There was a dark delivery-van at the curb. I leaped to it, tried the door-locked. I doubled my fist, smashed the glass, got the door open. The nearest demon broke into an awkward gallop.
I slid into the seat, twisted the key, accelerated from the curb as the thing leaped. It struck just behind the door, clung for a moment, and fell off. I steered for the one in the street ahead, saw it dodge aside at the last instant-just too late. There was a heavy shock; the car veered. I caught it, rounded a corner on two wheels, steering awkwardly with one hand. The gyros screeched their protest as I zigzagged, missed another dog-thing coming up fast, then straightened out and roared off along the street, past stores, a service station, houses, then open fields. Blood was running from my knuckles, trickling under my sleeve.
There was a clump of dark trees ahead, growing down almost to the edge of the road. A little farther on, the polyarcs of a major expressway intermix gleamed across the dark prairie. I caught a glimpse of a roadside sign:
CAUTION-KANSAS 199-1/4 MI.
SW. AUTODRIVE 100 YDS.
MANDATORY ABOVE 100 MPH
I braked quickly, passed the blue glare sign that indicated the pickup point for the state autodrive system, squealed to a stop fifty yards beyond it. I switched the drive lever to AUTO, set the cruise control on MAXLEG, jumped out, reached back in to flick the van into gear. It started off, came quickly up to speed, jerkily corrected course as it crossed the system monitor line. I watched it as it swung off into the banked curve ahead, accelerating rapidly; then I climbed an ancient wire fence, stumbled across a snow-scattered ploughed field and into the shelter of the trees.
Excitement, I was discovering, wasn't good for my ailment. I had another attack of nausea that left me pale, trembling, empty as a looted house, and easily strong enough to sort out a stamp collection. I swayed on all fours, smelling leaf-mold and frozen bark, hearing a distant croak of tree-frogs, the faraway wail of a horn.
The demons had laid a neat trap for me. They had watched, followed my movements-probably from the time I left the ship-waiting for the time to close in. For the moment, I had confused them. For all their power, they seemed to lack the ability to counter the unexpected-the human ability to improvise in an emergency, to act on impulse.
My trick with the van had gained me a few minutes' respite-but nothing more. Alerted police would bring the empty vehicle to a halt within a mile or two; then a cordon would close in, beating every thicket, until they found me.
Meanwhile, I had time enough to take a look at whatever it was that I had come five thousand miles to collect-the thing Felix had guarded with the last fragment of his will. I took the envelope from an inner pocket, tore off one end. A two-inch-square wafer of translucent polyon slipped into my hand. In the faint starlight, I could see a pattern of fine wires and vari-colored beads embedded in the material. I turned it over, smelled it, shook it, held it to my ear "Identify yourself," a tiny voice said.
I jumped, held the thing on my palm to stare at it, then cautiously put it to my ear again.
"You now have sixty seconds in which to identify yourself," the voice said. "Fifty-eight seconds and counting…"
I held the rectangle to my mouth.
"Bravais," I said. "John Bravais, CBI SA-0654."
I listened again:
"… fifty-two; fifty-one; fifty…"
I talked to it some more.
"… forty-four; forty-three; forty-two…"
Talking to it wasn't getting me anywhere. How the hell did you identify yourself to a piece of plastic the size of a book of matches? Fingerprints? A National Geographic Society membership card?
I pulled out my CBI card, held it to the plastic, then listened again:
"… thirty-one; thirty…" There was a pause. "In the absence of proper identification within thirty seconds, this plaque will detonate. Unauthorized personnel are warned to withdraw to fifty yards… Twenty seconds and counting. Nineteen; eighteen…"
I had my arm back, ready to throw. I checked the motion. The blast would attract everything within a mile, from flying saucer watchers to red-eyed beast-shapes that loped on hands like a man's, and I would have lost my one ace in a game where the stakes were more than life and death… I hesitated, looked at the ticking bomb in my hand. "Thinking caps, children," I whispered aloud. "Thinking caps, thinking caps…"
Talking to it was no good. ID cards with built-in molecular patterns for special scanners meant nothing to it. It had to be something simple, something Felix hadn't had time to tell me…
A signal had to be transmitted. I had nothing-except an array of gimmicks built into my teeth by Felix There was a spy-eye detector that would set up a sharp twinge in my left upper canine under any radiation on the spy band; the right lower incisor housed a CBI emergency band receiver; in my right lower third molar, there was a miniature radar pulser A transmitter. Just possibly-if there was still time. I jammed the plague to my ear:
"… ten seconds and counting. Nine-"
With my tongue, I pushed aside the protective cap on the tooth, bit down. There was a sour taste of galvanic action as the contacts closed, a tingle as an echo bounced back from metal somewhere out across the night. I pulsed again; if that hadn't done it, nothing would.
I cocked my arm to throw the thing But if I did-and it failed to explode-I would never find it again in the dark, not in time. And it was too late to drop it and run… not that I had anything left to run with. I gritted my teeth, held the thing to my head…
"… two…" The pause seemed to go on and on. "You are recognized," the voice said crisply. "You are now seven hundred and thirty-two yards north-northeast of the station."
I felt a pang of emotion in which relief and regret mingled. Now the chase would go on; there would be no rest for me. Not yet…
I got to my feet, took a bearing on the north star, and set off through the trees.
I came out of the woods onto an unsurfaced track, went through a ditch choked with stiff, waist-high weeds, scraped myself getting over a rotting wire fence. There were headlights on the highway now, swinging off onto the side road, and other lights coming out from Coffeyville. The patch of woods would be the obvious first place to search. In another five minutes, the hunters would be emerging on the spot where I now stood ankle-deep in the clods of a stubbled cornfield. I couldn't tell what was on the far side; my night vision was long gone. I broke into a shambling run, across the frozen furrows, tripping at every third step, falling often. The thudding of my heart was almost drowned by the roaring in my head.
Something low and dark lay across my path-the ruins of a row of sheds. I angled off to skirt them, and slammed full-tilt into a fence, sending fragments of rotted wood flying as I sprawled. I sat up, put the wafer to my ear.
"… six hundred twenty-two yards, bearing two-oh-seven," the calm voice said. I struggled up, picked my way past the rusted hulk of a tractor abandoned under the crabbed branches of a dead apple tree. I came back into the open, broke into a run across a grassy stretch that had probably been a pasture forty years earlier. Faint light fell across the ground ahead; my shadow bobbed, swung aside, and disappeared. Cars were maneuvering, closing in on the woodlot behind me. Fence posts loomed up ahead; I slowed, jumped a tangle of fallen wires, ran on across another field, plowed by the auto-tillers months before but never planted.