away stood a square stone altar around which four of the lesser priests in light blue robes with less gold fringe and dark blue false beards were busy with the preliminaries to the sacrifice. At considerable distance about halfway down the length of the temple some two hundred worshipers a few substantial citizens in gold-fringed tunics artisans in tunics without gold fringe soldiers in male haubirks and plain steel caps one officer in ornately gilded armor a number of peasants in nondescript smocks and women of all classes were beginning to prostrate themselves on the stone floor. Gullum rose to his feet bowing deeply to Yat-Zar and holding the knife extended in front of him and backed away toward the altar. As he did, one of the lesser priests reached into a fringed and embroidered sack and pulled out a live rabbit, a big one obviously a domestic breed holding it by the ears while one of his fellows took it by the hind legs. A third priest caught up a silver pitcher while the fourth fanned the altar fire with a sheet-silver fan. As they began chanting antiphonally Gullum turned and quickly whipped the edge of his knife across the rabbit's throat. The priest with the pitcher stepped in to catch the blood and when the rabbit was bled it was laid on the fire. Gullum and his four assistants all shouted together and the congregation shouted in response. The high priest waited as long as was decently necessary and then, holding the knife in front of him, stepped around the prayer cushion or under the idol into the holy of holies. A boy in novice's white robes met him and took the knife carrying it reverently to a fountain for washing. Eight or ten under-priests sitting at a long table rose and bowed, then sat down again and resumed their eating and drinking. At another table a half-dozen upper-priests nodded to him in casual greeting. Crossing the room, Gullum went to the triple veil in front of the house of Yat-Zar where only the highest of the priesthood might go and parted the curtains passing through until he came to the great gilded door. Here he fumbled under his robe and produced a small object like a mechanical pencil, inserting the pointed end in a tiny hole in the door and pressing on the other end. The door opened, then swung shut behind him and as it locked itself the lights came on within. Gullum removed his miter and his false beard, tossing them aside on a table, then undid his sash and peeled out of his robe. His regalia discarded, he stood for a moment in loose trousers and a soft white shirt with a pistol-like weapon in a shoulder holster under his left arm. No longer Gullum the High Priest of Yat-Zar, but now Stranor Sleith, resident agent on this timeline of the fourth-level Proto-Aryan Sector for the Trans-Temporal Mining Corporation. Then he opened a door at the other side of the anti-room and went to the anti-graveshaft, stepping over the edge and floating downward. There were temples of Yat-Zar on every timeline of the Proto-Aryan Sector for the worship of Yat-Zar and the ancient among the Hulgun people of that area of paratime. But there were only a few which had such installations as this and all of them were owned and operated by Trans-Temporal Mining, which had the Fissionable Ores franchise for this sector. During the ten elapsed centuries since Trans-Temporal had begun operations on this sector, the process had become standardized. A few first-level paratimers would transpose to a selected timeline and abduct an Upper Priest of Yat-Zar, preferably the High Priest of the Temple at Yoldav or Zurb. He would be drugged and transposed to the first level, where he would receive hypnotic indoctrination and, while unconscious, have an operation performed on his ears which would enable him to hear sounds well above the normal audible range. He would be able to hear the shrill sonar cries of bats, for instance, and, more important, he would be able to hear voices when the speaker used a first-level audio-frequency step-up phone. He would also receive a memory obliteration from the moment of his abduction and a set of pseudo-memories of a visit to the heaven of Yat-Zar on the other side of the sky. Then he would be returned to his own timeline and left on a mountain top far from his temple, where an unknown peasant, leading a donkey, would always find him, return him to the temple, and then vanish inexplicably. Then the priest would begin hearing voices, usually while serving at the altar. They would warn of future events which would always come to pass exactly as foretold. Or they might bring tidings of things happening at a distance, the news of which would not arrive by normal means for days or even weeks. Before long the holy man who had been carried alive to the heaven of Yat-Zar would acquire a most awesome reputation as a prophet and would speedily rise to the very top of the priestly hierarchy. Then he would receive two commandments from Yat-Zar. The first would ordain that all lower priests must travel about from temple to temple, never staying longer than a year at any one place. This would ensure a steady influx of newcomers personally unknown to the local upper priests, and many of them would be first-level paratimers. Then there would be a second commandment. A house must be built for Yat-Zar against the rear wall of each temple. Its dimensions were minutely stipulated. Its walls were to be of stone, without windows, and there was to be a single door opening into the holy of holies, and before the walls were finished the door was to be barred from within.  Sometimes such innovations met with opposition from the more conservative members of the hierarchy. When they did, the principal objector would be seized with a sudden and violent illness. He would recover if and when he withdrew his objections. Very shortly after the house of Yat-Zar would be completed strange noises would be heard from behind the thick walls. Then, after a while, one of the younger priests would announce that he had been commanded in a vision to go behind the veil and knock upon the door. Going behind the curtains, he would use his door activator to let himself in and return by paratime conveyor to the first level to enjoy a well-earned vacation. When the high priest would follow him behind the veil after a few hours and find that he had vanished, it would be announced as a miracle. A week later an even greater miracle would be announced. The young priest would be returned from behind the triple veil, headed in such raiment as no man had ever seen, and bearing in his hands a strange box. He would announce that Yat-Zar had commanded him to build a new temple in the mountains, at a place to be known by the voice of the God speaking out of the box. This time there would be no doubts and no objections. A procession would set out, headed by the new revelator bearing the box, and when the clicking voice of the God spoke rapidly out of it, the sight would be marked and the work would begin. No local labor would ever be employed on such temples. The masons and wood-workers would be strangers, coming from afar and speaking a strange tongue. And when the temple was completed, they would never be seen to leave it. Men would say that they had been put to death by the priest, and buried under the altar to preserve the secrets of the God. And there would always be an idol to preserve the secrets of the God. And there would always be an idol of Yat-Zar, obviously of heavenly origin, since its workmanship was beyond the powers of any local craftsman. The priests of such a temple would be exempt, by divine decree, from the rule of yearly travel. Nobody, of course, would have the least idea that there was a uranium mine in operation under it, shipping ore to another timeline. The Hogan people knew nothing about uranium, and neither did they as much as dream that there were other timelines. The secret of paratime transposition belonged exclusively to the first-level civilization which had discovered it, and it was a secret that was guarded well. Stranorth Sleth, dropping to the bottom of the antigrav shaft, cast a hasty and instinctive glance to the right, where the freight conveyors were. One was gone, taking its cargo over hundreds of thousands of para-years to the first level. Another had just returned, empty, and a third was receiving its cargo from the robot mining machines far back under the mountain. Two young men and a girl, in first-level costumes, sat at a bank of instruments and visor screens, handling the whole operation, and six or seven armed guards, having inspected the newly arrived conveyor, and finding that it had picked up nothing inimical en route, were relaxing and lighting cigarettes. Three of them, Stranorth Sleth noticed, wore the green uniforms of the paratime police. When did those fellows get in, he asked the people at the control desk, nodding toward the green-clad newcomers. About ten minutes ago, on the passenger conveyor, the girl told him, the big boys here, Brannad Klav, and a paratime police officer, they're in your office. Uh-huh, I was expecting that, Stranorth Sleth nodded. Then he turned down the corridor to the left. Two men were waiting for him in his office. One was short and stocky, with an angry, impatient face, Brannad Klav, trans-temporal's vice-president in charge of operations. The other was tall and slender, with handsome and entirely expressionless features. He wore a paratime police officer's uniform, with the blue badge of hereditary nobility on his breast, and carried a Sigma Ray needler in a belt holster. Were you waiting long, gentlemen, Stranorth Sleth asked? I was holding a sunset sacrifice up in the temple. No, we just got here, Brannad Klav said. This is Verkan Val, maverat of Neros, special assistant to Chief Tortha of the paratime police. Stranorth Sleth, our resident agent here. Stranorth Sleth touched hands with Verkan Val. I've heard a lot about you, sir, he said. Everybody working in paratime has, of course. I'm sorry we have a situation here that calls for your presence, but since we have, I'm glad you're here in person. You know what our trouble is, I suppose. In a general way, Verkan Val replied. Chief Tortha and Brannad Klav have given me the main outline, but I'd like to have you fill in the details. Well, I told you everything, Brannad Klav interrupted impatiently.  If I—he stopped short, catching sight of the shoulder holster under Stranorth Sleth's left arm. Were you wearing that kneeler up in the temple, he demanded? You're blasted right I was, Stranorth Sleth retorted, and any time I can't arm myself for my own protection on this timeline you can have my resignation. I'm not getting into the same jam as those people at Zurb. Well, never mind about that, Verkan Val intervened. Of course, Stranorth Sleth has a right to arm himself. I wouldn't think of being caught without a weapon on this timeline myself. Now, Stranorth, suppose you tell me what's been happening here from the beginning of this trouble. It started, really, about five years ago, when Kirk Chuck, the king of Zurb, married this Chuldan princess, Dareth, from the country over beyond the Black Sea, and made her his queen over the heads of about a dozen daughters of the local nobility, whom he'd married previously. Then he brought in this Chuldan scribe, Labdurg, and made him overseer of the kingdom, roughly Prime Minister. There was a lot of dissatisfaction about that, and for a while it looked as though he was going to have a revolution on his hands. But he brought in about five thousand Chuldan mercenaries, all archers, these hulgans can't shoot a bow worth beans, so the dissatisfaction died down, and so did most of the leaders of the disaffected group. The story I get is that this Labdurg arranged the marriage in the first place. It looks to me as though the Chuldan emperor is intending to take over the Hulgan kingdoms, starting with Zurb. Well, these Chuldans all worship a god called Muz Azin. Muz Azin is a crocodile with wings like a bat and a lot of knife blades in his tail. He makes this Yadzar look downright beautiful. So do his habits. Muz Azin fancies human sacrifices. The victims are strung up by the ankles on a triangular frame and lash to death with iron-barbed whips. Nasty sort of deity, but this is a nasty timeline. The people here get a big kick out of watching these sacrifices. Much better show than our bunny killing. The victims are usually criminals or overage or incorrigible slaves or prisoners of war. Of course, when the Chuldans began infiltrating the palace, they brought in their crocodile god, too, and a flock of priests, and King Kerchuk let them set up a temple in the palace. Naturally we preached against this heave and idolatry in our temples, but religious bigotry isn't one of the numerous imperfections of this sector. Everybody's deity is as good as anybody else's. Indifferentism, I believe, is the theological term. Anyhow, on that basis things went along fairly well, till two years ago when we had this run of bad luck. Bad luck, Brannad Klav snorted. That's the standing excuse of every incompetent. Go on, Stranor, what sort of bad luck, Verkan Vahl asked. Well, first we had a drought, beginning in early summer that burned up most of the grain crop. Then, when that broke, we got heavy rains and hailstorms and floods, and that destroyed what got through the dry spell. When they harvested what little was left, it was obvious there'd be a famine, so we brought in a lot of grain by conveyor and distributed it from the temples. Miraculous gift of Yatsar, of course. Then the main office on first level got scared about flooding this timeline with a lot of unaccountable grain, and were afraid we'd make the people suspicious and ordered it stopped. Then Kerchuk, and I might add that the kingdom of Zurb was the hardest hit by the famine, ordered his army mobilize and started an invasion of the Jumdan country, south of the Carpathians, to get grain. He got his army chopped up, and only about a quarter of them got back with no grain. You ask me, I'd say that Labdirk framed it to happen that way. He advised Kerchuk to invade in the first place, and I mentioned my suspicion that Chombrug, the Chuldan emperor, is planning to move in on the Hulgan kingdoms. Well, what would be smarter than to get Kerchuk's army smashed in advance? How did the defeat occur, Verkenval asked, and a suspicion of treachery? Nothing you could put your finger on, except that the Jumdans seem to have pretty good intelligence about Kerchuk's invasion route and battle plans.  See, these Hulgens, and particularly the Zurb Hulgens, are spearmen. They fight in a fairly thin line, with heavy-armed infantry in front and light infantry with throwing spears behind. The nobles fight in light chariots, usually at the center of the line. And that's where they were at this battle of Jorm. Kerchuk himself was at the center with his Chuldan archers masked around him. The Jumdans use a lot of cavalry with long swords and lances, and a lot of big chariots with two javelin men and a driver. Well, instead of ramming into Kerchuk's center, where he had his archers, they hit the extreme left and folded it up, and then swung around behind and hit the right from the rear. All the Chuldan archers did was stand fast around the king and shoot anybody who came close to them. They were left pretty much alone. But the Hulgens spearmen were cut to pieces. The battle ended with Kerchuk and his nobles and his archers making a fighting retreat, while the Jumdan cavalry were chasing the spearmen every which way and cutting them down or lancing them as they ran. Well, whether it was Labdurg's treachery or Kerchuk's stupidity, in either case it was natural for the archers to come off easiest and the Hulgens spearmen to pay the butcher's bill. But try and tell these knuckleheads anything like that. Muz-Azine protected the Chuldans and Yadzar let the Hulgens down, and that was all there was to it. The Zurb temple started losing worshippers, particularly the families of the men who didn't make it back from Jorm. If that had been all there had been to it, though, it still wouldn't have hurt the mining operations, and we could have got by. But what really tore it was when the rabbits started to die. Stranos Sluth picked up a cigar from his desk and bit the end, spitting it out disgustedly. Tularimia, of course, he said, touching his lighter to the tip. When that hit, they started going over to Muz-Azine in droves. Not only at Zurb, but all over the six kingdoms. You ought to have seen the house we had for sunset service this evening, about two hundred, and we used to get two thousand. It used to be all two men could do to lift the offering box at the door afterward, and all the money we took in tonight I could put in one pocket. The high priest used language that would have been considered unclerical even among the Hulgens. Verkan Vahl nodded, Even without the quicky hypnomech he had taken for this sector he knew that the rabbit was domesticated among the proto-Aryan Hulgens and was their chief meat-animal. Hulgen rabbits were even a minor import on the first level, and could be had at all the better restaurants in cities like Durgabar. He mentioned that. That's not the worst of it, Strander-Slath told him. See, the rabbit's sacred to Yatzar. Not taboo, just sacred. They have to use a specially consecrated knife to kill them. Consecrating rabbit knives has always been an item of temple revenue, and they must say a special prayer before eating them. We could have got around the rest of it, even the battle of Jorm, punishment by Yatzar for the sin of apostasy, but Yatzar just wouldn't make rabbits sick. Yatzar thinks too well of rabbits to do that, and it had not been any use claiming he would. So, there you are. Well, I take the attitude that this situation is the result of your incompetence, Brennan Klav began, in a bully-ragging tone. You're not only the High Priest of this temple, you're the acknowledged head of the religion in all the Hulgen kingdoms. You should have had more hold on the people than to allow anything like this to happen. Hold on the people, Strander-Slath fairly howled, appealing to work-involve. What does he think a religion is on this sector anyhow? You think these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity up there to express their yearning for higher things or to symbolize their moral ethos or as a philosophical escape hatch from the dilemma of causation? They never even heard of such matters. On this sector, gods are strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of their worshipers, they get their sacrifices. When they can't put out, they have to get out. How do you suppose these children living in the Caucasus Mountains got the idea of a god like a crocodile anyhow? Why, they got it from Hamran traders, people from down in the Nile Valley. They had a god once, something basically like a billy goat, but he'd let them get licked in a couple of battles so out he went. Why, all the deities on this sector have hyphenated names because their combinations of several deities were shipped in one person. Do you know anything about the history of this sector? He asked a paratime police officer. Well, it develops from an alternate probability of what we call the Nile Mesopotamian Basic Sector Group, Verkan Vahl said. On most Nile Mesopotamian sectors, like the Macedonian Empire Sector or the Alexandrian Roman or Alexandrian Punic or Indo-Terranian or Europo-American, there was an Aryan invasion of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor about 4,000 elapsed years ago. On this sector, the ancestors of the Aryans came in about 15 centuries earlier as Neolithic savages, about the time that the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations were first developing and overran all Southeast Europe, Asia Minor and the Nile Valley. They developed the Bronze Age culture of the civilizations they overthrew and then more slowly to an Iron Age culture. About 2,000 years ago they were using hardened steel and building large stone cities just as they do now. At that time they reached cultural stasis.  A god is only worshipped as long as the people think him powerful enough to aid and protect them.  He turned to Brenad Klav. Didn't Stranel report this situation to you when it first developed, he asked? I know he did. He speaks of receiving shipments of grain by conveyor for temple distribution. Then why didn't you report it to paratime police? That's what we have a paratime police force for. Well, yes, of course. But I had enough confidence in Straner Sleth to think that he could handle the situation himself. I didn't know he'd gone slack. Look, I can't make weather even if my parishioners think I can, Straner Sleth defended himself. And I can't make a great military genius out of a blockhead like Kirchuk. And I can't immunize all the rabbits on this timeline against tularemia, even if I'd had any reason to expect a tularemia epidemic, which I hadn't because the disease is unknown on this sector. This is the only outbreak of it anybody's ever heard of on any proto-Aryan timeline. No, but I'll tell you what you could have done, Verkanvall told him. When this Kirchuk started to apostasize, you could have gone to him at the head of a procession of priests, all paratimers, and all armed with energy weapons, and pointed out his spiritual duty to him. And if he gave you any back-talk, you could have pulled out that needler and raided him down and then cried, Behold the vengeance of Yatzar upon the wicked king! I'll bet any some at any odds that his successor would have thought twice about going over to Mazazine, and none of these other kings would have even thought once about it. Ha! That's what I wanted to do, Straner-Sleith exclaimed, and who stopped me? I'll give you just one guess. Well, it seems there was slackness here, but it wasn't Straner-Sleith who was slack, Verkanvall commented. Well, I must say, I never thought I'd hear an officer of the paratime police criticizing me for trying to operate inside the paratime transposition code, Brannad Klav exclaimed. Verkanvall, sitting on the edge of Straner-Sleith's desk, aimed his cigarette at Brannad Klav like a blaster. Now look, he began, there is one and only one inflexible law regarding out-time activities. The secret of paratime transposition must be kept in violate, and any activity tending to endanger it is prohibited. That's why we don't allow the transposition of any object of extraterrestrial origin to any timeline on which space travel has not been developed. Such an object may be preserved, and then, after the local population begin exploring the planet from whence it came, there will be dangerous speculations and theories as to how it arrived on Terra at such an early date. I came within inches, literally, of getting myself killed not long ago, cleaning up the result of a violation of that regulation. For the same reason, we don't allow the export to out-time natives of manufactured goods too far in advance of their local culture. That's why, for instance, you people have to hand-finish all those big Yatzar idols to remove traces of machine work. One of those things may be around a few thousand years from now when these people develop a mechanical civilization. But as far as reying down this kerchuk is concerned, these hulgons are completely non-scientific. They wouldn't have the least idea what happened. They'd believe that Yatzar struck him dead, as gods on this plane of culture are supposed to do. They'd notice the needler at all. They'd think it was just a holy amulet of some kind. But the law is the law, Brannad Klav began. Verkin Vahl shook his head. Brannad, as I understand, you were promoted to your present position on the retirement of Salvan Marth about ten years ago. Up to that time you were in your company's financial department. You were accustomed to working subject to the first level commercial regulations code. Now any law binding upon our people at home on the first level is inflexible. It has to be. We found out over 50 centuries ago that laws have to be rigid and without discretionary powers in administration in order that people may be able to predict their effect and plan their activities accordingly. Naturally you became conditioned to operating in such a climate of legal inflexibility. But in paratime the situation is entirely different. There exists within the range of the Galdron Hestor paratemporal field generator a number of timelines of the order of ten to the hundred thousands power. In effect, that many different worlds. In the past ten thousand years we have visited only the tiniest fraction of these. But we have found everything from timelines inhabited only by subhumanate men to second level civilizations which are our own equal in every respect but knowledge of paratemporal transposition. We even know of one second level civilization which is approaching the discovery of an interstellar hyperspatial drive. Something we've never even come close to. And in between are every degree of savagery, barbarism and civilization. Now it's just not possible to frame any single code of laws applicable to conditions on all of these. The best we can do is prohibit certain flagrantly immoral types of activity such as slave trading introduction of new types of narcotic drugs or out and out piracy and brigandage. If you are in doubt as to the legality of anything you want to do out time go to the judicial section of the paratime commission and get an opinion on it. But that's where you made your whole mistake. You didn't find out just how far it was allowable for you to go. He turned to Stran or Slet again. Well, that's the background then. Now tell me about what happened yesterday at Zerb. Well, a week ago Kirchak came out with his decree closing our temple at Zerb and ordering his subjects to perform worship and make money offerings to Mazazine. The Zerb temple was asked for a mine. Zerb's too far south for the uranium deposits. It's just a center for propaganda and that sort of thing. But they have a house of Yat-Zar and a conveyor and most of the upper priests are paratimers. Well, our man there, Temandrav, alias Koram defied the king's order so Kirchak sent a company of chulden archers to close the temple and arrest the priests. He took all his people who were in the temple at the time into the house of Yat-Zar and transposed them back to the first level. He had orders, Stran or Slet looked meaningly at Branad Klav, not to resist with energy weapons or even ultrasonic paralyzers. And while we're on the subject of letting the local Yoko see too much, about fifteen of the under-priests he took to the first level were hulga natives. Nothing wrong about that. They'll get memory obliteration and pseudo-memory treatment, Verkanval said, but he should have been allowed to needle about a dozen of those chuldens. Teach the beggars to respect Yat-Zar in the future. Now how about the six priests who were outside the temple at the time? All but one were paratimers. We'll have to find out about them and get them out of Zurb. That'll take some doing, Stran or Slet said, and it'll have to be done before sunset tomorrow. They are all in the dungeon of the palace citadel, and Kirchak is going to give them to the priests of Mazazine to be sacrificed tomorrow evening. How'd you learn that? Verkanval asked. Oh, we have a man in Zurb, not connected with the temple, Stran or Slet said. Name's Kranar Jirth, calls himself Kranjer, locally. He has a sword-maker's shop, employs about a dozen native journeymen and apprentices who hammer out the common blades he sells in the open market. Then he imports a few high-class alloy steel blades from the first level, that'll cut through this local low-carbon armor like cheese, fits them with locally made hilts and sells them at unbelievable prices to the nobility. He sword-smiths to the king, picks up all the inside palace dope. Of course, he was among the first to accept the new gospel and go over to Mazazine. He has a secret room under his shop, with his conveyor and a radio. What happened was this. These six priests were at a consecration ceremony at a rabbit ranch outside the city, and they didn't know about the raid on the temple. On their way back, they were surrounded by chuldon archers and taken prisoner. They had no weapons but their sacrificial knives. He threw another dirty look at Branad Klav. So they're due to go up on the triangles at sunset tomorrow. We'll have to get them out before then, Verkan Val stated. They're our people, and we can't let them down. Even the native is under our protection, whether he knows it or not.  Yatzar will be through on this timeline, and you'll be through along with him. And considering that you are fissionables franchise for this sector comes up for renewal next year, your company will be through in this paratime area. You believe that would happen? Branad Klav asked anxiously. I know it will, because through a recommendation to that effect if those six men are tortured to death tomorrow, Verkan Val replied. And in the fifty years that I've been in the police department I've only heard of five such recommendations being ignored by the commission. You know, fourth level mineral products syndicate is after your franchise. Ordinarily they wouldn't have a chance of getting it, but with this maybe they will, even without my recommendation. This was all your fault for ignoring Stranar Streth's proposal and for denying those men the right to carry energy weapons. Well, we were only trying to stay inside the paratime code, Branad Klav pleaded. If it isn't too late now you can count on me for every cooperation. He fiddled with some papers on the desk. What do you want me to do to help? I'll tell you that in a minute. Verkan Val walked to the wall and looked at the map. Then returned to Stranar Streth's desk. How about these dungeons? He asked. How are they located and how can we get into them? I'm afraid we can't, Stranar Streth told him, not without fighting our way in. They're under a palicitadel a hundred feet below ground. They're spatially co-existent with the heavy water barriers around one of our company's plutonium piles on the first level, and below surface on any unoccupied timeline I know of. So, we can't transpose into them. This palace is really a walled city inside a city. Here, I'll show you. Going around the desk, he sat down, and after looking in the index screen, punched a combination on the keyboard. A picture, projected from the microfilm bank, appeared again. It was an air view of the city of Zerb, taken, the high priest explained, by infrared light from an airboat over the city at night. It showed a city of an entirely pre-mechanical civilization, with narrow streets lined on either side by low one- and two-story buildings. Although there would be considerable snow in winter, the roofs were usually flat, probably massive stone slabs supported by pillars within. Even in the poorer sections, this was true except for the very meanest houses and outbuildings which were thatched. Here and there, some huge pile of masonry would rear itself above its lower neighbors, and, where the streets were wider, occasional groups of large buildings would be surrounded by battle-minted walls. Strander's sleth indicated one of the larger of these. Here's the palace, he said. And here's the temple of Yadzar, about a half mile away. He touched a large building occupying an entire block. Between it and the palace was a block-wide park, with lawns and trees on either side of a wide roadway connecting the two. Now here's a detailed view of the palace. He punched another combination. The view of the city was replaced by one taken from directly overhead area. Here's the main gate in front at the end of the road from the temple, he pointed out. Over here on the left are the slave's quarters and the stables and workshops and storehouses and so on. Over here, on the other side, are the noble's quarters. And this, he indicated, a towering structure at the rear of the walled enclosure. Is the citadel and the royal dwelling. Audience hall on this side, over here on this side. A wide stone platform, about fifteen feet high, runs completely across the front of the citadel, from the audience hall to the harem. Since this picture was taken, the new temple of Mazazine was built right about here. He indicated that it extended out from the audience hall into the central courtyard. And out here on the platform they've put up about a dozen of feet high on which the sacrificial victims are whipped to death. Yes, about the only way we could get down to the dungeons would be to make an airdrop onto the citadel roof and fight our way down with needlers and blasters. And I'm not willing to do that as long as there's another way," Verkanbaal said. We'd lose men, even with needlers against bows, and there's a chance that some of them will be lost in the melee and fall into out-time hands. You say this sacrifice comes off at tomorrow at sunset? That would be about actual sunset, plus or minus an hour. These people aren't astronomers. They don't even have good sundials and it might be a cloudy day," Stranor Sluth said. There'll be a big idol of Mazazine on a cart, set about here," he pointed. After the sacrifice it has be dragged down this road, outside, to the temple of Yatzar and set up there. The temple is now occupied by about twenty Chul'dun mercenaries and five or six priests of Mazazine. They haven't, of course, got into the house of Yatzar, the doors of Impervium Steel about six inches thick, with a plating of collapsed nickel under the gilding. It would take a couple of hours to cut through it with our best atomic torch. There's a tool on this timeline that could even scratch it. And the insides of the walls are lined with the same thing. Do you think our people have been tortured yet? Verkan Vohl asked. No, Stranor Sluth was positive. They'll be fairly well treated until the sacrifice. The idea is to make them last as long as possible on the triangles. Mazazine likes to see a slow killing and so does the mob of spectators. That's good. Now, here's my plan. We won't try to rescue them from the dungeons. Instead, we'll transpose back to the Zerb Temple from the first level in considerable force, say, a hundred or so men, and march on the palace to force their release. You're in constant radio communication with all the other temples on this timeline, I suppose. Yes, certainly. All right. Pass this out to everybody. Authority, paratime police in my name, acting for Tortha Karf. I want all paratimers who can possibly be spared to transpose to first level immediately and rendezvous at the first level terminal of the Zerb Temple conveyor as soon as possible. Close down all mining operations and turn over temple routine to the native under-priests. You can tell them that the upper priests are retiring to their respective houses of Yadzar to pray for the deliverance of the priests in the hands of King Kurchuk. And everybody is to bring back his priestly regalia to the first level. That will be needed. He turned to Brannad Klav. I suppose you keep spare regalia and stock on the first level? Yes, of course. We keep plenty of everything in stock. Robes, miters, false beards of different shades of everything. And these big Yadzar idols, they're mass-produced on the first level. You have one available now? Good. I'll want some alterations made on one. For one thing, I'll want it plated heavily all over with collapsed nickel. For another, I'll want it fitted with anti-grab units and some sort of propulsion units and a loudspeaker and a remote control. And, Strenor, you get in touch with his sword-maker, Krannar Jirth, and alert him to cooperate with us. Tell him to start calling Zerb Temple on his radio about noon to-morrow and keep it up till he gets an answer. Or better, tell him to run his conveyor to his first level terminal and bring with him an extra suit of clothes appropriate to the role of journeyman mechanic. I'll want to talk to him and furnish him with special equipment. Got all that? Well, carry on with it and bring your own paratimers, priests and mining operators back with you as soon as you've taken care of everything. Brannad, you come with me now. We're returning to first level immediately. We have a lot of work to do, so let's get started. Anything I can do to help, just call on me for it, Brannad Klav promised earnestly. And, Strenor, I want to apologize. I'll admit now that I ought to have followed your recommendations when this situation first developed. End of Part 1 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 Temple Trouble by H. Beam Piper Part 2 By noon of the next day, Verkan Vall had at least 100 men gathered in the big room at the first-level fish-nibbles refinery at Jernabar, spatially co-existent with the fourth-level temple of Yadzar at Zurb. He was having a little trouble distinguishing between them. For every man wore the fringed blue robe and gold mitre of an upper priest and had his face masked behind a blue false beard. It was, he admitted to himself, a most ludicrous-looking assemblage, one of the most ludicrous things about it was, the fact that it would have inspired only pious awe in a holgan of the fourth-level proto-Aryan sector. About half of them were priests from the trans-temporal mining corporation's temples. The other half were members of the Perotime police. All of them wore, in addition to their temple knives, holstered Sigma-ray needleers. Most of them carried ultrasonic paralyzers, 18-inch baton-like things with bulbous ends. Most of the Perotime police, and a few of the priests, also carried either heat-ray pistols or neutron disruption blasters. Virkin Vall wore one of the latter in a left-hand belt holster. The Perotime police were lined up separately for inspection and Stranorslet, Temandrav of the Zurb temple and several other high priests were checking the authenticity of their disguises.  He was fiddling with the knobs and buttons on it, practicing. A big idol of Yat-Zar, on anti-gravity, was floating slowly about the room in obedience to its remote controls, rising and lowering, turning about and pirouetting gracefully. Hey, Val! he called to his superior. How's this? The idol rose about five feet, turned slowly in a half-circle, moved to the right a little and then settled down slowly toward the floor. Fine, fine, Horov, Virkin Vall told him, but don't set it down on anything or turn off the anti-gravity. There's enough collapsed nickel-plating on that thing to sink at a yard in soft ground. I don't know what the idea of that was, Brenad Klav, standing beside him, said. Understand, I'm not criticizing. I haven't any right to under the circumstances, but it seems to me that armoring that thing in collapsed nickel was an unnecessary precaution. Maybe it was, Virkin Vall agreed. I sincerely hope so. But we can't take any chances. This operation has to be absolutely right. Ready, Tammond? I don't know what the idea of that was, Brenad Klav, standing beside him, said. Understand, I'm not criticizing. Ready, Tammond? All right, first detail into the conveyor. He turned and strode toward a big dome of fine metallic mesh, thirty feet high and sixty in diameter, at the other end of the room. Tammond Rav and his ten paratimer priests and Brenad Klav and ten paratime police followed him in. One of the ladders slid shut the door and locked it. Virkin Vall went to the control desk at the center of the dome and picked up a two-foot globe of the same fine metallic mesh, opened it and, making some adjustments inside, then attaching an electric cord and closing it. He laid the globe on the floor near the desk and picked up the hand battery at the other end of the attached cord. Not taking any chances at all, are you, Brenad Klav asked, watching the operation with interest? I never do, unnecessarily. There are too many necessary chances that have to be taken in this work. Virkin Vall pressed the button on the hand battery. The globe on the floor flashed and vanished. Yesterday five paratimers were arrested. Any or all of them could have had door activators with them. Stranor Sleth says that they were not tortured, but that is a purely inferential statement. They may have been, and the use of the activator may have been extorted from one of them. So I want to look at the inside of that conveyor chamber before we transpose into it. He laid the hand battery with the loose dangling wire that had been left behind on the desk, then lit a cigarette. The others gathered around, smoking and watching, careful to avoid the place from which the globe had vanished. And then, in a queer iridescence, the globe reappeared. Virkin Vall counted ten seconds and picked it up, taking it to the desk and opening it to remove a small square box. Then he slid into a space under the desk and flipped a switch. Instantly a view screen lit up and a three-dimensional picture appeared, the interior of a big room a hundred feet square and some seventy in height.  A remarkably clean sixty-foot circle on the concrete floor outlined in faintly luminous red. How about it, Virkin Vall asked him and Drav, anything wrong? The Zurb High Priest shook his head. Just as we left it, he said, nobody's been inside since we left. One of the policemen took Virkin Vall's place at the control desk and threw the master switch after checking the instruments. Immediately the paratemporal transposition field went on with a humming sound that mounted to a high scream then settled to a steady drone. The mesh dome flickered with a cold iridescence and vanished. And they were looking into the interior of a great fissionables refinery plant operated by paratimers on another first-level timeline. The structural details altered from timeline to timeline as they watched. Buildings appeared and vanished. Once, for a few seconds, they were inside a cool insulating bubble in the midst of molten lead. Tim and Drav jerked a thumb at it before it vanished. That always bothers me, he said, bad place for the field to go weak. I'm fussy as an old hen with the inspection of the conveyor on account of that.  Probably the cooling system of a breeder pile. They passed more swiftly now across the second level and the third. Once they were in the midst of a huge land battle with great tank-like vehicles spouting flame at one another. Another moment was spent in an air-bombardment. On any timeline, natural battleground. Once a great procession marched toward them, carrying red banners and huge pictures of a coarse-faced man with a black moustache. Verkan Vall recognized the environment as fourth-level Europo-American sector. Finally, as the transposition rate slowed, they saw a clutter of miserable, thatched huts in the rear of a granite wall of a fourth-level Hulgun Temple of Yatzar, a temple not yet infiltrated by a trans-temporal mining corporation agents. Finally they were at their destination. The dome around them became visible and an overhead green light flashed slowly on and off. Verkan Vall opened the door and stepped outside, his needler drawn. The house of Yatzar was just as he had seen it in the picture photographed by the automatic reconnaissance conveyor. The others crowded outside after him. One of the regular priests pulled off his miter and beard and went to the radio, putting on a headset. Verkan Vall and Taman Drav snapped on the visus-screen getting a view of the holy of holies outside. There were six men there seated at the upper priest's banquet table, drinking from golden goblets. Five of them wore the black robes and green facings which marked them as priests of Muz-Azin. The sixth was an officer of the Chuldan archers in gilded mail and helmet. Why, those are the sacred vessels of the temple! Taman Drav cried, scandalized. Then he laughed in self-ridicule. I'm beginning to take this stuff seriously myself. Time I put in for a long vacation. I was actually shocked by the black-relage. Well, let's overtake the infidels in their sins, Verkan Vall said. Paralyzes will be good enough. He picked up one of the bulb-headed weapons and unlocked the door. Taman Drav and another of the priests of the Zurb temple following and the others crowding behind. They passed out through the veils and burst into the holy of holies. Verkan Vall pointed the bulb of his paralyzer at the six seated men and pressed the button. Other paralyzers came into action and the whole sextet were knocked senseless. The officer rolled from his chair and fell to the floor in a clatter of armor. Two of the priests slumped forward on the table. The others merely sank back in their chairs, dropping their goblets. Give each one of them another dose to make sure Verkan Vall directed a couple of his own men. Taman, any other way into the main temple beside that door? Up those steps, Taman Drav pointed, there's a gallery along the side. We can cover the whole room from there. Take your men and go up there. I'll take a few through the door. There'll be about twenty archers out there and we don't want any of them loosing any arrows before we can knock them out. Three minutes be time enough? Easily. Make it too, Taman Drav said. He took his priests up the stairway and vanished into the gallery of the temple. Verkan Vall waited until one minute had passed and then, followed by Brannad Klav and a couple of paratime policemen, he went under the plinth and peered out into the temple. Five or six archers in steel caps and sleeveless leather jackets sewn with steel rings were gathered on the altar, cooking something in a pot on the fire. Most of the others, like veteran soldiers, were sprawled on the floor trying to catch a short nap, except a half dozen who were crouched in a circle playing some game with dice, an almost universal military practice. The two minutes were up. He aimed his paralyzer at the men around the altar and squeezed the button, swinging it from one to another and then came down with a bludgeon of inaudible sound. At the same time, Teman Drav and his detail were stunning the gamblers. Stepping forward and to one side, Verkan Vall, Brannad Klav and the others took care of the sleepers on the floor. In less than thirty seconds every chuldon in the temple was incapacitated. All right, make sure none of them come out of it prematurely, get their weapons, and be sure nobody has a knife or anything hidden on him. Who has the syringe and the sleep-drug ampules? Somebody had, it developed, who was still on the first level to come up with the second conveyor load. Verkan Vall swore. Something like this always happened on any operation involving more than a half dozen men.  Ultrasonics were nice, effective, humane police weapons, but they were unreliable. The same dose that would keep one man out for an hour would paralyze another for more than ten or fifteen minutes. And be sure none of them are playing possum. He went back through the door under the plinth, glancing up at the decorated wooden screen and wondering how much work it would have to do if they were in from the conveyors. The five priests and the archer captain were still unconscious. One of the policemen was searching them. Here's the sort of weapons these priests carry, he said, holding up a short iron mace with a spiked head. Carried them on their belts. He tossed it on the table and began searching another knocked-out hierophant. From under the left side of the senseless man's robe and held up a sigma-ray needler, Verkan Vall looked at it and nodded grimly. Had it in a regular shoulder holster, the policemen said, handing the weapon across the table, what do you think? Find anything else funny on him? Wait a minute. The policeman pulled open the robe and began stripping the priest of Mazazine. Verkan Vall came around the table to help. There was nothing else of a suspicious nature. Could have got it from one of the prisoners, but I don't like the familiar way he's wearing that holster, Verkan Vall said. Has the conveyor gone back yet? When the policeman nodded, he continued. When it returns, take him to the first level. I hope they bring up the sleep-drug with the next load. When you get him back, take him to Durgabar by strato rocket immediately, and make sure he's safe. I want him questioned under narco-hypnosis by a regular paratime commission psychotechnician, in the presence of Chief Torthekarf and some responsible commission official. This is going to be hot stuff. Within an hour the whole force was assembled in the temple. The wooden screen had presented no problem. It slid easily to one side. The big idol floated on anti-gravity in the temple. Verkan Vall was looking anxiously at his watch. It's about two hours to sunset, he said to Strandor Slith, but as you pointed out these hulgons aren't astronomers and it's a bit cloudy. I wish Cranard Jirth would call in with something definite. About twenty minutes passed. Then the man at the radio came out into the temple. OK, he called. The man at Cranard Jirth's called in. Cranard Jirth contacted him with a midget radio he has up his sleeve. He's in the palace courtyard now. They haven't brought out the victims yet, but Kerchuk has just been carried out on his throne to that platform in the front of the citadel. Big crowd gathering on the inner courtyard. More in the streets outside. Palace gates are wide open. That's it, Verkan Vall cried. Form up! The parade starting. Cranard, you and Tammond and Strandor and I in front, about ten men with paralyzers a little behind us. Then, Yadzar, about ten feet off the ground and then the others. Forward, ho! They emerged from the temple and started down the broad roadway toward the palace. There was not much of a crowd at first. Most of Zerb had flocked to the palace earlier. The lucky ones in the courtyard and the latecomers outside. Those whom they did meet stared at them in open-mouthed amazement. And then some, remembering their doubts and blasphemies, began howling for forgiveness. Others, a substantial majority, realizing that it would be upon King Kerchuk that the real weight of Yadzar's six hands would fall took to their heels, trying to put as much distance as possible from them and the palace before the blow fell. As the procession approached the palace gates the crowds grew thicker, made up of those who had been unable to squeeze themselves inside. The panic was worse here, too. A good many were trampled and hurt in the rush to escape and it became necessary to use paralyzers to clear away. That made it worse. Everybody was sure that Yadzar was striking sinners who had left been right. Fortunately the gates were high enough to let the God through without losing altitude appreciably. Inside the mob surged back, clearing away across the courtyard. It was only necessary to paralyze a few here, and the levitated idol and its priestly attendants advanced toward the stone platform where the king sat on his throne, flanked by court-functionaries and black-robed priests of Mazazin.  Horf, move Yadzar forward about a hundred feet and up about fifty, Verkenval directed, quickly. As the six armed anthropomorphic idol rose and moved closer toward its Sarian rival, Verkenval drew his needler, scanning the assemblage around the throne anxiously. Where is the wicked king? A voice thundered, the voice of Stranor Sleth speaking into a midget radio tuned to the loudspeaker inside the idol. Where is the blasphemer and desecrator Karchuk? There's Labdurg in the red tunic beside the throne, Tamindrav whispered, and that's Gramdur, the Mazazin high priest beside him. Verkenval nodded, keeping his eyes on the group on the platform. Gramdur, the high priest of Mazazin, was edging backward and reaching under his robe. At the same time an officer shouted an order, and the cheldon archers drew arrows from their quivers and fitted them to their bow strings. Immediately the ultrasonic paralyzers of the advancing paratimers went into action and the mercenaries began dropping. Lay down your weapons, fools! the amplified voice boomed at them.  Who are you miserable wretches to draw bows against me? At first a few, then all of them, the cheldons lowered or dropped their weapons and began edging away to the sides. At the center in front of the throne most of them had been knocked out. Verkenval was still watching the Mazazin high priest intently. As Gramdur raised his arms there was a flash and a puff of smoke from the front of Yatzar, the paint over the collapsed nickel was burned off, but otherwise the idol was undamaged. Verkenval swung up his needler and raid Gramdur dead. As the man in the green-faced black robes fell a blaster clattered on the stone platform. Is that your puny best Mazazin, the booming voice demanded? Where is your high priest now? Horf, face Yatzar toward Mazazin, Verkenval said over his shoulder, drawing his blaster with his left hand. Like all first-level people he was ambidextrous, although like all paratimers he habitually concealed the fact while out-time. As the levitated idol swung slowly and looked down upon its enemy on the built-up cart, Verkenval aimed his blaster and squeezed. In a spot less than a millimetre in diameter on the crocodile idol's side a certain number of neutrons in the atomic structure of the stone from which it was carved broke apart becoming, in effect, atoms of hydrogen. With a flash and a bang the idol burst and vanished. Verkenval looked back on the cart, which was now burning fiercely facing King Kirchuk again. Get your hands up, all of you, Verkenval shouted, in the first-level language, swinging the stubby muzzle of the blaster and the knob-tipped twin tubes of the kneadler to cover the group around the throne. Come forward before I start blasting. Labdurg raised his hands and stepped forward. He was raised by paratime policemen who swarmed up onto the platform and disarmed. All three were carrying Sigma Ray-needlers, and Labdurg had a blaster as well. King Kirchuk was clinging to the arms of his throne, a badly frightened monarch trying desperately not to show it. He was a big man, heavy-shouldered, black-bearded, under ordinary circumstances he would probably have cut his lost male and his golden crown. Now his face was a dirty gray, and he was biting nervously at his lower lip. The others on the platform were in even worse state. The Hulga Nobles were grouped together, trying to dissociate themselves from both the king and the priests of Mazazine. The latter were staring in a daze at the blazing cart from which their idol had just been blasted, and the dozen men who were to have done the work of the torture sacrifice had all dropped their whips and were fairly gibbering in fear. Yatzar, manipulated by the robed paratimer, had taken a position directly above the throne and was lowering slowly. Kirchuk stared up at the massive idol descending toward him, his knuckles white as he clung to the arms of his throne. He managed to hold out until he could feel the weight pressing on his head. Then, with a scream, he hurled himself from the throne and rolled forward almost to the edge of the platform. Yatzar moved to one side, swung slightly, and knocked the throne toppling, and then settled down on the platform. To Kirchuk, who was rising cautiously on his hands and knees, the big idols seemed to be looking at him in contempt. Where are my holy priests, Kirchuk? Strander's death demanded into a sleeve hidden radio, let them be brought before me, alive and unharmed, or it shall be better for you had you never been born. The six priests of Yatzar, it seemed, were already being brought onto the platform by one of Kirchuk's nobles. This noble, whose name was Yorzok, knew a miracle when he saw one and believed a god with the heaviest artillery. As soon as he had seen Yatzar coming through the gate without visible means of support, he had hastened to the dungeons with a half a dozen of his personal retainers and ordered the release of the six captives. He was now escorting them onto the platform, assuring them that he had always been a faithful servant of Yatzar and had been deeply grieved at his sovereign's apostasy. Hear my word, Kirchuk! Stranner sleth continued through the loudspeaker in the idle. You have sinned most violently against me, and were I a cruel god, your fate would be such as no man has ever before suffered. But I am a merciful god. Behold, you may gain forgiveness in my sight. For thirty days you shall neither eat meat nor drink wine, nor shall you wear gold nor find raiment, and each day shall you go to my temple and beseech me for my forgiveness. And on the thirty-first day you shall set out, barefoot and clad in the garb of a slave, and journey to my temple that is in the mountains over above Yodav, and there will I forgive you after you have made sacrifice to me. Yadzar! Have spoken! The king started to rise, babbling thanks. Rise not before me until I have forgiven you, Yadzar thundered. Creep out of my sight upon your belly, wretch! The procession back to the temple was made quietly and sedately along an empty roadway. Yadzar seemed to be in a kindly humor. The people of Zerb had no intention of giving him any reason to change his mood. The priests of Mazazin and their torturers had been flung into the dungeon. Yorzak, appointed regent for the duration of Kirchuk's penance, had taken control and was employing Hulgun Spearman and hastily converted chuldon archers to restore order and, incidentally, purge a few of his personal enemies and political rivals. The priests, with the three prisoners who had been found carrying first-level weapons among them, and Yadzar floating triumphantly in front, entered the temple. A few of the devout, who sought admission after them, were told that elaborate and secret rites were being held to cleanse the profane altar and sent away. Verkanval and Brannad Klav and Strahner Sleth were in the paratime policemen and the extra priests. Along with them were the three prisoners.  He could see that they all recognized him.  You violated the paratime transposition code, the commercial regulation code and the first-level criminal code all together. If you know what's good for you, you'll start talking. I'm not saying anything till I have legal advice, the man who had been using the local alias of Labdurg replied, and if you're through searching me, I'd like to have my cigarettes and lighter back. Smoke one of mine for a change, Verkanval told him. I don't know what's in yours besides tobacco. He offered his case and held a light for the prisoner before lighting it up. I'm going to be sure you get back to first-level alive. The former overseer of the Kingdom of Zurb shrugged. I'm still not talking, he said.  Besides, we got that man of yours who was here at the temple when we came in. He's being given a full treatment as a presumed out-time native of the first-level weapons. If you talk now, it'll go easier with you. The prisoner dropped the cigarette on the floor and tramped it out. Anything you cops get out of me, you'll have to get the hard way, he said. I have friends on the first level who'll take care of me. I doubt that they'll have their hands full taken care of themselves after this gets out. Verkanval turned to the two and went to say anything. When they shook their heads, he nodded to a group of his policemen. They were hustled into the conveyor. Take them to the first-level terminal and hold them till I come in. I'll be along with the next conveyor load. The conveyor flashed and vanished. Brunad Klav stared for a moment at the circle of concrete floor from whence it had disappeared. Then he turned to Verkanval. I still can't believe it, he said. Why those fellows were first-level paratimers? So was that priest, Gromdur, the one you raid. Yes, of course. They worked for your rivals, the fourth-level mineral product syndicate, the outfit that was trying to get your proto-Aryan sector fissionables franchise away from you. They operate on this sector already, have the petroleum franchise for the Chuldon country, they export to some of these internal combustion engine sectors, like Europo-American. You know, most of the wars they've been fighting lately on the Europo-American sector have been, at least in part, motivated by rivalry for oil fields. But now that the Europo-Americans have begun to release nuclear energy, fissionables have become more important than oil. In less than a century, it's predicted that atomic energy will replace all other forms of power. Mineral product syndicate wanted to get a good source of supply for uranium, and your proto-Aryan sector franchise was worth grabbing. I had considered something like this as a possibility when Strannar here mentioned that Tuileremia was normally unknown in Eurasia on this sector. That epidemic must have been started by imported germs. And I knew that mineral has agents at the court of the Chalden Emperor, Chombrog. They have to, to protect their oil wells on his eastern frontiers. I spent most of last night checking up on some stuff by video transcription from Paratime Commission's microfilm library at Durgabar. I found out, for one thing, that while there is a Kinkercuk of Zerb on every timeline for a hundred para-years on either side of this one, this is the only timeline in which he married a princess derrith of Chalden. And it's the only timeline on which there is any trace of a Chalden scribe named Labdurg. That's why I went to all the trouble of having that Yatzar plated with collapsed nickel. If there were disguised paratimers among the Muzzezin party at Kirchuk's court, I expected one of them to try to blast our idol when we brought it into the palace. I was watching Gromdurg in particular. As soon as Gromdurg used his blaster, I needled him. After that it was easy. Was that why you insisted on sending that automatic viewer on ahead? Yes. There was a chance that they might have planted a bomb in the house of Yatzar here. I knew they'd either do that or let the place entirely alone. I suppose they were so confident of getting away with this that they used the conveyor or the conveyor chamber. They expected to use them themselves after they took over your company's franchise. Well, what's going to be done about it by the commission, Brannad Klav wanted to know? Plenty. The syndicate will probably lose their paratime license. Any of its officials who had guilty knowledge of this will be dealt with according to law. You know, this was a pretty nasty business. You are telling me, Stranoslath exclaimed. Did you get a look at those whips they were going to use on our people? Pointed iron barbs a quarter inch long braided into them all over the lash ends. Yes. Any punitive action you are thinking about taking on these priests of Muzzazine, the natives I mean, will be ignored on the first level. And that reminds me, you'd better work out a line of policy pretty soon. Well, as for the priests and the torturers, I think I'll tell Yorzok to have them sold to the Bungans, to the East. They're always in the market for galley slaves, Stranoslath said. He turned to Brannad Klav. And I want six gold crowns made up as soon as possible. Strictly Hulgun-designed, with Yatzar religious symbolism, very rich and ornate, all slightly different. When I give Kirchuk Absolution, I'll crown him at the altar in the name of Yatzar. Then I'll invite in the other five Hulgun kings, lecture them on their religious duties and make them confess their secret doubts, forgive them, and crown them too. From then on they can all style themselves as ruling by the will of Yatzar. And from then on you'll have all of them eating out of your hand, Birkenvall concluded. You know, this will probably go down in Hulgun history as the reformation of Gullum the Holy. I've always wondered whether the theory of the divine right of kings was invented by the kings to establish their authority over the people, or by the priests to establish their authority over the kings. It works about as well one way as the other. What I can't understand is this, Brannad Klav said. It was entirely because of my respect for the paratime code that I kept Stranor sleth from using fourth-level weapons and other techniques to control these people with a show of apparent miraculous powers. But this fourth-level mineral product syndicate was operating in violation of the paratime code by invading our franchise area. Why didn't they fake up a supernatural reign of terror to intimidate these natives? Ha! Exactly because they were operating illegally, Verkanvall replied. Suppose they had started using needlers and blasters and anti-gravity and nuclear energy around here. The natives would have thought it was the power of Muzzazine, of course, but what would have you thought? You'd have known as soon as they tried it that first-level paratimers were working against you, and you'd have laid the facts before the commission, and this timeline would have been flooded with terror. They had to conceal their operations not only from the natives, as you do, but also from us. So they didn't dare make public their use of first-level techniques. Of course, when we came marching into the palace with that idol on anti-gravity, they knew at once what was happening. I have an idea that they only tried to blast that idol to create a diversion which would permit them to escape. If they could get out of here, they'd have made their way in disguise to the nearest mineral product syndicate conveyor and transposed out of here. I realized that they could best delay us by blasting our idol, and that's why I had had played it with collapsed nickel. I think that where they made their mistake was in allowing Kurchuk to have those priests arrested, and insisting on sacrificing them to Muzzazine. If it hadn't been for that, the paratime wouldn't have done this at all. Well, Stranner, you'll want to get back to your temple, and Brannet and I want to get back to the first level. I'm supposed to take my wife to a banquet in Durga Bar tonight, and with the fastest strato rocket, I'll just barely make it. End of Temple Trouble 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. Flight from Tomorrow by H. B. Piper. But yesterday, a whole planet had shouted, Hail, Haradska! Hail, the leader! Today they were screaming, Death to Haradska! Kill the tyrant! The palace, where Haradska, surrounded by his sycophants and guards, had lorded it over a solar system, was now an inferno. Those who had been too closely identified with the dictator's rule to hope for forgiveness were fighting to the last, seeking only a quick death in combat. One by one, their isolated points of war were being wiped out. The corridors and chambers of the huge palace were thronged with rebels, loud with their shouts, and with the rasping hiss of heat beams and the crash of blasters, reeking with the stench of scorched plastic and burned flesh, of hot metal and charred fabric. The living quarters were overrun, the mobs smashed down walls and tore up floors in search of living places. They found strange things, the spaceship that had been built under one of the domes, in readiness for flight to the still loyal colonies on Mars, or the asteroid belt, for instance, but Haradska himself they could not find. At last the search reached the new tower, which reared its head five thousand feet above the palace, the highest thing in the city. They landed down the huge steel doors, cut power from the energy screens. They landed from anti-grab cars on the upper levels, but except for barriers of metal and concrete and energy, they met with no opposition. Finally they came to the spiral stairway which led up to the great metal sphere which capped the whole structure. General Zarbaz, the army commander who had revolt, stood with his foot on the lowest step, his followers behind him. There was Prince Bervani, the leader of the old nobility, and Gorzesko Orm, the merchant, and between them stood Tob, the chieftain of the mutinous slaves. There were clerks, laborers, poor but haughty nobles, and wealthy merchants who had long been forced to hide their riches from the dictator's tax soldiers and spacemen. You'd better let some of us go first, sir. A blood-stained bandage about his head, his uniform in rags suggested. You don't know what might be up there. The general shook his head. I'll go first. Zarbaz Paul was not the man to send subordinates into danger ahead of himself. To tell the truth, I'm afraid we won't find anything at all up there. You mean Gorzesko Orm began. The time machine, Zarbaz Paul replied. If he's managed to get it finished, the Great Mind only knows where he may be now, or when. He loosened the blaster in his holster and started up the long spiral. His followers spread out below. Sharp shooters took position to cover his assent. Prince Bervani and Tob the slave started to follow him. They hesitated as each motion to the other to proceed him. Then the nobleman followed the general, his blaster drawn, and the brawny slave behind him. The door at the top was open, and Zarbaz Paul stepped through, but there was nothing in the great spherical room except a raised dais some fifty feet in diameter, its polished metal really clean and empty. And a crumpled heap of burned cloth and charred flesh that had not long ago been a man. An old man with a white beard and the seven-pointed star of the learned brothers on his breast advanced to meet the armed intruders. So he is gone, Krazizago, Zarbaz Paul said, holstering his weapon. Gone in the time machine he died in yesterday or tomorrow. And you let him go? The old one nodded. He had a blaster, and I had none. He indicated the body on the floor. Zoldy Jarv had no blaster either, but he tried to stop Radska. See, he squandered his life as a fool squanders his money, getting nothing for it. And a man's life is not money, Zarbaz Paul. I do not blame you, Krazizago, General Zarbaz said. But now you must get to work and build us another time machine so that we can hunt him down. Does revenge mean so much to you then? The soldier made an impatient gesture. Revenge is for fools like that pack of screaming beasts below. I do not kill for revenge.  Radska will do us no more harm," the old scientist replied. He is a thing of yesterday, of a time long past and half lost in the mists of legend. No matter, as long as he exists at any point in space-time, Radska is still a threat. Revenge means much to expect him. The old man shook his head. No, Zarbaz Paul, Radska will not return. Radska holstered his blaster, through the switch that sealed the time machine, put on the anti-grab unit and started the time shift unit. He reached out and set the destination dial for the mid-fifty-second century of the atomic era. That would land him in the ninth age of chaos, following the two-century war and the collapse of the world theocracy. A good time for his purpose, the world would be slipping back into barbarism and yet possess the technologies of former civilizations. A hundred little nation states would be trying to regain social stability, competing and warring with one another. Radska glanced back over his shoulder at the cases of record spools, tridimensional pictures and scale models. These people of the past would welcome him and his science of the future would make him their leader. He would start in a small way by taking over the local feudal or tribal government, would arm his followers with weapons of the future. Then he would impose his rule upon neighboring tribes or princetums or communes or whatever, and build a strong sovereignty. From that he envisioned a world empire, a solar system empire. Then he would build time machines, many time machines. He would recruit an army such as the universe had never seen, a swarm of men from every age in the past. At that point he would return to the hundredth century of the atomic era to avengeance upon those who had risen against him. A slow smile grew on Radska's thin lips as he thought of the tortures with which he would put Xarvas Paul to death. He glanced up at the great disc of the indicator and frowned. Already he was back to the year 7500 A.E., and the temporal displacement had not begun to slow. The disc was turning even more rapidly, 7000, 6500. He gasped slightly. Then he had passed his destination. He was now in the 40th century, but the indicator was slowing. The hairline crossed the 30th century, the 20th, the 15th, the 10th. He wondered what had gone wrong, but he had recovered from his fright by this time. When this insane machine stopped, as it must around the first century of the Atomic Era, he would investigate, make repairs, then shift forward to his target point. Radska was determined upon the 52nd century. He had made a special study of the history of that period, had learned the language spoken then, and he understood the methods necessary to gain power over the natives of that time. The indicator disc came to a stop in the first century. He switched on the magnifier and leaned forward to look. He had emerged into normal time in the year 10 of the Atomic Era, a decade after the first uranium pile had gone into operation, and seven years after the first atomic bombs had been exploded in warfare. The altimeter showed that he was hovering at 8000 feet above ground level. Slowly he cut out the anti-grav, letting the time machine down easily. He knew that there had been no danger of materializing inside anything. The new tower had been built to put it above anything that had occupied that space point at any moment within history, or legend, or even the geological knowledge of man. What lay below, however, it was night. The busy screen showed only a star-dusted moonless sky and dark shadows below. He snapped another switch. For a few microseconds a beam of intense light was turned on, automatically photographing the landscape under him. A second later the developed picture was projected upon another screen. It showed only wooded mountains in brush-grown valley. The time machine came to rest with a soft jar and a crashing of broken brushes that was audible through the sound pickup. Radska pulled the main switch. There was a click as the shielding went out and the door opened. A breath of cool night air drew into the hollow sphere. Then there was a loud bang inside the mechanism and a blue-white light which turned to pinkish flame with a nasty crackling. Curls of smoke began to rise from the square black box that housed the time-shift mechanism and from behind the instrument board. In a moment everything was glowing hot. Driplets of aluminum and silver were running down from the instruments. Then the whole interior of the time machine was a fire. There was barely time for fire. The brush outside impeded him and he used his blaster to clear a path for himself away from the big sphere which was now glowing faintly on the outside. The heat grew in intensity and the brush outside was taking fire. It was not until he had gotten two hundred yards from the machine that he stopped realizing what had happened. The machine, of course, had died. That would have been young Zoldy, whom he had killed, or that old Billy-goat Kradzky Zago, the latter most likely. He cursed both of them for having marooned him in this savage age at the very beginning of atomic civilization with all his printed and recorded knowledge destroyed. Oh, he could still gain mastery over these barbarians. He knew enough to fashion a machine, or a heat-beam gun, or an atomic-electric conversion unit. But without his books and records he could never build an anti-grave unit and the secret of the temporal shift was lost. For time is not an object or a medium which can be traveled along. The time machine was not a vehicle. It was a mechanical process of displacement within the space-time continuum, with the sort of fiction the dictator demanded, for their own well-being. Even had there been no sabotage, his return to his own time was nearly of zero probability. The time machine had been used in the space-time continuum. It had been used in the space-time continuum. It had been used in the space-time continuum, with zero probability. The fire, spreading from the time machine, was blowing toward him. He observed the wind direction and hurried around out of the path of the flames. The light enabled him to pick his way through the brush, and, after crossing a small stream, he found a rutted road and followed it up the mountainside until it was broad daylight when he woke, and there was a strange throbbing sound. Ratska lay motionless under the brush where he had slept, his blaster ready. In a few minutes a vehicle came into sight, following the road down the mountainside. It was a large thing, four-wheeled, with a projection in front which probably housed the engine and a cab for the operator. One of the vehicles was simply an open rectangular box. There were two men in the cab, and about twenty or thirty more crowded into the box body. These were dressed in faded and nondescript garments of blue and grey and brown. All were armed with crude weapons, axes, bill-hooks, long-handled instruments with serrated edges, and what looked like broad-bladed spears. The vehicle itself, which seemed to be propelled by some sort of chemical explosion engine, was dingy and mud-splattered. The men in it were ragged and unshaven. Ratska snorted in contempt. They were probably warriors of the local tribe, going to the fire in the belief that it had been started by raiding enemies. When they found the wreckage of the time machine, they would no doubt believe that it was from God and drag it home to be venerated. A plan of action was taking shape in his mind. First, he must get clothing of the sort worn by these people and find a safe hiding place for his own things. Then, pretending to be deaf-mute, he would go among them to learn something of their customs and pick up the language. When he had done that, he would move on to a village able to tell a credible story for himself. For a while it would be necessary for him to do menial work, but in the end he would establish himself among these people. Then he would gather around him a faction of those who were dissatisfied with whatever conditions existed, organize a conspiracy, make arms for his followers and start his program of power seizure. The matter of clothing was attended to shortly after he had crossed the mountain and descended into the valley on the other side. Hearing a clinking sound some distance from the road, as of metal striking stone, Hrodska stole cautiously through the woods until he came within sight of a man who was digging with a mattock, uprooting small bushes of a particular sort, with rough gray bark and three-pointed wood. When he had dug one up he would cut off the roots and then slice away the root bark with a knife, putting it into a sack. Hrodska's lip curled contemptuously. The fellow was gathering the stuff for medicinal use. He had heard of the use of roots and herbs for such purposes by the ancient savages. The blaster would be no use here. It was too powerful and would destroy the clothing of the man. He unfastened a strap from his belt and attached it to a stone to form a hand-loop, then inched forward behind the lone herb-gatherer. When he was close enough he straightened and rushed forward swinging the improvised weapon. The man heard him and turned too late. After undressing his victim Hrodska used the mattock to finish him and then to his own clothes with the murdered man and don the faded blue shirt, rough shoes, worn trousers and jacket. The blaster he concealed under the jacket and he kept a few other hundredth-century gadgets, these he would hide somewhere closer to his center of operations. He had kept, among other things, a small box of food-concentrate capsules and in one pocket of the newly acquired jacket he found a package of cooking food. It was rough and unappetizing fare, slices of cold cooked meat between slices of some cereal substance. He ate these before filling in the grave and put the paper wrappings in with the dead man. Then, his work finished, he threw the mattock into the brush and set out again, grimacing disgustedly and scratching himself. The clothing he had appropriated to his clothes. Crossing another mountain, he descended into a second valley and, for a time, lost his way among a tangle of narrow ravines. It was dark by the time he mounted a hill and found himself looking down another valley in which a few scattered lights gave evidence of human habitations. Not wishing to arouse suspicion by approaching these in the night time, he found a place among some deep. The next morning, having breakfasted on a concentrate capsule, he found a hiding place for his blaster in a hollow tree. It was in a sufficiently prominent position so that he could easily find it again and, at the same time, unlikely to be discovered by some native. Then he went down into the inhabited valley. He was surprised at the ease at which he established contact with his colleagues. The first dwelling which he approached, a cluster of farm buildings at the upper end of the valley, gave him shelter. There was a man, clad in the same sort of rough garments Hradska had taken from the body of the herb-gatherer and a woman in a faded and shapeless dress. The man was thin and work-bent, the woman short and heavy. The man had no particular sounds to attract their attention, then gestured to his mouth and ears to indicate his assumed affliction. He rubbed his stomach to portray hunger. Looking about, he saw an axe sticking in a chopping block and a pile of wood near it, probably the fuel used by these people. He took up the axe, split up some of the wood, then repeated the hunger signs. He was shown a pile of tree limbs, and the man picked up a short billet of wood and used it like a measuring rule to indicate that all the wood was to be cut to that length. Hradska fell to work and, by mid-morning, he had all the wood cut. He had seen a circular stone mounted on a trestle with a metal axle through it and judged it to be some sort of a grinding wheel since it was fitted with a metal pedal and a rusty metal can was set above it to spill water onto the grinding edge. After chopping the wood, he carefully sharpened the axe, handing it to the man for inspection. This seemed to please the man. He clapped Hradska on the shoulder, making commendatory sounds. It required considerable time and ingenuity to make himself a more or less permanent member of the household. Hradska made a survey of the farmyard noting the sorts of work that would normally be performed on the farm and he pantomimed this work in its simpler operations. He pointed to the east where the sun would rise and to the zenith and to the west. He made signs indicative of eating and of sleeping and of rising and of working. At length he succeeded in conveying his meaning. There was considerable argument between the man and the woman but his proposal was accepted as he expected that it would. It was easy to see that the work of the farm was hard for this aging couple.  In the days that followed he made himself useful to the farm people. He fed the chickens and the livestock, milked the cow, worked in the fields. He slept in a small room at the top of the house under the eaves and ate with the man and woman in the farmhouse kitchen. It was not long before he picked up a few words which he had heard his employers using and related them to the things or acts spoken of. And he began to notice that these people, in spite of the crudities of their own life, enjoyed some of the advantages of fairly complex civilization. Their implements were not handcraft products but showed machine workmanship. There were two objects hanging on hooks on the kitchen wall which he was sure were weapons. Both had wooden shoulder stocks and wooden four-pieces. They had long tubes extending to the front and triggers like blasters. One had double tubes mounted side by side and double triggers. The other had an octagonal tube mounted over a round tube and a loop extension on the trigger-guard. Then there was a box on the kitchen wall with a mouthpiece and a cylindrical tube on a cord. Sometimes a bell would ring out of the box and the woman would go to this instrument, take down the tube and hold it to her ear and talk into the mouthpiece. There was another box from which voices would issue of people conversing with predators or of singing and sometimes instrumental music. None of these were objects made by savages. These people probably traded with some fairly high civilization. They were not illiterate, he found printed matter indicating the use of some phonetic alphabet and paper pamphlets containing printed reproductions of photographs as well as verbal text. There was also a vehicle on the farm powered, like the one he had seen on the road, by an engine in which a hydrocarbon liquid fuel was exploded. He made it his business to examine this minutely and to study its construction and operation until he was thoroughly familiar with it. It was not until the third day after his arrival that the chickens began to die. In the morning Horatska found three of them dead when he went to feed them and the rest drooping unhealthily. He summoned the man and showed him what he had found. The next morning they were all dead and the cow was sick.  The man and the woman were also beginning to sicken, though both of them tried to continue their work, it was the woman who first noticed that the plants around the farmhouse were withering and turning yellow. The farmer went to the stable with Horatska and looked at the cow. Shaking his head he limped back to the house and returned carrying one of the weapons from the kitchen, the one with the single trigger and the octagonal tube. As he entered the stable he jerked down and up on the loop extension of the trigger-guard. Then he put the weapon to his shoulder and pointed it at the cow. It made a flash and roared louder even than a hand-blaster and the cow jerked convulsively and was dead. The man then indicated by signs that Horatska was to drag the dead cow out of the stable, dig a hole and bury it. This Horatska did, carefully examining the wound in the cow's head. The weapon he decided was not an energy weapon but a simple solid missile projector. By evening neither the man nor the woman were able to eat and both seemed to be suffering intensely. The man used the communicating instrument on the wall probably calling on his friends for help. Horatska did what he could to make them comfortable, cooked his own meal, washed the dishes as he had seen moving and tidied up the kitchen. It was not long before people, men and women whom he had seen on the road or who had stopped at the farmhouse while he had been there, began arriving. Some carrying baskets of food. And shortly after Horatska had eaten, a vehicle like the farmers, but in better condition and of better quality, arrived and a young man got out of it and entered the house carrying a leather bag. He was apparently some sort of a scientist. He examined the man and his wife, asked many questions, and administered drugs. He also took samples for blood tests and urinalysis. This, Horatska considered, was another of the many contradictions he had encountered among these people. This man behaved like an educated scientist and seemingly had nothing in common with the peasant herb-gatherer inside. The fact was that Horatska was worried. The strange death of the animals, the blight which had smitten the trees and vegetables around the farm, and the sickness of the farmer and his wife, all mystified him. He did not know of any disease which would affect plants and animals and humans. He wondered if some poisonous gas might not be escaping from the earth or the farmhouse. However, he had not himself been affected. He also disliked the way in which the doctor and the neighbor seemed to be talking about him. While he had come to a considerable revision of his original opinion about the culture level of these people, it was not impossible that they might suspect him of having caused the whole thing by witchcraft. At any moment they might fall upon him and put him to death. In any case, there was no longer any use in his staying here and it might be wise if he left at once. Accordingly he filled his pockets with food from the pantry and slipped out of the farmhouse. Before his absence was discovered he was well on his way down the road. That night Horatska slept under a bridge across a fairly wide stream. The next morning he followed the road until it came to town. It was not a large place there were perhaps four or five hundred houses and other buildings in it. Most of these dwellings were like the farmhouse where he had been staying but some were much larger and seemed to be places of business. One of these ladder was a concrete structure with wide doors at the front. Inside he could see men working on the internal combustion vehicles which seemed to be universal use. Horatska decided to obtain employment here. It would be best, he decided to continue his pretense of being a deaf mute. He did not know whether a world language were in use at this time or not and even if not the pretense of being a foreigner unable to speak the local dialect might be dangerous. So he entered the vehicle repair shop and accosted a man in a clean shirt who seemed to be issuing instructions to the workers going into his pantomime of the homeless mute seeking employment. The master of the repair shop merely laughed at him, however. Horatska became more insistent in his manner making signs to indicate his hunger and willingness to work. The other men in the shop left their tasks and gathered around. There was much laughter and unmistakable ribbled and derogatory remarks. Horatska was beginning to give up hope of getting employment here when one of the workmen approached the master and whispered something to him. The two of them walked away conversing in low voices. Horatska thought he understood the situation. No doubt the workman thinking to lighten his own labor was urging that the vagrant be employed for no other pay than food and lodging. At length the master assented to his employees' urgings. He returned showing Horatska a hose and a bucket and sponges and cloths, and sent him to work cleaning the mud from one of the vehicles. Then, after seeing that the work was being done properly, he went away entering a room at one side of the shop. About twenty minutes later another man entered the shop. He dressed like any of the other people whom Horatska had seen. He wore a grey tunic and breeches, polished black boots and a cap with a visor and a metal insignia on it. On a belt he carried a holstered weapon, like a blaster. After speaking to one of the workers, who pointed Horatska out to him, he approached the fugitive and said something. Horatska made gestures at his mouth and made gargling sounds. The newcomer shrugged and motioned him to come with him, at the same time producing a pair of handcuffs from his belt and jingling them suggestively. In a few seconds, Horatska tried to analyze the situation and estimate its possibilities. The newcomer was a soldier or, more likely, a policeman, since monocles were part of his equipment. Evidently, since the evening before, a warning had been made public by means of communicating devices such as he had seen at the farm advising people that a man of his description, pretending to be a death-mute, should be detained and the police notified. It had been for that reason that the workmen had persuaded his master to employ Horatska. No doubt he would be accused of causing the conditions at the farm by sorcery. Horatska shrugged and nodded, then went to the water tap to turn off the hose he had been using. He disconnected it, coiled it and hung it up, and then picked up the water bucket. Then, without warning, he hurled the water into the policeman's face, sprang forward, swinging the bucket by the bail and hit the man on the head. Releasing his grip on the bucket, he tore the blaster or whatever it was from the holster. One of the workers swung a hammer, as though to throw it. Horatska aimed the weapon at him and pulled the trigger.  He used it again to drop the policeman, then thrust it into the waistband of his trousers and ran outside. The thing was not a blaster at all, he realized, only a missile projector like the big weapons at the farm, utilizing the force of some chemical explosion. The policeman's vehicle was standing outside. It was a small, single seat, two-wheeled affair. Having become familiar with the principles of these hydrocarbon engines from examination of the vehicle on the farm, and accustomed as he was to far more complex mechanisms than this crude affair, Horatska could see at a glance how to operate it. Springing onto the saddle, he kicked away the folding support and started the engine. Just as he did, the master of the repair shop ran outside, one of the small hand weapons in his hand, and fired several shots. They all missed, but Horatska heard the whining sound of the missiles passing uncomfortably close to him. It was imperative that he recovered the blaster he had hidden in the hollow tree at the head of the valley. By this time, there would be a concerted search underway for him and he needed a better weapon than the solid missile projector he had taken from the policeman. He did not know how many shots the thing contained, but if it propelled solid missiles by chemical explosion there could not have been more than five or six such charges in the cylindrical part of the weapon which he had assumed to be the charge-holder. On the other hand, his blaster, a weapon of much greater power, contained enough energy for five hundred blasts, and with it were eight extra energy capsules giving him a total of four thousand five hundred blasts. Handling the two-wheeled vehicle was no particular problem. Although he had never ridden on anything of the sort before, it was child's play compared to controlling a hundredth century strato rocket and Horatska was a skilled rocket pilot. Several times he passed vehicles on the road. The passenger vehicles with enclosed cabins and cargo vehicles piled high with farm produce.  They scattered off the road in terror to approach. Fortunately he hit none of them, for at the speed at which he was travelling such a collision would have wrecked his light vehicle. As he approached the farm where he had spent the past few days he saw two passenger vehicles standing by the road. One was a black one similar to the one in which the physician had come to the farm and the other was white with black trimmings and bore the same device he had seen on the cap of the vehicle. A policeman was sitting in the driver's seat of this vehicle and another policeman was standing beside it, breathing smoke with one of the white paper cylinders these people used. In the farmyard two men were going about with a square black box. To this box a tube was connected by a wire and they were passing the tube about over the ground. The policeman who was standing beside the vehicle saw him approach and blew his whistle. Then drew the weapon from his belt. Haradska, who had been expecting some attempt to halt him had let go of the right hand steering handle and drawn his own weapon. As the policeman drew he fired at him. Without observing the effect of the shot he sped on. Before he had rounded the bend above the farm several shots were fired after him. A mile beyond he came to the place where he had hidden the blaster. He stopped the vehicle and jumped off, plunging into the brush and racing toward the hollow tree. Just as he reached it he heard a vehicle approach and stop and the door of the police vehicle slammed. Haradska's fingers found the belt of his blaster. He dragged it out and buckled it on, tossing away the missile weapon he had been carrying. Then crouching behind the tree a few moments later he caught a movement in the brush toward the road. He brought up the blaster, aimed and squeezed the trigger. There was a faint blueish glow at the muzzle and a blast of energy tore through the brush, smashing the molecular structure of everything that stood in the way. There was an involuntary shout of alarm from the direction of the road. At least one of the policemen had escaped the blast. Haradska holstered his weapon and crept away for some distance keeping under cover, then turned and waited for some sign of the presence of his enemies. For some time nothing happened. He decided to turn Hunter against the men who were hunting him. He started back in the direction of the road making a wide circle flitting silently from rock to bush and from bush to tree stopping often to look and listen. This finally brought him upon one of the policemen and almost terminated his flight at the same time. He must have grown overconfident and careless. Suddenly a weapon roared and a missile smashed through the brush inches from his face. The shot had come from his left and a little to the rear. Whirling he blasted four times in rapid succession, turned and fled for a few yards, dropped and crawling behind a rock. When he looked back he could see wisps of smoke rising from the shattered trees and brushes which had absorbed the energy output of his weapon and he caught a faint odor of burned flesh. One of his pursuers at least would pursue him no longer. He slipped away down into the tangle of ravines and hollows in which he had wandered the day before his arrival at the farm. For the time being he felt safe and finally confident that he was not being pursued he stopped to rest. The place where he stopped seemed familiar and he looked about. In a moment he recognized the little stream, the pool where he had bathed his feet, the clump of seedling pines under which he had slept. He even found the silver foil wrapping from the concentrate capsule. But there had been a change since the night when he had slept here. Then the young pines had been green and alive. Now they were blighted and their needles had turned brown. Frodska stood for a long time looking at them. It was the same blight that had touched the plants around the farmhouse and here, among the pine needles on the ground lay a dead bird. It took some time for him to admit to himself the implications of vegetation, the chickens, the cow, the farmer and his wife had all sickened and died. He had been in this place and now when he had returned he found that death had followed him here too. During the early centuries of the atomic era he knew there had been great wars, the stories of which had survived even to the hundredth century. Among the weapons that had been used there had been artificial plagues and epidemics caused by new types of bacteria developed in laboratories against which the victims had possessed no protection. Those germs and viruses had persisted for centuries and gradually had lost their power to harm mankind. Suppose now that he had brought some of them back with him to a century before they had been developed.  He thought of the vermin that had infested the clothing he had taken from the man he had killed on the other side of the mountain. They had not troubled him after the first day. There was a throbbing mechanical sound somewhere in the air. He looked about and finally identified its source. A small aircraft had come over the valley from the other side of the mountain and was circling lazily overhead. He froze, shrinking back under a pine tree. As long as he remained motionless he would not be seen and soon the thing would go away. He was beginning to understand why the search for him was being pressed so relentlessly. As long as he remained alive he was a menace to everybody in the first century world. He got out his supply of food concentrates, saw that he had only three capsules left and put them away again. For a long time he sat under the dying tree chewing on a twig and thinking. There must be some way in which he could overcome or even utilize his inherent deadliness to these people. He might find some isolated community conceal himself near it, invaded at night and infect it and then, when everybody was dead, move in and take it for himself. But was there any such isolated community? The farmhouse where he had worked had been fairly remote yet its inhabitants had been in communication with the outside world and the physician had come immediately in response to their call for help. The aircraft had been circling overhead, directly above the place where he lay hidden. For a while Fratska was afraid it had spotted him and was debating the advisability of using his blaster on it. Then it banked, turned and went away. He watched its circle over the valley on the other side of the mountain and got to his feet. Almost at once there was a new sound, a multiple throbbing at a quick snarling tempo that hinted at enormous power growing louder each second. Fratska stiffened and drew his blaster. As he did, five more aircraft swooped over the crest of the mountain and came rushing down toward him. Not aimlessly but as though they knew exactly where he was. As they approached the leading edges of their wings sparkled with light. Branches began flying from the trees about him and there was a loud hammering noise.  A wing flew from one of the aircraft and it plunged downward. Another came apart in the air, a third burst into flames. The other two zoomed upward quickl