He recorded a message announcing the arrival of the task-force, pulled out the tape and sealed it in a capsule, and put the capsule in a mesh message 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 would rematerialize, eject a parachute, and turn on a whistle to call attention to itself.  Then he sealed on his helmet, climbed into an aircar, and turned on his helmet-radio to speak to the driver.  The car lifted a few inches, floated out an open port, and dived downward.

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[Illustration:]

He landed at the big conveyer-head building.  There were spaces for fifty conveyers around it, and all but eight of them were in place.  One must have arrived since the gas bombs burst; it was crammed with senseless Kharanda slaves.  A couple of Paratime Police officers were towing a tank of sleep-gas around on an antigrav-lifter, maintaining the proper concentration in case any more came in.  At the smaller conveyer building, there were no conveyers, only a number of red-lined fifty-foot circles around a central two-hundred-foot circle.  The Organization personnel there had been dragged outside, and a group of paracops were sealing it up, installing robot watchmen, and preparing to flood it with gas.  At the slave pens, a string of two-hundred-foot conveyers, having unloaded soldiers and fighting-gear, were coming in to take on unconscious slaves for transposition to Police Terminal.  Aircars and airboats were bringing in gassed slavers; they were being shackled and dumped into the slave barracks; as soon as the gas cleared and they could be brought back to consciousness, they would be narco-hypnotized and questioned.

He had finished a tour of the warehouses, looking at the kegs of gunpowder and the casks of brandy, the piles of pig lead, the stacks of cases containing muskets.  These must have all come from some low-order handcraft time line.  Then there were swords and hatchets and knives that had been made on Industrial Sector—­the Organization must be getting them through some legitimate trading company—­and mirrors and perfumes and synthetic fiber textiles and cheap jewelry, of similar provenance.  It looked as though this stuff had been brought in by ship from somewhere else on this time line; the warehouses were too far from the conveyers and right beside the ship dock—­

There was a tremendous explosion somewhere.  Vall and the men with him ran outside, looking about, the sound-phones of their helmets giving them no idea of the source of the sound.  One of the policemen pointed, and Vall’s eyes followed his arm.  The ship that had been transposed in in the big conveyer was falling, blown in half; as he looked, both sections hit the ground several miles away.  A strange ship, a freighter, was coming in fast, and as he watched, a blue spark winked from her bow as a heavy-duty blaster was activated.  There was another explosion, overhead; they all ran for shelter as Vall’s command-conveyer disintegrated into falling scrap-metal.  At once, all the other conveyers which were on antigrav began flashing and vanishing.  That was the right, the only, thing to do, he knew.  But it was leaving him and his men isolated and under attack.