The fog had grown so dense that Kintyre knew his goal only by the car parked at the roadside. "Don't stop!" he cried, the moment it hove into view. "Brake easy. Let me out a hundred yards on." He began to open the door. "The nearest phone I remember is a gas station a few miles farther south. Don't raise your own posse and come back. They'd hear you and might shoot her first. Wait for the police. Good luck." They rolled softly through a dripping gray swirl. Kintyre stepped from the car. Contact jarred in his feet. Almost, he fell, running alongside it in search of balance. Then the dark wet body slipped from him and was lost. He heard a muffled slam as Guido closed the door, the rising drone of speed, and now just his shoes thudding on pavement. He stopped himself and jogged back. He was no track star, but he remembered to conserve his wind. The fog was moving with him, its eddies and streamers gave him the nightmare sense of a treadmill bound south. He could see the highway and something of the right-hand cliff that rose up and lost itself overhead. To his left there was nothing, world's edge and smoky endlessness. The air was chill. Presently he regained the automobile. It was a new model, built for an impression of lowness and width; it sat and bared its teeth between blind headlights like some garish dinosaur defying the glaciers. Judas! Suppose this was only a harmless passer-by? But a signboard told him POINT PERRO, and who else would have come today? Kintyre tried the door. It wasn't locked. He eased it open to read the registration on the steering column. Gerald R. Clayton. So. Kintyre felt his hands shaking. One more reassurance, before he went down the path. The dashboard thermometer showed the engine still warm. They hadn't been here long. _I do not wish for a God to help me_, he thought. _But I wish I had one to thank._ He filled his lungs and emptied them, filled and emptied them. Those were dank breaths, but they helped him ease up. He had three armed men to face; if he must also war with himself, it would be hopeless. Not that he felt any great conviction of winning. But--yes. He reached under the dash and yanked loose the ignition wires. After he was dead, that might delay their escape with Corinna. He climbed the low barbed-wire fence. It guarded a jut of cliff maned with harsh yellow grass. You had to go to its very edge to see that there was a beach underneath. As he approached, he began to hear the surf. Incoming tide: breakers crashed among rocks, the water streamed down again with a roar, whirlpools gurgled in small grottoes. He did not think a human cry would be heard this far above.