designation and the base-line designation."

"You have the base-line designation?" Vall demanded.

"Oh, yes. That's what I was telling you. We worked that out from the
designations you gave me." He recited it. "All the designations you
gave me are--"

Vall wasn't listening to him. He frowned in puzzlement.

"That's not a Fifth Level designation," he said. "That's First Level!"

"That's correct. First Level Abzar Sector."

"Now why in blazes didn't anybody think of that before?" he marveled,
and as he did, he knew the answer. Nobody ever thought of the Abzar
sector.

[Illustration:]

Twelve millennia ago, the world of the First Level had been
exhausted; having used up the resources of their home planet, Mars, a
hundred thousand years before, the descendants of the population that
had migrated across space had repeated on the third planet the
devastation of the fourth. The ancestors of Verkan Vall's people had
discovered the principle of paratime transposition and had begun to
exploit an infinity of worlds on other lines of probability. The
people of the First Level Dwarma Sector, reduced by sheer starvation
to a tiny handful, had abandoned their cities and renounced their
technologies and created for themselves a farm-and-village culture