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 batonlike ultrasonic paralyzer on
his belt and made sure that the radio and sound-phones in his helmet
were working. He hoped that the frantic efforts to gather several
thousand spacesuits onto Police Terminal from the Industrial and
Commercial and Interplanetary Sectors hadn't started rumors which had
gotten to the ears of some of the Organization's ubiquitous agents.

* * * * *