He shook hands with Ranthar Jard, who moved to the switch which would activate all the conveyers simultaneously, and accepted the good wishes of the girls at the terrain board.  Then he walked to the mesh-covered dome of the hundred-foot conveyer, with the five news service conveyers surrounding it in as regular a circle as the buildings and towers of the regular conveyer heads would permit.  The members of his own detail, smoking and chatting outside, saw him and started moving inside; so did the news people.  A public-address speaker began yelping, in a hundred voices all over the area, warning those who were going with the conveyers to get aboard.  He went in through a door, between two aircars, and on to the central control-desks, going up to a visiscreen over which somebody had crayoned “Novilan EQ.”  It gave him a view, over the shoulder of a man in the uniform of a field agent third class, of the interior of a conveyer like his own.

* * * * *

“Hello, Assistant Verkan,” a voice came out of the speaker under the screen, as the man moved his lips.  “Deputy Skordran!  Here’s Chief’s Assistant Verkan, now!”

Skordran Kirv moved in front of the screen as the operator got up from his 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 hope you won’t be too disappointed if you draw a blank on your end.”

“We realize that they’ve closed out the whole Esaron Sector,” Skordran Kirv, eight thousand odd miles away, replied.  “We’re taking in a couple of ships; we’re going to make a survey all up the coast.  There are a lot of other sectors where slaves can be sold in this area.”

In the outside viewscreen, tuned to a slowly rotating pickup on the top of a tower spatially equivalent with a room in a tall building on Second Level Triplanetary Empire Sector, he could see his own conveyer rising vertically, with the news conveyers following, and the troop conveyers, several miles away, coming into position.  Finally, they were all placed; he reported the fact to Skordran Kirv and then picked up a hand-phone.

“Everybody ready for transposition?” he called.  “On my count.  Thirty seconds ...  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 another space-time continuum, even into another kind of space-time.  The transposition would take half an hour; that seemed to be the time needed to build up and collapse the transposition field, regardless of the paratemporal distance covered.  The dome above and around them vanished; the bare, tower-forested, building-dotted world of Police Terminal