, well, he'd been drinking; it would all come back
to him, after a while.

* * * * *

Verkan Vall rubbed his hand over his face wearily, started to light
another cigarette, and threw it across the room in disgust. What he
needed was a drink--a long drink of cool, tart white wine, laced with
brandy--and then he needed to sleep.

"We're absolutely nowhere!" Ranthar Jard said. "Of course they're
operating on time lines we've never penetrated. The fact that they're
supplying the Croutha with guns proves that; there isn't a firearm on
any of the time lines our people are legitimately exploiting. And
there are only about three billion time lines on this belt of the
Croutha invasion--"

"If we could think of a way to reduce it to some specific area of
paratime--" one of Ranthar Jard's deputies began.

"That's precisely what we've been trying to do, Klav," Vall said. "We
haven't done it."

Dalla, who had withdrawn from the discussion and was on a couch at the
side of the room, surrounded by reports and abstracts and summaries,
looked up.

"I took hours and hours of hypno-mech on Kholghoor Sector religions,
before I went out on that wild-goose chase for psychokinesis and
precognition data," she said. "About six or eight hundred years ago,
there were religious wars and heresies and religious schisms all over
the Kharanda country. No matter how uniform the Kholghoor Sector may
be otherwise, there are dozens and dozens of small belts and
sub-sectors of different religions or sects or god-cults."

"That's right," Ranthar Jard agreed, brightening. "We have
hagiologists who know all that stuff; we'll have a couple of them
interrogate those slaves. I don't know how much they can get out of
them--lot of peasants, won't be up on the theological niceties--but a
synthesis of what we get from the lot of them--"

"That's an idea," Vall agreed. "About the first idea we've had,
here--Oh, how about politics, too? Check on who's the king, what the
stories about the royal family are, that sort of thing."

Ranthar Jard looked at the map on the wall. "The Croutha have only
gotten halfway to Nharkan, here. Say we transpose detectives in at
night on some of these time lines we think are promising, and check
up at the tax-collection offices on a big landowner north of Jhirda
named Ghromdour? That might get us something."

"Well, I don't want you to think we're trying to get out of work,
Chief's Assistant,"