Then I was sorry; a brat who looked like the twin of the one who had given me trouble earlier was inside fiddling with the controls. Cursing, I dumped my prisoner in the lounge circle and grabbed at the kid. The boy shrank back and struggled, but I tore him loose and threw him out—straight into the arms of the first of my pursuers.
That saved me. He was still untangling himself as I slammed into the driver’s seat and shot forward without bothering with door or safety belt. As I took the first corner the door swung shut and I almost went out of my seat; I then held a straight course long enough to fasten the belt. I cut sharp on another corner, nearly ran down a ground car coming out, and went on.
I found the wide boulevard I needed—the Paseo, I think—and jabbed the take-off key. Possibly I caused several wrecks; I had no time to worry about it. Without waiting to reach altitude I wrestled her to course east and continued to climb as I made easting. I kept her on manual across Missouri and expended every launching unit in her racks to give her more speed. That reckless and illegal action may have saved my neck; somewhere over Columbia, just as I fired the last one, I felt the car shake to concussion. Someone had launched an interceptor, a devil-chaser would be my guess—and the pesky thing had fused where I had just been.
There were no more shots, which was good, as I would have been a duck on water from then on. My starboard impeller began to run hot immediately thereafter, possibly from the near miss or perhaps simply from abuse. I let it heat, praying that it would not fly apart, for another ten minutes. Then, with the Mississippi behind me and the indicator way up into “danger” I cut it out and let the car limp along on the port unit. Three hundred was the best she would do—but I was out of Zone Red and back among free men.
Up until then I had not had time to give my passenger more than a glance. He lay where I had slung him, sprawled on the floor pads, unconscious or dead. Now that I was back among men and no longer had the power for illegal speeds there was no reason not to go automatic. I flipped on the transponder, signaled a request for block assignment, and put the controls on automatic without waiting for permission. A block control technician might curse me out and even note my signal for a citation, but they would fit me into the system somehow. I swung around into the lounge and looked my man over.
He was breathing but still out. There was a welt on his face where I had clipped him with the table, but no bones seemed broken and I doubted that he would be unconscious from that cause. I slapped his face and dug my thumbnails into his ear lobes but I could not rouse him.
The dead slug was beginning to stink but I had no way to dispose of it. I let him be and went back to the control seat.
The chronometer read twenty-one thirty-seven Washington time—and I still had better than six hundred miles to go. At my best speed on one power plant, allowing nothing for landing, for tearing over to the White House and finding the Old Man, I would reach Washington a few minutes after midnight. So I had already failed to carry out the letter of my orders and the Old Man was sure as the devil going to make me stay in after school for it.
I took a chance and tried to start the starboard impeller. No dice—it was probably frozen solid and needing a major overhaul. Perhaps just as well, as anything that goes that fast can be explosively dangerous if it gets out of balance—so I desisted and tried to raise the Old Man by phone.
The phone would not work. Perhaps I had jiggered it in one of the spots of exercise I had been forced to take that day but I had never had one fail me before. Printed circuits, transistors, and the whole works being embedded in plastic made those units almost as shock resistant as a proximity fuse. I put it back in my pocket, feeling that this was one of those days when it was just not worthwhile to get out of bed. I turned to the car’s communicator and punched the emergency tab.