ings. 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.

Presently he and Murgatroyd approached the spaceport, on foot, from a
rather improbable direction. The gigantic, unsubstantiated tower rose
incredibly far toward the sky. As he drew near it he crouched lower
and lower so he was almost crawling to keep from being silhouetted
against the stars. He saw lights in the windows of the grid's control
building. As he looked, a lighted window darkened from someone moving
past it inside. There was an enormous stillness, broken only by faint,
faint noises of the wind in the metal skeleton.

He saw no ground cars to i