me with a
summons, they'd better send a robot for a process server."

"Fight back!" Zostha Olv echoed. "You can't fight the Council and the
whole Management! They'll tear you into inch bits!"

"I can hold them off till Vall's able to raid those Abzar Sector
bases," Tortha Karf said. He thought for a moment. "Maybe this is all
for the best, after all. If it distracts the Organization's
attention--"

* * * * *

"I wish we could have made a boomerang-ball reconnaissance," Ranthar
Jard was saying, watching one of the viewscreens, in which a film,
taken from an airboat transposed to an adjoining Abzar sector time
line, was being shown. The boat had circled over the Ganges, a mere
trickle between wide, deeply cut banks, and was crossing a gullied
plain, sparsely grown with thornbush. "The base ought to be about
there, 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 being
spotted. This has to be a complete surprise. It'll be about like the
other place, the one the slaves described. There won't be any
permanent buildings. This operation only started a few months ago,
with the Croutha invasion; it may go on for four or five months, till
the Croutha have all their surplus captives sold off. That country,"
he added, gesturing at the screen, "will be flooded out when the rains
come. See how it's suffered from flood-erosion. There won't be a thing
there 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 charge
here, and you know your own people better than I do. Beside, this
won't be the last operation like this. Next time, I'll have to stay on
Police Terminal and command from a desk; I want first-hand experience
with the outtime end of the job, and this is the only way I can get
it."

He watched the four police-girls who were working at the big terrain
board showing the area of the Police Terminal time line around them.
They had covered the miniature buildings and platforms and towers with
a fine mesh, at a scale-equivalent of fifty feet; each intersection
marked the location of a three-foot conveyer ball, loaded with a
sleep-gas bomb and rigged with an automatic detonator which would
explode it and release the gas as soon as it rematerialized on the
Abzar Sector. Higher, on stiff wires that