"Right, sir. Twenty seconds to blast, when you're ready."

"Ready now." Verkan Vall relaxed, counting seconds subconsciously.

The rocket trembled, and Verkan Vall felt himself being pushed gently
back against the upholstery. The seats, and the pilot's instrument panel
in front of them, swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicator
swept slowly over a ninety-degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled.
By then, the high cirrus clouds Verkan Vall had watched from the field
were far below; they were well into the stratosphere.

There would be nothing to do, now, for the three hours in which the
rocket sped northward across the pole and southward to Dhergabar; the
navigation was entirely in the electronic hands of the robot controls.
Verkan Vall got out his pipe and lit it; the pilot lit a cigarette.

"That's an odd pipe, sir," the pilot said. "Out-time item?"

"Yes, Fourth Probability Level; typical of the whole paratime belt I was
working in." Verkan Vall handed it over for inspection. "The bowl's
natural brier-root; the stem's a sort of plastic made from the sap of
certain tropical trees. The little white dot is the maker's trademark;
it's made of elephant tusk."

"Sounds pretty crude to me, sir." The pilot handed it back. "Nice
workmanship, though. Looks like good machine production."

"Yes. The sector I was on is really quite advanced, for an
electro-chemical civilization. That weapon I brought back with
me--that solid-missile projector--is typical of most Fourth Level
culture. Moving parts machined to the closest tolerances, and
interchangeable with similar parts of all similar weapons. The missile
is a small bolt of cupro-alloy coated lead, propelled by expanding
gases from the ignition of some nitro-cellulose compound. Most of
their scientific advance occurred within the past century, and most
of that in the past forty years. Of course, the life-expectancy on
that level is only about seventy years."

"Humph! I'm seventy-eight, last birthday," the boyish-looking pilot
snorted. "Their medical science must be mostly witchcraft!"

"Until quite recently, it was," Verkan Vall agreed. "Same story there
as in everything else--rapid advancement in the past few decades, after
thousands of years of cultural inertia."

"You know, sir, I don't really understand this paratime stuff," the
pilot confessed. "I know that all time is totally present, and that
every moment has its own past-future line of event-sequence, an