"
"Ha, that's what I wanted to do!" Stranor Sleth exclaimed. "And who
stopped me? I'll give you just one guess."
"Well, it seems there was slackness here, but it wasn't Stranor Sleth
who was slack," Verkan Vall commented.
"Well! I must say; I never thought I'd hear an officer of the Paratime
Police criticizing me for trying to operate inside the Paratime
Transposition Code!" Brannad Klav exclaimed.
Verkan Vall, sitting on the edge of Stranor Sleth's desk, aimed his
cigarette at Brannad Klav like a blaster.
"Now, look," he began. "There is one, and only one, inflexible law
regarding outtime activities. The secret of paratime transposition
must be kept inviolate, and any activity tending to endanger it is
prohibited. That's why we don't allow the transposition of any object
of extraterrestrial origin to any time-line on which space travel has
not been developed. Such an object may be preserved, and then, after
the local population begin exploring the planet from whence it came,
there will be dangerous speculations and theories as to how it
arrived on Terra at such an early date. I came within inches,
literally, of getting myself killed, not long ago, cleaning up the
result of a violation of that regulation. For the same reason, we
don't allow the export, to outtime natives, of manufactured goods too
far in advance of their local culture. That's why, for instance, you
people have to hand-finish all those big Yat-Zar idols, to remove
traces of machine work.
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