"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 and vanished, and they were
looking into the interior of a great fissionables refinery plant,
operated by paratimers on another First Level time-line. The
structural details altered, from time-line to time-line, as they
watched. Buildings appeared and vanished. Once, for a few seconds,
they were inside a cool, insulated bubble in the midst of molten lead.
Tammand Drav jerked a thumb at it, before it vanished.
"That always bothers me," he said. "Bad place for the field to go
weak. I'm fussy as an old hen about inspection of the conveyer, on
account of that."
"Don't blame you," Verkan Vall agreed. "Probably the cooling system of
a breeder-pile."
They passed more swiftly, now, across the Second Level and the Third.
Once they were in the midst of a huge land battle, with great tanklike
vehicles spouting flame at one another.
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