Vall opened a slide under the screen and saw that the photoprint film
was in place, then closed it again, nodding. Skordran Kirv fed a sheet
of paper into his screen cabinet and his arm moved forward out of the
picture.

"On, sir," he said. He and Vall counted ten seconds together, and then
Skordran Kirv said: "Through to you." Vall pressed a lever under his
screen, and a rectangle of microcopy print popped out.

"That's about all I have, sir. Want me to keep my troops ready here,
or shall I send them somewhere else?"

"Keep them ready, Kirv," Vall told him. "You may need them before
long. Call you later."

He put the microcopy in an enlarger, and carried the enlarged print
with him to the conveyer room. There was something odd about the list
of time line designations. They were expressed numerically, in First
Level notation; extremely short groups of symbols capable of exact
expression of almost inconceivably enormous numbers. Vall had only a
general-education smattering of mathematics--enough to qualify him for
the chair of Higher Mathematics at any university on, say, the Fourth
Level Europo-American Sector--and he could not identify the
peculiarity, but he could recognize that there existed some sort of
pattern. Shoving in the starting lever, he relaxed in one of the
chairs, waiting for the transposition field to build up around him,
and fell asleep before the mesh dome of the conveyer had vanished. He
woke, the list of time line designations in his hand, when the
conveyor rematerialized on Home Time Line. Putting it in his pocket,