tigrav."

"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 vanished, too, into the uniform green of the uninhabited
Fifth Level. A planet could take pretty good care of itself, he
thought, if people would only leave it alone. Then he began to see the
fields and villages of Fourth Level. Cities appeared and vanished,
growing higher and vaster as they went across the more civilized Third
Level. One was under air attack--there was almost never a paratemporal
transposition which did not run through some scene of battle.

He unbuckled his belt and took off his boots and tunic; all around
him, the others were doing the same. Sleep-gas didn't have to be
breathed; it could enter the nervous system by any orifice or lesion,
even a pore or a scratch. A spacesuit was the only protection. One of
the detectives helped him on with his metal and plastic armor; before
sealing his gauntlets, he reciprocated the assistance, then checked
the needler and blaster and the long ba