Great Kings' War by Roland Green, John F. Carr Read Free Book Online Page B

stirring up the barbarians in the Sastragath. I have weighed his words and do not believe our Great King will march upon Hostigos unless so directed by the Great Council of Balph."
    "Then our own path is clear. Brothers, we must impose our will upon the Council, or this time next winter it will be our heads upon the walls of Balph!"

TWO
I
    Former Paratime Police Chief Tortha Karf stepped through the sliding door into the outer office of the Chief in the Paratime Police Headquarters. The door hissed shut behind him, cutting off the drumming of the rain on the landing stage. He unhooked his cloak and presented it to one of the green-uniformed Paratime Policemen on guard duty. It dripped water as the policeman headed for a closet, and the janitorial robot in one corner let out an electronic whimper as it detected damage to the carpet.
    For at least the hundredth time, Tortha wondered why First Level civilization couldn't manage weather control. A handful of Second Level civilizations and one or two Third Level ones managed it; it was talked about and sometimes experimented with on a few of the more advanced Fourth Level time-lines. On First Level, however, they'd conquered space, controlled gravity, converted mass directly into energy, learned the ultimate secret of paratemporal transposition, and still endured rain dripping on rugs.
    Also for the hundredth time, Tortha Karf came up with the answer almost at once. Any agreement on what the weather should be over a whole planet could only be a fragile, artificial one, sure to break down sooner or later. The human animal wasn't made to come to enduring agreements. The best Tortha had seen it do, in more than three centuries of watching its behavior on thousands of different time-lines, was to limit the extent of its disagreements.
    He'd also seen the ruins, usually radioactive, of a good many civilizations that hadn't even gone that far.
    First Level humanity had at least outgrown a higher percentage of the silliest delusions about itself than any other level. Not that this made it well behaved, let alone completely trustworthy—otherwise both Tortha Karf and the man he'd come to see could have spent their lives as something other than policemen. Yet a race that knew avoiding artificial agreements was worth a few wet rugs wasn't completely hopeless.
    That, Tortha reflected, was probably about as high as the human animal could reach, at least until the next evolutionary step was achieved. Waiting for that day to arrive would keep the Paratime Police busy for the next four or five hundred millennia.
    Ex-Chief Tortha straightened his neckcloth as he approached the familiar secretary's desk beside the door to his former office. He wore a civilian tunic and breeches, although as a former Chief Tortha had the right to wear the uniform of the Paratime Police for the rest of his life. However, it was only thirty-two days since people had stopped calling him "Chief" and started calling him citizen. The less he wore his uniform, the faster they would think of him as citizen and remember the man they now called "Chief."
    Before he could reach the anteroom, Tortha was bumped aside by the stocky figure of Barton Shar, Deputy Inspector in charge of Stores and Equipment, his face beet red and all but puffing steam.
    Tortha used his own not inconsiderable girth to bump back and Barton turned, with fist raised, until he recognized his former boss. "Oh! Sorry, Chief."
    Barton had once thought he was on the fast track to being the new Paratime Chief, but Tortha had gradually shunted the bean-counter aside for Verkan, who was as good in the field as he was in the office—maybe better. Tortha had never liked nor trusted Barton Shar, and had assigned him to a place where he thought he couldn't do any harm—Stores and Equipment. Somehow Barton, over the past century, had managed to turn it into a rather large fiefdom.
    "In a rush, Inspector? What's the emergency? I don't see any Code Yellow or Red