"Everything's in place, now, Assistant Verkan," she told him.
"Good. I'm going aboard, now," he said. "You can have it, Jard."
He shook hands with Ranthar Jard, who moved to the switch which would
activate all the conveyers simultaneously, and accepted the good
wishes of the girls at the terrain board. Then he walked to the
mesh-covered dome of the hundred-foot conveyer, with the five news
service conveyers surrounding it in as regular a circle as the
buildings and towers of the regular conveyer heads would permit. The
members of his own detail, smoking and chatting outside, saw him and
started moving inside; so did the news people. A public-address
speaker began yelping, in a hundred voices all over the area, warning
those who were going with the conveyers to get aboard. He went in
through a door, between two aircars, and on to the central
control-desks, going up to a visiscreen over which somebody had
crayoned "Novilan EQ." It gave him a view, over the shoulder of a man
in the uniform of a field agent third class, of the interior of a
conveyer like his own.
* * * * *
"Hello, Assistant Verkan," a voice came out of the speaker under the
screen, as the man moved his lips. "Deputy Skordran! Here's Chief's
Assistant Verkan, now!"
Skordran Kirv moved in front of the screen as the operator got up from
his stool.
"Hello, Vall; we're all set to move out as soon as you give the word,"
he said. "We're all in position on antigrav."
"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!_"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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