A car was approaching from the north and they were slashing across his lane. The other car was moving no more than ninety but its driver was taken by surprise-he had no reason to expect another car to appear out of nowhere against him on a clear road: Mary was forced to duck left, then right, and left again; the car slewed and reared up on its hind wheel, writhing against the steel grip of its gyros. Mary fought it back into control to the accompaniment of a teeth-shivering grind of herculene against glass as the rear wheel fought for traction.
Lazarus let his jaw muscles relax and breathed out gustily. “Whew!” he sighed. “I hope we won’t have to do that again.”
Mary glanced at him, grinning. “Women drivers make you nervous?”
“Oh, no, no, not at all! I just wish you would warn me when something like that is about to happen.”
“I didn’t know myse1f,” she admitted, then went on worriedly, “I don’t know quite what to do now. I thought we could lie quiet out of town until dark … but I had to show my hand a Little when I took that fence. By now somebody will be reporting it to the tower. Mmm.
“Why wait until dark?” he asked. “Why not just bounce over to the lake in this Dick Dare contraption of yours and let it swim us home?”
“I don’t like to,” she fretted. “I’ve attracted too much attention already. A trimobile faked up to look like a groundster is handy, but … well, if anyone sees us taking it under water and the proctors hear of it, somebody is going to guess the answer. Then they’ll start fishing-everything from seismo to sonar and Heaven knows what else.”
“But isn’t the Seat shielded?”
“Of course. But anything that big they can find-if they know what they’re looking for and keep looking.”
“You’re right, of course,” Lazarus admitted slowly. “Well, we certainly don’t want to lead any nosy proctors to the Families’ Seat. Mary, I think we had better ditch your car and get lost.” He frowned. “Anywhere but the Seat.”
“No, it has to be the Seat,” she answered sharply.
“Why? If you chase a fox, he-“
“Quiet a moment! I want to try something.” Lazarus shut up; Mary drove with one hand while she fumbled in the glove compartment.
“Answer,” a voice said.
“Life is short-” Mary replied.
They completed the formula. “Listen,” Mary went on hurriedly, “I’m in trouble-get a fix on me.”
“Okay.”
“Is there a sub in the pool?”
“Yes.”
“Good! Lock on me and home them in.” She explained hurriedly the details of what she wanted, stopping once to ask Lazarus if he could swim. “That’s all,” she said at last, “but move! We’re short on minutes.”
“Hold it, Mary!” the voice protested. “You know I can’t send a sub out in the daytime, certainly not on a calm day. It’s too easy to-“
“Will you, or won’t you!”
A third voice cut in. “I was listening, Mary-Ira Barstow. We’ll pick you up.”
“But-” objected the first voice.
“Stow it, Tommy. Just mind your burners and home me in. See you, Mary.”
“Right, Ira!”
While she had been talking to the Seat, Mary had turned off from the local-traffic strip into the unpaved road she had followed the night before, without slowing and apparently without looking. Lazarus gritted his teeth and hung on. They passed a weathered sign reading CONTAMINATED AREA-PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK and graced with the conventional purple trefoil. Lazarus blinked at it and shrugged-he could not see how, at the moment, his hazard could be increased by a neutron or so.
Mary slammed the car to a stop in a clump of stunted trees near the abandoned road. The lake lay at their feet, just beyond a low bluff. She unfastened her safety belt, struck a cigarette, and relaxed. “Now we wait. It’ll take at least half an hour for them to reach us no matter how hard Ira herds it. Lazarus, do you think we were seen turning off into here?”
“To tell the truth, Mary, I was too busy to look.”
“Well nobody ever comes here, except a few reckless boys.”
(“-and girls,” Lazarus added to himself.) Then he went on aloud, “I noted a ‘hot’ sign back there. How high is the count?”
“That? -Oh, pooh. Nothing to worry about unless you decided to build a house here. We’re the ones who are hot. If we didn’t have to stay close to the communicator, we-“
The communicator spoke. “Okay, Mary. Right in front of you.”
She looked startled. “Ira?”
“This is Ira speaking but I’m still at the Seat. Pete Hardy was available in the Evanston pen, so we homed him in on you. Quicker.”
“Okay-thanks!” She was turning to speak to Lazarus when he touched her arm.
“Look behind us.”
A helicopter was touching down less than a hundred yards from them. Three men burst out of it. They were dressed as proctors.
Mary jerked open the door of the car and threw off her gown in one unbroken motion. She turned and called, “Come on!” as she thrust a hand back inside and tore a stud loose from the instrument panel. She ran.
Lazarus unzipped the belt of his kilt and ran out of it as he followed her to the bluff. She went dancing down it; he came after with slightly more caution, swearing at sharp stones. The blast shook them as the car exploded, but the bluff saved them.
They hit the water together.
The lock in the little submarine was barely big enough for one at a time; Lazarus shoved Mary into it first and tried to slap her when she resisted, and discovered that slapping will not work under water. Then he spent an endless time, or so it seemed, wondering whether or not he could breathe water. “What’s a fish got that I ain’t got?” he was telling himself, when the outer latch moved under his hand and he was able to wiggle in.
Eleven dragging seconds to blow the lock clear of water and he had a chance to see what damage, if any, the water had done to his blaster.
Mary was speaking urgently to the skipper. “Listen, Pete-there are three proctors back up there with a whiny. My car blew up in their faces just as we hit the water. But if they aren’t all dead or injured, there will be a smart boy who will figure out that there was only one place for us to go-under water. We’ve got to be away from here before they take to the air to look for us.”
“It’s a losing race,” Pete Hardy complained, slapping his controls as he spoke. “Even if it’s only a visual search, I’ll have to get outside and stay outside the circle of total reflection faster than he can gain altitude-and I can’t.” But the little sub lunged forward reassuringly.
Mary worried about whether or not to call the Seat from the sub. She decided not to; it would just increase the hazard both to the sub and to the Seat itself. So she calmed herself and waited, huddled small in a passenger seat too cramped for two. Peter Hardy swung wide into deep water, hugging the bottom, picking up the Muskegon-Gary bottom beacons and conned himself in blind.
By the time they surfaced in the pool inside the Seat she had decided against any physical means of communication, even the carefully shielded equipment at the Seat. Instead she hoped to find a telepathic sensitive ready and available among the Families’ dependents cared for there. Sensitives were scarce among healthy members of the Howard Families as they were in the rest of the population, but the very inbreeding which had conserved and reinforced their abnormal longevity had also conserved and reinforced bad genes as well as good; they had an unusually high percentage of physical and mental defectives. Their board of genetic control plugged away at the problem of getting rid of bad strains while conserving the longevity strain, but for many generations they would continue to pay for their long lives with an excess of defectives.