Natan Crowley was enjoying a rare moment of free time in his private laboratory, at the top of the tower of conjuration, trying to master the intricacies of an extremely difficult and complicated high level spell, when Saturn burst in, his face red with the effort of sprinting up the two hundred and twenty two steps. "We've got a problem," he said, panting heavily.

"Can't it wait?" said the Director impatiently. After a futile three months of trying to learn this drassing spell he had the sense that he was finally making progress. Another hour or two of concentrated effort and he thought he might make a breakthrough.

"It's a big problem," insisted Saturn. "We've lost contact with Kronos."

Natan looked up, about to tear a strip off the normally calm and enigmatic wizard for bothering him with a simple breakdown in communication, but one look at the seamy, weathered face told him that it was something more serious than that. He laid the dusty old spellbook down on the acid burned, potion stained surface of the old oaken table, therefore, and gave the other wizard his full attention. "What happened?" he demanded.

"Just over an hour ago three humans emerged from the teleportation cubicle, babbling about a massive earthquake on Kronos. They described walls and ceilings collapsing in rubble, explosive decompressions, the ground shaking like a dog with fleas. They said they only managed to escape because they happened to be close to the teleportation chamber at the time, but that everyone else must have been killed. When a troop of Beltharan soldiers tried to return to Kronos, they found that the teleportation chamber was no longer working."

"Let's go," said the Director, turning to the open shaft in the middle of the room that contained the top of the spiral staircase. They sprinted back down, risking their necks on the perilously worn, narrow stone steps, and raced along hallways and corridors, shoving their way past proctors and junior wizards as they went. They left the conjugation building and ran along the Lydian Path to the small building, standing all alone in the Agglemonian Gardens, that contained the teleportation cubicle linking Lexandria Valley with the island of Pargonn, the home of the Fellowship of the Golden Griffin.

A co-operation agreement worked out during the Fourth Shadowwar, and which neither side had yet seen any reason to rescind, allowed senior Lexandrian wizards to use the Fellowship's teleportation network, with some restrictions, anytime they liked, and this agreement had become even more useful to the University since the advent of the interference affecting long range magic. The University was busy constructing a teleportation network of its own, as well as a more robust version of the teleportation spell that would, they hoped, work despite the interference, but until these were completed the Fellowship network was the only means the wizards had of traveling fast across the globe.

A few minutes later, therefore, Natan and Saturn were in Marshall House in Tara, standing in front of the now useless teleportation chamber that had, until recently, linked Tharia to Kronos. Malk Lov, a Lexandrian wizard who worked for the Beltharan army, and Colonel Augar, the officer in charge of the Kronos observatory, were already there, along with a handful of other men, most of whom were just scratching their heads unhappily.

"What's the situation?" snapped Natan impatiently. "What's going on up there?"

"We're not sure," replied Malk Lov. "We thought at first that Kronosia had been destroyed, but we now suspect a simple failure of the teleportation chamber. The chamber up on Kronos is pretty robust, physically at least, and a simple rooffall and decompression of the surrounding area ought not to have affected it much. The first attempt to return to Kronos took place before I was informed. They could have arrived on Kronos only to step out into hard vacuum. Fortunately for them, though, the chamber down here doesn't seem to work at all. It's as though the magic's been bled away at the other end."

"Teleportation cubicles don't just lose their magic for no reason," said Saturn impatiently. "Some last for hundreds of years and this one's less than ten years old. I understand there were survivors. I want to see them."

Colonel Augar snapped his fingers at an underling, who scurried off to obey. The three Lexandrian wizards spent the time examining the non-functional cubicle, probing it with diagnostic spells and discussing possible causes, until the underling returned a few minutes later with a couple of stooped, swarthy looking men who glanced around nervously, visibly intimidated by the powerful men they'd been brought before.

"I understood there were three of them," said Natan angrily.

"There were," said the underling unhappily. "The third one seems to have, er, escaped." He gulped nervously as if expecting to be held personally responsible.

Natan and Saturn stared at each other in shocked realisation. "Another saboteur," said the Director in a hushed whisper.

"So it seems," agreed Saturn. He approached the two mercenaries and glared down at them with his single eye like a cobra at a pair of field mice. "He promised to pay you well and help you get away," said the tall, gaunt wizard, hoping it was the truth. "Well, he's run out on you, left you to face the music. Are you going to let him get away with that?"

The mercenaries knew they were caught, knew that their only hope was to co-operate completely. "We'll help you any way we can," said Sliva, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

"Good," said Saturn. He cast a mind reading spell on the mercenary, and spent the next few minutes reliving his memories of the past few hours. Then he did the same with the other. "Their story about the earthquake was a lie," he said when he'd finished. "Kronosia is intact, but the teleportation cubicle is destroyed. The moon trogs used a burner cable on it."

"A burner cable!" cried Natan in astonishment. "How in the name of the Gods..."

"That's not important," interrupted Saturn. "What matters now is finding a way out of this mess."

"We'll subject these two to a full interrogation," said the Colonel. "Find out exactly what they know."

"You won't learn anything new, but do it anyway," said Saturn. "They deserve it." The mercenaries protested in outrage but were dragged away by the soldiers, carrying them off to the holding cells.

"We can't do anything more here," said the Director. "I want a full meeting of all the senior staff in one hour. Have Elmias Pastin present as well. There may be some way back to Kronos using the planes."

Saturn nodded, and the two wizards left, leaving Malk Lov and Colonel Augar staring at the useless teleportation cubicle in helpless frustration.

☆☆☆

"Well," mused Elmias an hour and a half later, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "You could go by way of the ethereal plane, but you've still got to walk the distance. Ten thousand miles."

"Walk?" said Natan Crowley, his eyes widening with disbelief. "Walk to Kronos?"

"In the ethereal plane you can walk in any direction," explained the old wizard. "Even straight up. You could, in principle, walk to Kronos, but it would take you well over a year to get there. Also, you'd have to take everything with you as you went. Food, water... And if a problem arose half way there, it would be a five month walk back again..."

"We get the picture," said Saturn irritably. "Clearly walking to Kronos is out of the question."

"And even if you did manage to walk the distance you'd then have to match velocities with Kronos before you emerged back into the material world. Kronos's orbit around Tharia carries it through space at over twelve thousand miles an hour..."

"So we need another answer," said Saturn, knowing the old wizard was likely to ramble on for hours if they let him.

Elmias nodded, but wasn't able to come up with any other suggestions and the other wizards around the long table hung their heads in disappointment. The old wizard had a formidable reputation, and even now, in his declining years, his knowledge was respected by everyone in the valley. They'd been so sure that he'd somehow manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat for them. Tell them of a plane he'd discovered where distances were less, for instance.

"What if we went by flying carpet?" suggested Robyn Goldspin brightly. Robyn was the youngest of the wizards present, something of a child prodigy, and her narrow face with its crown of yellow hair still had something of the glow of youth about it despite her forty two years. "We could be there in less than a week, and then teleport the remaining distance, matching velocities that way."

"A good idea," agreed Elmias, giving her a fond smile. "Unfortunately, there remains the problem of finding Kronos. You'd have to come back into normal space to do that, and the moment you did that you'd die in the vacuum."

"We could wear Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing," suggested Robyn, undaunted.

"You forget the skydeath," pointed out Saturn. "Kronos may orbit within a safe haven without skydeath, but if you emerged outside that safe haven..." The wizardess nodded, going pale as she remembered what had happened to the lab animals.

Saturn turned to Schoena Scull, the wizard who'd been put in charge of the skydeath problem. "Has there been any progress in that direction yet?"

"Some, erm, promising avenues of research," replied the crusty old man whose most prominent features were his enormous hairy ears. "No hard results yet, though. The, erm, only defence against it remains six inches of good, solid lead."

"Okay," said Robyn, brightening again as a new idea came to her. "Forget the flying carpet. We take the test chamber. Outfit it to take a couple of wizards instead of lab animals. With its layers of lead plating it won't matter where it emerges into normal space. In fact we needn't enter the ethereal plane at all. We can go all the way through normal space, using its levitation spells as a form of propulsion. We manoeuvre it close to Kronos and then teleport across. We can still teleport safely across distances of less than a hundred miles."

"And then what?" asked the Director. "Suppose we do manage to get a wizard to Kronos. Then what? He wouldn't be able to repair the teleportation cubicle, and one man alone couldn't build a new one."

"We can only build them here, in the factory lab," agreed Pondar Walton. "Even the Fellowship's cubicles were created here. There's nowhere else in the world, in the tharsolar system, where they can be made. We make them here, then transport them to their destinations. It was easy before the interference came, we just teleported them to their destinations, but now..."

"The problem isn't to get one man to Kronos," said Natan Crowley, nodding as he saw the problem. "We have to get a teleportation cubicle up there. Perhaps we can make a small one, small enough to fit inside the test chamber. It would only have to be small enough for one man to squeeze inside, so we can evacuate Kronos one man at a time. It could be as small as four feet wide."

"We can't make them that small," replied Pondar, his eyes glowering as he stared down at the tabletop in front of him. "The magics break down if they're packed into too small a volume. The smallest we've ever managed is six feet across. Way too big to fit inside the test chamber. And even if we could make them small enough, it takes five months to make a new teleportation chamber."

"We've got nearly a dozen sitting in the factory lab's storage yard," said Robyn, her eyes dancing between Pondar and the Director. "Ready to be carried around the world to begin the University's own teleportation network."

"They're full size chambers!" cried Saturn, his voice full of disbelief at her stupidity. "Big enough to take horses and carts! Twenty feet long! How do you propose..." Suddenly he stared across the room, his single eye widening as an idea came to him. "How much weight can the test chamber carry?" he asked, turning to regard Pondar Walton.

"I can't say with any accuracy," replied the other wizard. "If you're suggesting we attach the teleportation chamber to the test chamber I would strongly advise against it. It's not the weight so much. There's no problem with the levitation spells being able to lift it. It's whether the test chamber is physically strong enough to have that much weight attached to it. It might rip it open and dump the wizards into the open sky."

"We have to get a teleportation chamber to Kronos," pointed out Saturn. "If you have a better idea, I would urge you to share it with the rest of us." Pondar could only shake his head, though.

"Would it work?" asked the Director, staring around at his wizards. "Could it be done? Look into it," he added when no-one answered him. "Look for reasons it might not work and eliminate them one by one."

"Just getting the test chamber to Kronos is a big enough problem," protested Pondar. "We don't even know if it's possible to find Kronos's location in space with the necessary accuracy. We can't just move towards it. It's moving much too fast, as our venerable colleague pointed out." He nodded in Elmias's direction. "We have to work out where it'll be and wait for it to come to us."

"It should be possible, said Saturn. "We take it out to Kronos's distance from Tharia, making sure to stay directly above the equator, then loiter in space until Kronos's orbit brings it close enough to teleport."

"And you wouldn't have much time to teleport," said Robyn. "Not with Kronos moving at, what did you say? Twelve thousand miles an hour?" Elmias nodded. "So if the test chamber is floating up there waiting for it," the woman continued, "Kronos will flash in and out of teleportation range in..." She stared across the room as she did the mental arithmetic. "Just about one minute. Is that right? We'll only be within teleportation range of Kronos for one minute. That's pretty tight timing."

"The test chamber would have to be positioned with great accuracy," agreed Pondar Walton. "It would have to be placed within a torus centred on Kronos's orbit, a torus with a minor radius of just one hundred miles, compared with its major radius of fifteen thousand miles. Getting its inclination is no problem, we can simply measure it against the background stars, but what about its altitude, its height above the ground? Do we have the means to measure that distance accurately?"

"Parallax, perhaps," suggested Robyn thoughtfully. "Observing it against the background stars from two points on the surface of Tharia. We'd need some pretty powerful spyglasses, and the help of a priest of Caratheodory to do the sums, assuming we can find an application heretic."

"And how do we communicate the information up to the test chamber?" asked Pondar Walton. "We can't just Farspeak it up to them."

Saturn thumped the table hard in a fit of frustration. "Damn this damned interference!" he swore. "There has to be some way of dealing with it! Do we even know what's causing it yet?"

"We still have no idea," replied Chendakhar Spackelan with a very slight lisp. The Garonian wizard, one of only three living Lexandrian wizards from the vast island continent, had a slight speech impediment that forced him to speak slowly and carefully if he wanted to be understood, but which, fortunately, did not affect his spellcasting. "All we can say for certain is that the first effects seemed to manifest themselves about two years ago, and that it seems to be intensifying. Six months ago we estimated five hundred miles to be the maximum safe teleporting range. Now, I would not attempt to teleport more than a hundred miles without a very good reason. At this rate, we estimate that teleporting, farspeaking and other long range spells will become effectively useless within another six months."

A hush of dread fell around the table. "But teleportation chambers are unaffected?" asked Elmias hopefully, raising a trembling hand to wipe a thin line of drool from his chin.

"So far as we can tell," replied Chendakhar. "The existence of an apparatus at both ends seems to act as a buffer against the interference."

"Perhaps we can Farspeak the same way," suggested Robyn. "Using two separate artifacts, one held by each of the two people speaking."

"Look into it," Natan told Pondar Walton. "That's how we can communicate inclination and altitude data to the test chamber." He rose to his feet. "In the meantime, start modifying the test chamber. It'll have to carry two people, one of them a wizard, for several hours and have a teleportation chamber strapped to it. We'll need to modify the levitation spells as well, so that it can be moved around by the wizards inside it. It'll need a window. Probably several windows."

"We'll make the whole thing transparent," said Saturn. "That's the simplest way."

Natan nodded. "I want constant progress reports, and I want the test chamber ready to lift in a week. There's no telling what the moon trogs will be doing to our ship of space in the meantime. Let's go to it!"

They all stood and filed out of the room, all filled with determination that the sudden and drastic action of the moon trogs would not end the project they'd been working on so hard for so many months, and that it would not go unpunished.

"The moon trogs will be made to pay for this outrage," Saturn muttered to himself as he strode back to his laboratory. "They will be made to pay dearly."