cked up after
him.

"... And should be avoided unless such suggestion is intended," Dalla
finished.

Skordran Kirv laughed, opening another, inner door, and stood aside.
In what had been the paratimers' recreation room, most of the
furniture had been shoved into the corners. Four small tables had been
set up, widely spaced and with screens between; across each of them,
with an electric recorder between, an almost naked Kharanda slave
faced a Paratime Police psychist. At a long table at the far side of
the room, four men and two girls were working over stacks of cards and
two big charts.

"Phrakor Vuln," the man who was working on the charts introduced
himself. "Synthesist." He introduced the others.

Vall made a point of the fact that Dalla was his wife, in case any of
the cops began to get ideas, and mentioned that she spoke Kharanda,
had spent some time on the Fourth Level Kholghoor, and was a qualified
psychist.

"What have you got, so far?" he asked.

"Two different time lines, and two different gangs of Wizard
Traders," Phrakor Vuln said. "We've established the latter from
physical descriptions and because both batches were sold by the
Croutha at equivalent periods of elapsed time."

Vall picked up one of the kidnap-story cards and glanced at it.

"I notice there's a fair verbal description of these firearms, and
mention of electric whips," he said. "I'm curious about where they
came from."

"Well, this is how we reconstructed them, Chief's Assistant," one of
the girls said, handing him a couple of sheets of white drawing paper.

The sketches had been done with soft pencil; they bore repeated
erasures and corrections. That of the whip showed a cylindrical
handle, indicated as twelve inches in length and one in diameter,
fitted with a thumb-switch.

"That's definitely Second Level Khiftan," Vall said, handing it back.
"Made of braided copper or silver wire and powered with a little
nuclear-conversion battery in the grip. They heat up to about two
hundred centigrade; produce really painful burns."

"Why, that's beastly!" Dalla exclaimed.

"Anything on the Khiftan Sector is." Skordran Kirv looked at the four
slaves at the tables. "We don't have a really bad case here, now. A
few of these people were lash-burned horribly, though."

Vall was looking at the other sketches. One was a musket, with a wide
butt and a band-fastened stock; the lock-mechanism, vaguely flintlock,
had been dotted in tentativel