The world proceeded about its own business, of course, thoroughly indifferent to a worried man eating his belated breakfast. I was so completely _alone_! If I felt any sense of foreboding, stuffing articles into my pockets, picking up the guinea pigs' case and going out to the car, I couldn't distinguish it from my feeling of gloom. Perhaps I did, since the world's affairs caught up with me quite forcibly that night. I met the rain before I was halfway up the Freeway and had to cut speed clear down to 85. The old hotel on Indian Lake was my natural choice for a rendezvous, since it was a gutted ruin in abandoned backwoods--though "abandoned" isn't exactly true. Local residents still fish the lake and there are a few homes around the shore area. Strictly speaking, the region has simply changed with the times. Today, you can't get past the toll-gate onto a Federal Freeway unless you have a Federal Driver's License and your Vehicle Inspection sticker is up to date--which changed more things, I think, than nuclear power and industrial automation. * * * * * When people suddenly couldn't drive across the country in any junkheap with a nut at the wheel, it became a mark of distinction just to _live_ in the country. That's what made more rural jobs--the small community shopping centers springing up, products having to be shipped out to them, the growth of rural power and water systems--when work in the cities got scarce, with automation taking over the factories. But it hit the small resort areas especially hard. More people are vacationing in the cities now than at the seashore or mountains! I hadn't been out to the lake in years, but I had less trouble finding my way this time than ever before. The influx of new home-builders has considerably improved the road signs around there, both in number and accuracy, and that's all you need in a Porsche Apache. My little blue speedster takes those narrow, rain-slicked county roads like a Skid Row bum making the saloon circuit with a brand new ten-dollar bill. The only real problem is getting around those armor-sided Detroit mastodons that can't decide which end is the front. Anyway, driving kept me too busy to think much of anything else. But I made good time--better than I expected--and it wasn't long after dark when my headlights cut through the sheeting rain to pick out the fire-blackened ruin of the hotel. I jounced the little Porsche around the deep-rutted drive and parked next to the empty frame building that had once been the restaurant and bar. I had plenty of time to think, for Dr. Whitney didn't arrive until two hours later. It was sometime during those two hours that the Claggett gang smashed their way through a police roadblock just outside Lima, their guns blasting reply to the machine-gun bullets peppering their big sedan. Two policemen were seriously wounded; one died on the way to the hospital.