"H. Beam Piper - Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

H. Beam Pipper

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
TORTHA Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, told himself to stop fretting. He was
only three hundred years old, so by the barest life-expectancy of his race he
was good for another two centuries. Two hundred more days wouldn't matter.
Then it would be Year-End Day, and precisely at midnight, he would rise from
this chair and Verkan Vall would sit down in it, and after that he would be
free to raise grapes and lemons and wage guerrilla war against the rabbits on
the island of Sicily, which he owned outright on one uninhabited Fifth Level
time-line. He wondered how long it would take Vall to become as tired of the
Chief's seat as he was now.
Actually, Karf knew, Verkan Vall had never wanted to be Chief. Prestige and
authority meant little to him, and freedom much. Vall liked to work outtime.
But it was a job somebody had to do, and it was the job for which Vall had
been trained, so he'd take it, and do it, Karf suspected, better than he'd
done it himself. The job of policing a near-infinity of worlds, each of which
was this same planet Earth, would be safe with Verkan Vall.
Twelve thousand years ago, facing extinction on an exhausted planet, the First
Level race had discovered the existence of a second, lateral, time dimension
and a means of physical transposition to and from a near-infinity of worlds of
alternate probability parallel to their own. So the conveyers had
gone out by stealth, bringing back wealth to Home Time-Line a little from this
one, a little from that, never enough to be missed anywhen.
It all had to be policed. Some paratimers were less than scrupulous in dealing
with outtime races he'd have retired ten years ago except for the discovery of
a huge paratemporal slave-trade, only recently smashed. More often, somebody's
bad luck or indiscretion would endanger the Paratime Secret, or some incident-
nobody's fault, something that just happened' would have to be explained away.
But, at all costs, the Paratime Secret must be preserved. Not merely the
actual technique of transposition-that went without saying-but the very
existence of a race possessing it. If for no other reason (and there were many
others), it would be utterly immoral to make any outtime race live with the
knowledge that there w 'ere among them aliens indistinguishable from
themselves, watching and exploiting. It was a big police-beat.
Second Level that had been civilized almost as long as the First, but there
had been dark-age interludes. Except for paratemporal transposition, most of
its sectors equaled First Level, and from many, Home Time Line had learned
much. The Third Level civilizations were more recent, but still of respectable
antiquity and advancement. Fourth Level had started late and progressed
slowly; some Fourth Level genius was first domesticating animals long after
the steam engine was obsolescent all over the Third. And Fifth Level on a few
sectors, subhuman brutes, speechless and fireless, were cracking nuts and each
other's heads with stones, and on most of it nothing even vaguely humanoid had
appeared.
Fourth Level was the big one. The others had devolved from low-probability
genetic accidents; it was the maximum probability. It was divided into many
sectors and subsectors, on most of which human civilization had first appeared
in the valleys of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates, and on the Indus and Yangtze.
Europo-American Sector they might have to pull out of that entirely, but that