tch.
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.

* * * * *

[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 o