them. There was a fifty-foot conveyer dome inside, and a fifty-foot
red-lined circle that marked the transposition point of an outtime
conveyer. They all entered the dome, and the operator put on the
transposition field.

"You haven't heard the worst of it yet." Skordran Kirv was saying. "On
this time line, we have reason to think that the native,
Nebu-hin-Abenoz, who bought the slaves, actually saw the slavers'
conveyer. Maybe even saw it activated."

"If he did, we'll either have to capture him and give him a
memory-obliteration, or kill him," Vall said. "What do you know about
him?"

"Well, this Careba, the town he bosses, is a little walled town up in
the hills. Everybody there is related to everybody else; this man we
have, Coru-hin-Irigod, is the son of a sister of Nebu-hin-Abenoz's
wife. They're all bandits and slavers and cattle rustlers and what
have you. For the last ten years, Nebu-hin-Abenoz has been buying
slaves from some secret source. Before the Kholghoor Sector people
began coming in, they were mostly white, with a few brown people who
might have been Polynesians. No Negroes--there's no black race on this
sector, and I suppose the paratime slavers didn't want too many
questions asked. Coru-hin-Irigod, under narco-hypnosis, said that they
were all outlanders, speaking strange languages."

"Ten years! And this is the first hint we've had of it," Vall said.
"That's not a bright mark for any of us. I'll bet the slave population
on some of these Esaron time lines is an anthropologist's nightmare."