of these 'saucers', they recognized the objects as antigrav
landing-disks from a spaceship. So I went to the Commission and raised
atomic blazes about it, and the _Ardrath_ was ordered to confine
operations to the lower areas of the Fifth Level. Then our people
on that time-line went to work with corrective action. Here."

He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Page after
page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen
the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last.

"The standard smother-out technique," Verkan Vall grinned. "I only
heard a little talk about the 'Flying Saucers', and all of that was in
joke. In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story
by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it--Wasn't that
the time-line the Tharmax Trading Corporation almost lost their
paratime license on?"

"That's right; it was! They bought up all the cigarettes, and caused a
conspicuous shortage, after Fourth Level cigarettes had been introduced
on this line and had become popular. They should have spread their
purchases over a number of lines, and kept them within the local
supply-demand frame. And they also got into trouble with the local
government for selling unrationed petrol and automobile tires. We had
to send in a special-operations group, and they came closer to having
to engage in out-time local politics than I care to think of." Tortha
Karf quoted a line from a currently popular song about the sorrows of
a policeman's life. "We're jugglers, Vall; trying to keep our traders
and sociological observers and tourists and plain idiots like the late
Gavran Sarn out of trouble; trying to prevent panics and disturbances
and dislocations of local economy as a result of our operations; trying
to keep out of out-time politics--and, at all times, at all costs and
hazards, by all means, guarding the secret of paratime transposition.
Sometimes I wish Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom had strangled in
their cradles!"

Verkan Vall shook his head. "No, chief," he said. "You don't mean that;
not really," he said. "We've been paratiming for the past ten thousand
years. When the Ghaldron-Hesthor trans-temporal field was discovered,
our ancestors had pretty well exhausted the resources of this planet.
We had a world population of half a billion, and it was all they could
do to keep alive. After we began paratime transposition, our population