chances that
have to be taken, in this work." Verkan Vall pressed the button on the
hand battery. The globe on the floor flashed and vanished. "Yesterday,
five paratimers were arrested. Any or all of them could have had
door-activators with them. Stranor Sleth says they were not tortured,
but that is a purely inferential statement. They may have been, and
the use of the activator may have been extorted from one of them. So I
want a look at the inside of that conveyer-chamber before we transpose
into it."

He laid the hand battery, with the loose-dangling wire that had been
left behind, on the desk, then lit a cigarette. The others gathered
around, smoking and watching, careful to avoid the place from which
the globe had vanished. Thirty minutes passed, and then, in a queer
iridescence, the globe reappeared. Verkan Vall counted ten seconds and
picked it up, taking it to the desk and opening it to remove a small
square box. This he slid into a space under the desk and flipped a
switch. Instantly, a view-screen lit up and a three-dimensional
picture appeared--the interior of a big room a hundred feet square and
some seventy in height. There was a big desk and a radio; tables,
couches, chairs and an arms-rack full of weapons, and at one end, a
remarkably clean sixty-foot circle on the concrete floor, outlined in
faintly luminous red.

"How about it?" Verkan Vall asked Tammand Drav. "Anything wrong?"

The Zurb high priest shook his head. "Just as we left it," he said.
"Nobody's been inside since we left."

* * * * *

One of the policemen took Verkan Vall's place at the control desk and
threw the master switch, after checking the instruments. Immediately,
the paratemporal-transposition field went on with a humming sound that
mounted to a high scream, then settled to a steady drone. The mesh
dome flickered with a cold iridescence and vanished, and they were
looking into the interior of a great fissionables refinery plant,
operated by paratimers on another First Level time-line. The
structural details altered, from time-line to time-line, as they
watched. Buildings appeared and vanished. Once, for a few seconds,
they were inside a cool, insulated bubble in the midst of molten lead.
Tammand Drav jerked a thumb at it, before it vanished.

"That always bothers me," he said. "Bad place for the field to go
weak. I'm fussy as an old hen about inspection of the conveyer, on
account of that."