"Well, what else did you expect?" he demanded. "This was the logical
next move. BuPsychHyg is supposed to detect anybody who believes in
looking out for his own interests first, and condition him into a
pious law-abiding sucker. Well, the sacred Bureau of Sucker-Makers
slipped up on a lot of us. It's a natural alibi for Tortha Karf."
"It's also a lot of grief for all of us," the young man in the
wrap-around tunic added. "I don't want my psychotests reviewed by some
duty-struck bigot who can't be reasoned with, and neither do you."
"I'm getting something organized to counter that," Salgath Trod said.
"I'm going to attack the whole scientific basis of psychotesting.
There's Dr. Frasthor Klav; he's always contended that what are called
criminal tendencies are the result of the individual's total
environment, and that psychotesting and personality-analysis are
valueless, because the total environment changes from day to day, even
from hour to hour--"
"That won't do," the nameless young man who was the messenger of
somebody equally nameless retorted. "Frasthor's a crackpot; no
reputable psychologist or psychist gives his opinions a moment's
consideration. And besides, we don't want to attack Psychological
Hygiene. The people in it with whom we can do business are our
safeguard; they've given all of us a clean bill of mental health, and
we have papers to prove it. What we have to do is to make it appear
that that incident on the Esaron Sector is all there is to this, and
also involve the Paratime Police themselves. The slavers are all
paracops. It isn't the fault of BuPsychHyg, because the Paratime
Police have their own psychotesting staff. That's where the trouble
is; the paracops haven't been adequately testing their own personnel."
"Now how are you going to do that?" Salgath Trod asked disdainfully.
"You'll take the floor, the first thing tomorrow, and utilize these
new revelations about the Wizard Traders. You'll accuse the Paratime
Police of being the Wizard Traders themselves. Why not? They have
their own paratemporal transposition equipment shops on Police
Terminal, they have facilities for manufacturing duplicates of any
kind of outtime items, like the firearms, for instance, and they know
which time lines on which sectors are being exploited by legitimate
paratime traders and which aren't. What's to prevent a gang of
unscrupulous paracops from moving in on a few unexploited Kholghoor
time lines, buying captives from the Croutha, and shipping them to the
Esaron Sector?"
"Then why would they let a thing like this get out?" Salgath Trod
inquired.
"Somebody slipped up and moved a lot of slaves onto an exploited
Esaron time line. Or, rather, Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs
established a plantation on a time line they were shipping slaves to.
Parenthetically, that's what really did happen; the mistake our people
made was in not closing out that time line as soon as Consolidated
Foodstuffs moved in," the young man said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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