Verkan Vall’s handsome features became even more immobile than usual as he mentally pronounced the verbal trigger symbols which should bring hypnotically acquired knowledge into his conscious mind. Then he shook his head.
“Must be a singularly well-behaved sector, sir,” he said. “Or else we’ve been lucky, so far. I never was on an Akor-Neb operation; don’t even have a hypno-mech for that sector. All I know is from general reading.
“Like all the Second Level, its time-lines descend from the probability of one or more shiploads of colonists having come to Terra from Mars about seventy-five to a hundred thousand years ago, and then having been cut off from the home planet and forced to develop a civilization of their own here. The Akor-Neb civilization is of a fairly high culture-order, even for Second Level. An atomic-power, interplanetary culture; gravity-counteraction, direct conversion of nuclear energy to electrical power, that sort of thing. We buy fine synthetic plastics and fabrics from them.” He fingered the material of his smartly-cut green police uniform. “I think this cloth is Akor-Neb. We sell a lot of Venusian zerfa-leaf; they smoke it, straight and mixed with tobacco. They have a single System-wide government, a single race, and a universal language. They’re a dark-brown race, which evolved in its present form about fifty thousand years ago; the present civilization is about ten thousand years old, developed out of the wreckage of several earlier civilizations which decayed or fell through wars, exhaustion of resources, et cetera. They have legends, maybe historical records, of their extraterrestrial origin.”
Tortha Karf nodded. “Pretty good, for consciously acquired knowledge,” he commented. “Well, our luck’s run out, on that sector; we have troubles there, now. I want you to go iron them out. I know, you’ve been going pretty hard, lately—that night-hound business, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, wasn’t any picnic. But the fact is that a lot of my ordinary and deputy assistants have a little too much regard for the alleged sanctity of human life, and this is something that may need some pretty drastic action.”
“Some of our people getting out of line?” Verkan Vall asked.
“Well, the data isn’t too complete, but one of our people has run into trouble on that sector, and needs rescuing—a psychic-science researcher, a young lady named Hadron Dalla. I believe you know her, don’t you?” Tortha Karf asked innocently.
“Slightly,” Verkan Vall deadpanned. “I enjoyed a brief but rather hectic companionate-marriage with her, about twenty years ago. What sort of a jam’s little Dalla got herself into, now?”
“Well, frankly, we don’t know. I hope she’s still alive, but I’m not unduly optimistic. It seems that about a year ago, Dr. Hadron transposed to the Second Level, to study alleged proof of reincarnation which the Akor-Neb people were reported to possess. She went to Gindrabar, on Venus, and transposed to the Second Paratime Level, to a station maintained by Outtime Import & Export Trading Corporation—a zerfa plantation just east of the High Ridge country. There she assumed an identity as the daughter of a planter, and took the name of Dallona of Hadron. Parenthetically, all Akor-Neb family-names are prepositional; family-names were originally place names. I believe that ancient Akor-Neb marital relations were too complicated to permit exact establishment of paternity. And all Akor-Neb men’s personal names have -irz- or -arn- inserted in the middle, and women’s names end in -itra- or -ona. You could call yourself Virzal of Verkan, for instance.
“Anyhow, she made the Second Level Venus-Terra trip on a regular passenger liner, and landed at the Akor-Neb city of Ghamma, on the upper Nile. There she established contact with the Outtime Trading Corporation representative, Zortan Brend, locally known as Brarnend of Zorda. He couldn’t call himself Brarnend of Zortan—in the Akor-Neb language, zortan is a particularly nasty dirty-word. Hadron Dalla spent a few weeks at his residence, briefing herself on local conditions. Then she went to the capital city, Darsh, in eastern Europe, and enrolled as a student at something called the Independent Institute for Reincarnation Research, having secured a letter of introduction to its director, a Dr. Harnosh of Hosh.