gulliedplain, sparsely grown with thornbush. "The base ought to be aboutthere, but we have no idea what sort of changes this gang has made."
"Well, we couldn't: we didn't dare take the chance of it beingspotted. This has to be a complete surprise. It'll be about like theother place, the one the slaves described. There won't be anypermanent buildings. This operation only started a few months ago,with the Croutha invasion; it may go on for four or five months, tillthe Croutha have all their surplus captives sold off. That country,"he added, gesturing at the screen, "will be flooded out when the rainscome. See how it's suffered from flood-erosion. There won't be a thingthere that can't be knocked down and transposed out in a day or so."
"I wish you'd let me go along," Ranthar Jard worried.
"We can't do that, either," Vall said. "Somebody's got to be in chargehere, and you know your own people better than I do. Beside, thiswon't be the last operation like this. Next time, I'll have to stay onPolice Terminal and command from a desk; I want first-hand experiencewith the outtime end of the job, and this is the only way I can getit."
He watched the four police-girls who were working at the big terrainboard showing the area of the Police Terminal time line around them.They had covered the miniature buildings and platforms and towers witha fine mesh, at a scale-equivalent of fifty feet; each intersectionmarked the location of a three-foot conveyer ball, loaded with asleep-gas bomb and rigged with an automatic detonator which wouldexplode it and release the gas as soon as it rematerialized on theAbzar Sector. Higher, on stiff wires that raised them to whatrepresented three thousand feet, were the disks that stood for tenhundred-foot conveyers; they would carry squads of Paratime Police inaircars and thirty-foot air boats. There was a ring of bigtwo-hundred-foot conveyers a mile out; they would carry the armor andthe airborne infantry and the little two-man scooters of theair-cavalry, from the Service and Industrial Sectors. Directly overthe spatial equivalent of the Kholghoor Sector Wizard Traders'conveyers was the single disk of Verkan Vall's command conveyer, at arepresented five thousand feet, and in a half-mile circle around itwere the five news service conveyers.
"Where's the ship-conveyer?" he asked.
"Actually it's on antigrav about five miles north of here," one of thegirls said. "Representationally, about where Subchief Ranthar'sstanding."
Another girl added a few more bits to the network that represented thesleep-gas bombs and stepped back, taking off her earphones.
"Everything's in place, now, Assistant Verkan," she told him.
"Good. I'm going aboard, now," he said. "You can have it, Jard."
He shook hands with Ranthar Jard, who moved to the switch which wouldactivate all the conveyers simultaneously, and accepted the goodwishes of the girls at the terrain board. Then he walked to themesh-covered dome of the hundred-foot conveyer, with the five newsservice conveyers surrounding it in as regular a circle as thebuildings and towers of the regular conveyer heads would permit. Themembers of his own detail, smoking and chatting outside, saw him andstarted moving inside; so did the news people. A public-addressspeaker began yelping, in a hundred voices all over the area, warningthose who were going with the conveyers to get aboard. He went inthrough a door, between two aircars, and on to the centralcontrol-desks, going up to a visiscreen over which somebody hadcrayoned "Novilan EQ." It gave him a view, over the shoulder of a manin the uniform of a field agent third class, of the interior of aconveyer like his own.
* * * * *
"Hello, Assistant Verkan," a voice came out of the speaker under thescreen, as the man moved his lips. "Deputy Skordran! Here's Chief'sAssistant Verkan, now!"
Skordran Kirv moved in front of the screen as the operator got up fromhis stool.
"Hello, Vall; we're all set to move out as soon as you give the word,"he said. "We're all in position on antigrav."
"That's smart work. We've just finished our gas-bomb net," Vall said."Going on antigrav now," he added, as he felt the dome lift. "I hopeyou won't be too disappointed if you draw a blank on your end."
"We realize that they've closed out the whole Esaron Sector," SkordranKirv, eight thousand odd miles away, replied. "We're taking in acouple of ships; we're going to make a survey all up the coast. Thereare a lot of other sectors where slaves can be sold in this area."
In the outside viewscreen, tuned to a slowly rotating pickup on thetop of a tower spatially equivalent with a room in a tall building onSecond Level Triplanetary Empire Sector, he could see his own conveyerrising vertically, with the news conveyers following, and the troopconveyers, several miles away, coming into position. Finally, theywere all placed; he reported the fact to Skordran Kirv and then pickedup a hand-phone.
"Everybody ready for transposition?" he called. "On my count. Thirtyseconds ... Twenty seconds ... Fifteen seconds ... Five seconds ...Four seconds ... Three seconds ... Two seconds ... One second, _out!_"
All the screens went gray. The inside of the dome passed into anotherspace-time continuum, even into another kind of space-time. Thetransposition would take half an hour; that seemed to be the timeneeded to build up and collapse the transposition field, regardless ofthe paratemporal distance covered. The dome above and around themvanished; the bare, tower-forested, building-dotted world of PoliceTerminal vanished, too, into the uniform green of the uninhabitedFifth Level. A planet could take pretty good care of itself, hethought, if people would only leave it alone. Then he began to see thefields and villages of Fourth Level. Cities appeared and vanished,growing higher and vaster as they went across the more civilized ThirdLevel. One was under air attack--there was almost never a paratemporaltransposition which did not run through some scene of battle.
He unbuckled his belt and took off his boots and tunic; all aroundhim, the others were doing the same. Sleep-gas didn't have to bebreathed; it could enter the nervous system by any orifice or lesion,even a pore or a scratch. A spacesuit was the only protection. One ofthe detectives helped him on with his metal and plastic armor; beforesealing his gauntlets, he reciprocated the assistance, then checkedthe needler and blaster and the long batonlike ultrasonic paralyzer onhis belt and made sure that the radio and sound-phones in his helmetwere working. He hoped that the frantic efforts to gather severalthousand spacesuits onto Police Terminal from the Industrial andCommercial and Interplanetary Sectors hadn't started rumors which hadgotten to the ears of some of the Organization's ubiquitous agents.
* * * * *
The country below was already turning to the parched browns andyellows of the Abzar Sector. There was not another of the conveyers insight, but electronic and mechanical lag in the individual controlsand even the distance-difference between them and the central radiocontrol would have prevented them from going into transposition at thesame fractional microsecond. The recon-details began piling into theircars. Then the red light overhead winked to green, and the domeflickered and solidified into cold, inert metal. The screens lightedup again, and Vall could see Skordran Kirv, across Asia and thePacific, getting into his helmet. A dot of light in the center of theunderview screen widened as the mesh under the conveyer irised openaround the pickup.
Below, the Organization base--big rectangles of fenced slave pens,with metal barracks inside; the huge circle of the Kholghoor Sectorconveyer-head building, and a smaller structure that must houseconveyers to other Abzar Sector time lines; the work-shops and livingquarters and hangars and warehouses and docks--was wreathed inwhite-green mist. The ring of conveyers at three thousand feet wereopening and spewing out aircars and airboats, farther away, thegreater ring of heavy conveyers were unloading armored and shieldedcombat-craft. An aircar which must have been above the reach of thegas was streaking away toward the west, with three police cars afterit. As he watched, the air around it fairly sizzled blue with the raysof neutron disruption blasters, and then it blew apart. The threepolice cars turned and came back more slowly. The three-thousand-tonpassenger ship which had been hastily fitted with armament
wascircling about; the great dock conveyer which had brought it was gone,transposed back to Police Terminal to pick up another ship.
He recorded a message announcing the arrival of the task-force, pulledout the tape and sealed it in a capsule, and put the capsule in a meshmessage ball, attaching it to a couple of wires and flipping a switch.The ball flashed and vanished, leaving the wires cleanly sheared off.When it got back to Police Terminal, half an hour later, it wouldrematerialize, eject a parachute, and turn on a whistle to callattention to itself. Then he sealed on his helmet, climbed into anaircar, and turned on his helmet-radio to speak to the driver. The carlifted a few inches, floated out an open port,