He couldn't stop. After several excruciating minutes he lay down on the floor and gasped to Lansing for a drink of water.
"There isn't any," Lansing told him sharply. "And brother, you'd better get up from there, because you'll have to move fast when we get to Frisco."
Without knowing what would result, Ollie made sure he neither got up nor stopped coughing till they reached San Francisco which was fifteen minutes later.
The pretense involved intense effort for so old a man. His voice went. He was clammy with sweat from head to foot. His face was pale and his hands cold.
By the time the copter reached the roof of San Francisco's Union Square tower, Ollie was actually unable to jump out of the cabin in the thirty seconds allotted by the remote traffic-control system. Lansing tried to carry him out, but the result was merely a delay that damned the stream of traffic.
A winged inspector buzzed them, took remote control of their copter, and led it to the emergency tower at Civic center.
Ollie was taken off on a stretcher. Lansing, his urbanity washed away in a flood of redfaced rage, was still in the copter when it rose. And the hypo was still in his pocket; with Ollie due to get medical attention, he hadn't been able to use it.
Ollie didn't dare stay long in the hospital. As soon as his stretcher was set down on the receiving ward floor, he rolled out of it and with the help of a fat steward struggled to his feet.
"Thanks," he whispered hoarsely. "I have to go now."
"You can't!" said the steward. "You haven't even been examined yet."