He backed the car. He'd smashed the backing lights, too. He guided
himself by starlight. Presently he swung the wheel and faced the car
about. He drove back the way he had come. A mile or so, and there was
another hard-surface road branching off. He took it. Half an hour
later Jill said quickly, "Brakes!"

The road was blocked once more by an invisible terror beam, into which
any car moving at reasonable speed must move before its driver could
receive warning.

"This isn't good," he said coldly. "They may have picked some good
places to block. We have to go almost at random, just picking roads
that head away from the Park. I don't know how thoroughly they can
cage us in, though."

There was a flicker of light in the sky. Lockley jerked his head
around. It flashed again. Lightning. The sky was clouding up.

"It's getting worse," he said in a strained voice. "I've been taking
every turn that ought to lead us away from the Park, but I've had to
use the stars for direction. I didn't think that soldiers would keep
us from getting away from here. I was almost confident. But what will
I do without the stars?"

He drove on. The clouds piled up, blotting out the heavens. Once
Lockley saw a faint glow in the sky and clenched his teeth. He turned
away from it at the first opportunity. The glow could be Serena, and
he could have been forced back toward it by the windings of the
highway he'd followed without lights. Twice Jill warned him of beams
across the highway. Once, driven by his increasing anxiety, his brakes
almost failed to stop him in time. When the car did stop, he was aware
of faint tinglings on his skin. There were erratic flashings in his
eyes, too, and a discordant composite of sounds which by association
with past suffering made him nauseated. Perhaps this extra leakage
from the terror beam was through the metal of the car.

When he got out of that terror beam the sky was three-quarters blacked
out and before he was well away from the spot there was only a tiny
patch of stars well down toward the horizon. There were lightning
flickers overhead. After a time he depended on them to show him the
road.

Then the rain came. The lightning increased. The road twisted and
turned. Twice the car veered off onto the road's shoulders, but each
time he righted it. As time passed conditions grew worse. It was
urgent that he get as far as possible from Serena, because of the Wild
Life truck which could seize Jill and hi