“Anything I can do to help, just call on me for it,” Brannad Klav promised earnestly. “And, Stranor, I want to apologize. I’ll admit, now, that I ought to have followed your recommendations, when this situation first developed.”
By noon of the next day, Verkan Vall had at least a hundred men gathered in the big room at the First Level fissionables refinery at Jarnabar, spatially coexistent with the Fourth Level temple of Yat-Zar at Zurb. He was having a little trouble distinguishing between them, for every man wore the fringed blue robe and golden miter of an upper-priest, and had his face masked behind a blue false beard. It was, he admitted to himself, a most ludicrous-looking assemblage; one of the most ludicrous things about it was the fact that it would have inspired only pious awe in a Hulgun of the Fourth Level Proto-Aryan Sector. About half of them were priests from the Transtemporal Mining Corporation’s temples; the other half were members of the Paratime Police. All of them wore, in addition to their temple knives, holstered sigma-ray needlers. Most of them carried ultrasonic paralyzers, eighteen-inch batonlike things with bulbous ends. Most of the Paratime Police and a few of the priests also carried either heat-ray pistols or neutron-disruption blasters; Verkan Vall wore one of the latter in a left-hand belt holster.
The Paratime Police were lined up separately for inspection, and Stranor Sleth, Tammand Drav of the Zurb temple, and several other high priests were checking the authenticity of their disguises. A little apart from the others, a Paratime Policeman, in high priest’s robes and beard, had a square box slung in front of him; he was fiddling with knobs and buttons on it, practicing. A big idol of Yat-Zar, on antigravity, was floating slowly about the room in obedience to its remote controls, rising and lowering, turning about and pirouetting gracefully.
“Hey, Vall!” he called to his superior. “How’s this?”
The idol rose about five feet, turned slowly in a half-circle, moved to the right a little, and then settled slowly toward the floor.
“Fine, fine, Horv,” Verkan Vall told him, “but don’t set it down on anything, or turn off the antigravity. There’s enough collapsed nickel-plating on that thing to sink it a yard in soft ground.”
“I don’t know what the idea of that was,” Brannad Klav, standing beside him, said. “Understand, I’m not criticizing. I haven’t any right to, under the circumstances. But it seems to me that armoring that thing in collapsed nickel was an unnecessary precaution.”
“Maybe it was,” Verkan Vall agreed. “I sincerely hope so. But we can’t take any chances. This operation has to be absolutely right. Ready, Tammand? All right; first detail into the conveyer.”
He turned and strode toward a big dome of fine metallic mesh, thirty feet high and sixty in diameter, at the other end of the room. Tammand Drav, and his ten paratimer priests, and Brannad Klav, and ten Paratime Police, followed him in. One of the latter slid shut the door and locked it; Verkan Vall went to the control desk, at the center of the dome, and picked up a two-foot globe of the same fine metallic mesh, opening it and making some adjustments inside, then attaching an electric cord and closing it. He laid the globe on the floor near the desk and picked up the hand battery at the other end of the attached cord.
“Not taking any chances at all, are you?” Brannad Klav asked, watching this operation with interest.
“I never do, unnecessarily. There are too many necessary 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 viewscreen 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
