"I'm a para," he said quietly, "and I want this car. Give me the keys and you can keep the food." The man groaned. Then he dropped the keys on the ground. He fled into the house. "Thanks," said Calhoun politely to the emptiness. He took his place in the car. He thrust Murgatroyd again out of sight. "It's not," he told the _tormal_ with a sort of despairing humor, "that I'm ashamed of you, Murgatroyd, but I'm afraid I may become ashamed of myself. Keep low!" He started the car and drove away. He passed through a business district, with many smashed windows. He passed through canyons formed by office buildings. He crossed a manufacturing area, in which there were many ungainly factories but no sign of any work going on. In any epidemic many men stay home from work to avoid contagion. On Tallien Three nobody would be willing to risk employment, for fear of losing much more than his life. There there was a wide straight highway leading away from the city but not toward the spaceport. Calhoun drove his stolen car along it. He saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter _Esclipus Twenty_. They'd failed. Now Calhoun went past the place from which they had been launched, and did not notice. Once he could look across flat fields and see the spaceport highway. It was empty. Then there was sunset. He saw the topmost silvery beams and girders of the landing grid still glowing in sunshine which no longer reached down to the planet's solid ground. He drove. And drove. Government Center might put a road block to the spaceport, just in case. But they'd really believe him still hiding somewhere in Government Center with no hope of--actually--accomplishing anything but his own destruction. * * * * * After sunset he was miles beyond the spaceport. When twilight was done, he'd crossed to another surface road and was headed back toward the city. But this time he would pass close to the spaceport. And two hours after sundown he turned the car's running-lights off and drove a dark and nearly noiseless vehicle through deep-fallen night. Even so, he left the ground car a mile from the tall and looming lacework of steel. He listened with straining ears for a long time.