-brown hair, in loose shirts and baggy trousers and
rough cowhide buskins. Many of them wore bowl-shaped helmets, some had
shirts of ring-mail, all of them carried long straight swords with
cross-hilts, and about half of them had pistols thrust through their
belts or muskets slung from their shoulders.

The other set of pictures showed the Wizard Trader camps and conveyer
heads. In each case, a wide oval had been burned out in the jungle,
probably with heavy-duty heat guns. The camps were surrounded with
stout wire-mesh fence: in each there were a number of metal
prefab-huts, and an inner fenced slave-pen. A trail had been cut from
each to a similarly cleared circle farther back in the forest, and in
the centers of one or two of these circles he saw the actual conveyer
domes. There was a great deal of activity in all of them, and he
screwed the magnification-adjustment to the limit to scrutinize each
human figure in turn. A few of the men, he was sure, were First Level
Citizens; more were either Proles or outtimers. Quite a few of them
were of a dark, heavy-featured, black-bearded type.

"Some of these fellows look like Second Level Khiftans," he said.
"Rush an individual picture of each one, maximum magnification
consistent with clarity, to Dhergabar Equivalent to be transposed to
Home Time Line. You get all the dope from Zulthran Torv?"

"Yes; Abzar Sector," Ranthar Jard said. "I'd never have thought of
that. Wonder why they used that series system, though. I'd have tried
to spot my operations as completely at random as possible."

"Only thing they could have done," Vall said. "When we get hold of one
of their conveyers, we're going to find the control panel's just a
mess of arbitrary symbols, and there'll be something like a
computer-machine built into the control cabinet, to select the right
time line whenever a dial's set or a button pushed, and the only way
that could be done would be by establishing some kind of a numerical
series. And we were trustingly expecting to locate their base from one
of their conveyers! Why, if we give all those people in the pictures
narco-hyps, we won't learn the base-line designation; none of them
will know it. They just go where the conveyers take them."

"Well, we're all set now," Ranthar Jard said. "I have a plan of attack
worked out; subject to your approval, I'm ready to start implementing
it now." He glanced at his watch. "The Salgath telecast is over, on
Home Time Line, a