One of the men on the benches beckoned.
"This way," he said casually.
Murgatroyd poked his head out of Calhoun's jacket. He regarded these roughly dressed men with suspicion.
"What's that?" asked one of the five.
"A pet," said Calhoun briefly.
The statement went unchallenged. A man got up, lifting a small tank with a hose. There was a hissing sound. The spray made a fine, fog-like mist. Calhoun smelled a conventional organic solvent, well-known enough.
"This's antiseptic," said the man with the spray. "In case you got some disease inside there."
The statement was plainly standard, and once it had been exquisite irony. But it had been repeated until it had no meaning any more, except to Calhoun. His clothing glittered momentarily where the spray stood on its fibers. Then it dried. There was the faintest possible residue, like a coating of impalpable dust. Calhoun guessed its significance and the knowledge was intolerable. But he said between clenched teeth:
"Where do I go now?"
"Anywheres," said the first man. "Nobody'll bother you. Some normals try to keep you from getting near 'em, but you can do as you please." He added disinterestedly. "To them, too. No police out here!"
He went back to the bench and sat down. Calhoun moved on.
His inward sensations were unbearable, but he had to continue. It was not likely that instructions would have reached the para organization yet. There was one. There must be one! But eventually he would be hunted for even on the unlikely supposition that he'd gotten out of Government Center. Not yet, but presently.
He went down the street. He came to a corner and turned it. There were again a few moving figures in sight. There might be one pedestrian in a city block. This was the way they'd looked in the other part of the city, seen from a ground-car. On foot, they looked the same. Windows, too, were broken. Doors smashed in. Trash on the streets . . .
None of the humans in view paid any attention to him at all, but he kept Murgatroyd out of sight regardless. Walking men who came toward him never quite arrived. They turned off on other streets or into doorways. Those who moved in the same direction never happened to be overtaken. They also turned corners or slipped into doors. They would be, Calhoun realized dispassionately, people who still considered themselves normals, out upon desperate errands for food and trying hopelessly not to take contagion back to those they got the food for. And Calhoun was shaken with a horrible rage that such things could happen. He, himself, had been sprayed with something. . . . And Doctor Lett had held out a plastic container for him to smell. . . . He'd held his breath then, but he could not keep from breathing now. He had a certain period of time, and that period only, before—
He forced his thoughts back to the Med Ship when it was twenty miles high, and ten, and five. He'd watched the ground through the electron telescope and he had a mental picture of the city from the sky. It was as clear to him as a map. He could orient himself. He could tell where he was.
A ground-car came to a stop some distance ahead. A man got out, his arms full of bundles of food. Calhoun broke into a run. The man tried to get inside the doorway before Calhoun could arrive. But he would not leave any of the food.
Calhoun showed his blaster.
"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, "It's not 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.
Then there was a wide straight highway leading away from the city but not toward the space-port. 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 bellowing skyward with explosive war-heads to shatter Aesclipus 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 space-port 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. In Government Center nobody would suspect him long gone from the Center and driving swiftly away from the city. They might put a road-block to the space-port, 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 space-port. 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 space-port. 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 lace-work of steel. He listened with straining ears for a long time.
Presently he and Murgatroyd approached the space-port, on foot, from a rather improbable direction. The gigantic, unsubstantial 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 indicate men brought here and waiting for him. He went very cautiously forward. Once he stopped and distastefully restored his blaster to lethal-charge intensity. If he had to use it, he couldn't hope to shoot accurately enough to stun an antagonist. He'd have to fight for his life—or rather, for the chance to live as a normal man, and to restore that possibility to the people in the ghastly-quiet city at the horizon and the other lesser cities elsewhere on this world.
He took infinite precautions. He saw the Med Ship standing valiantly upright on its landing-fins. It was a relief to see it. The grid operator could have been ordered to lift it out to space—thrown away to nowhere, or put in orbit until it was wanted again, or—
That was still a possibility. Calhoun's expression turned wry. He'd have to do something about the grid. He must be able to take off on the ship's emergency rockets without the risk of being caught by the tremendously powerful force-fields by which ships were launched and landed.