He put
Dall in through the sliding door, followed, and closed it behind him,
locking it. Then, before he closed the starting switch, he drew a
pistollike weapon and checked it.
In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor paratemporal transposition field was
uninfluenced by material objects outside it. In practice, however,
such objects occasionally intruded, and sometimes they were alive and
hostile. The last time he had been in this conveyer room, he had seen
a quartet of returning officers emerge from a conveyer dome dragging
a dead lion by the tail. The sigma-ray needler, which he carried, was
the only weapon which could be used, under the circumstances. It had
no effect whatever on any material structure and could be used inside
an activated conveyer without deranging the conductor-mesh, as, say, a
bullet or the vibration of an ultrasonic paralyzer would do, and it
was instantly fatal to anything having a central nervous system. It
was a good weapon to use outtime for that reason, also; even on the
most civilized time-line, the most elaborate autopsy would reveal no
specific cause of death.
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