chocolate-brown, now; his hair was jet-black, and so were his eyes.
And in his subconscious mind, instantly available to consciousness,
was a vast body of knowledge about conditions on the Akor-Neb sector,
as well as a complete command of the local language, all hypnotically
acquired.

He knew that he was looking down upon one of the minor provincial
cities of a very respectably advanced civilization. A civilization
which built its cities vertically, since it had learned to counteract
gravitation. A civilization which still depended upon natural cereals
for food, but one which had learned to make the most efficient use of
its soil. The network of dams and irrigation canals which he saw was
as good as anything on his own paratime level. The wide dispersal of
buildings, he knew, was a heritage of a series of disastrous atomic
wars of several thousand years before; the Akor-Neb people had come to
love the wide inter-vistas of open country and forest, and had
continued to scatter their buildings, even after the necessity had
passed. But the slim, towering buildings could only have been reared
by a people who had banished nationalism and, with it, the threat of
total war. He contrasted them with the ground-hugging dome cities of
the Khiftan civilization, only a few thousand parayears distant.

Three men came out of the lounge behind him and joined him. One was,
like himself, a disguised paratimer from the First Level--the Outtime
Export and Import man, Zortan Brend, here known as Brarnend of Zorda.
The other two were Akor-Neb people, and both wore the black tunics and
the winged-bullet badges of the Society of Assassins. Unlike Verkan
Vall and Zortan Brend, who wore shoulder holsters under their short
tunics, the Assassins openly displayed pistols and knives on their
belts.