He said quietly, "Come in the house for it. That car is too public."

I wanted to refuse but he had already turned and was heading for the house. As I came up by him he whispered, "Careful. The woman is not of us."

"Your wife?"

"Yes."

We stopped on the porch and he said, "My dear, this is Mr. O'Keefe. We have some business to discuss. We'll be in the study."

She smiled and answered, "Certainly, my love. Good evening, Mr. O'Keefe. Sultry, isn't it?"

I agreed that it was and she went back to her knitting. We went on inside and the man ushered me into his study. Since we were both keeping the masquerade I went in first, as befitted a visitor being escorted. I did not like turning my back on him.

For that reason I was half expecting it. He hit me near the base of the neck. But I rolled with it and went down almost unhurt. I continued to roll and fetched up on my back.

In training school they used to slap us with sandbags for trying to get up, once down. I recall my savate instructor saying in a flat Belgian accent, "Brave men get up again-and die. Be a coward-fight from the floor."

So I was on my back and threatening him with my heels as soon as I hit. He danced back out of range. Apparently he did not have a gun and I could get at mine. But there was an open fireplace in the room, a real one, complete with poker, shovel, and tongs. He circled toward it.

There was a small table just out of my reach. I half rolled, half lunged, grabbed a leg and threw it. It caught him in the face as he was grabbing the poker. Then I was on him.

His master was dying in my fingers and he himself was convulsing under its last, terrible command when I became aware of nerve-shattering screams. His wife was standing in the doorway. I bounced up and let her have one, right about her double chin. She went down in mid scream and I returned to her husband.

A limp man is amazingly hard to lift; it took me longer to get him up and across my shoulders than it had to silence him. He was heavy. Fortunately I am a big husky, all hands and feet; I managed a lumbering dog trot toward the car. I doubt if the noise of our fight disturbed anyone but my victim's wife, but her screams must have aroused half that end of town. There were people popping out of doors on both sides of the street. So far, none of them was near, but I was glad to see that I had left the car door open. I hurried toward it.

Then I was sorry; a brat who looked like the twin of the one who had given me trouble earlier was inside fiddling with the controls. Cursing, I dumped my prisoner in the lounge circle and grabbed at the kid. The boy shrank back and struggled, but I tore him loose and threw him out-straight into the arms of the first of my pursuers.

That saved me. He was still untangling himself as I slammed into the driver's seat and shot forward without bothering with door or safety belt. As I took the first corner the door swung shut and I almost went out of my seat; I then held a straight course long enough to fasten the belt. I cut sharp on another corner, nearly ran down a ground car coming out, and went on.

I found the wide boulevard I needed-the Paseo, I think-and jabbed the take-off key. Possibly I caused several wrecks; I had no time to worry about it. Without waiting to reach altitude I wrestled her to course east and continued to climb as I made easting. I kept her on manual across Missouri and expended every launching unit in her racks to give her more speed. That reckless and illegal action may have saved my neck; somewhere over Columbia, just as I fired the last one, I felt the car shake to concussion. Someone had launched an interceptor, a devil-chaser would be my guess-and the pesky thing had fused where I had just been.

There were no more shots, which was good, as I would have been a duck on water from then on. My starboard impeller began to run hot immediately thereafter, possibly from the near miss or perhaps simply from abuse. I let it heat, praying that it would not fly apart, for another ten minutes. Then, with the Mississippi behind me and the indicator way up into "danger" I cut it out and let the car limp along on the port unit. Three hundred was the best she would do-but I was out of Zone Red and back among free men.

Up until then I had not had time to give my passenger more than a glance. He lay where I had slung him, sprawled on the floor pads, unconscious or dead. Now that I was back among men and no longer had the power for illegal speeds there was no reason not to go automatic. I flipped on the transponder, signaled a request for block assignment, and put the controls on automatic without waiting for permission. A block control technician might curse me out and even note my signal for a citation, but they would fit me into the system somehow. I swung around into the lounge and looked my man over.

He was breathing but still out. There was a welt on his face where I had clipped him with the table, but no bones seemed broken and I doubted that he would be unconscious from that cause. I slapped his face and dug my thumbnails into his ear lobes but I could not rouse him.

The dead slug was beginning to stink but I had no way to dispose of it. I let him be and went back to the control seat.

The chronometer read twenty-one thirty-seven Washington time-and I still had better than six hundred miles to go. At my best speed on one power plant, allowing nothing for landing, for tearing over to the White House and finding the Old Man, I would reach Washington a few minutes after midnight. So I had already failed to carry out the letter of my orders and the Old Man was sure as the devil going to make me stay in after school for it.

I took a chance and tried to start the starboard impeller. No dice-it was probably frozen solid and needing a major overhaul. Perhaps just as well, as anything that goes that fast can be explosively dangerous if it gets out of balance-so I desisted and tried to raise the Old Man by phone.

The phone would not work. Perhaps I had jiggered it in one of the spots of exercise I had been forced to take that day but I had never had one fail me before. Printed circuits, transistors, and the whole works being embedded in plastic made those units almost as shock resistant as a proximity fuse. I put it back in my pocket, feeling that this was one of those days when it was just not worthwhile to get out of bed. I turned to the car's communicator and punched the emergency tab.

"Control," I called out. "Control! This is an emergency!"

The screen lighted up and I was looking at a young man. He was, I saw with relief, bare-skinned so far as he appeared in the screen. "Control answering-Block Fox Eleven. What are you doing in the air? I've been trying to raise you ever since you entered my block."

"Never mind!" I snapped. "Patch me into the nearest military circuit. This is crash priority!"

He looked uncertain, but the screen flickered and went blank. Shortly another picture built up showing a military message center-and that did my heart good, as every person in sight was stripped to the waist. The foreground was occupied by a young watch officer; I could have kissed him. Instead I said, "Military emergency-patch me through to the Pentagon and there to the White House."

"Who are you?"

"No time, no time! I'm a civil agent and you wouldn't recognize my I.D. if you saw it. Hurry!"

I might have talked him into it but he was shouldered out of scan by an older man, a wing commander by his cap insignia. "Land at once!" was all that he said.

"Look, skipper," I said. "This is a military emergency; you've got to put me through. I-"

"This is a military emergency," he interrupted, "and all civil craft have been grounded for the past three hours. Land at once."

"But I've got to-"