“You think so?”
“I know so, Storm. I’ve been round a long time. You’re too good a man to go down out of control. You’ve got a place in the world and a job to do. You’ll be back—” a thought struck the Lensman and he went on, in a strangely altered tone: “But you wouldn’t—of course you wouldn’t—you couldn’t.”
“I don’t think so. No.” Suicide, tempting although it might be, was not the answer. “Good-bye, Phil.”
“Not good-bye, Storm. Au revoir.”
“Maybe.” Cloud left the laboratory and took an elevator down to the garage. Into his big blue DeKhotinsky Special and away.
Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side-bumpers almost touched he drove with his wonted cool skill; even though he did not know, consciously, that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned, stopped, “shoveled on the coal,” all correctly—and all purely automatically.
He did not know where he was going, nor care. His numbed brain was simply trying to run away from its own bitter imaginings—which, if he had thought at all, he would have known hopeless of accomplishment. But he did not think. He simply acted; dumbly, miserably.
Into a one-way skyway he rocketed; along it over the suburbs and into the trans-continental super-highway. Edging inward, lane after lane, he reached the “unlimited” way—unlimited, that is, except for being limited to cars of not less than seven hundred horsepower, in perfect mechanical condition, driven by registered, tested drivers at not less than one hundred twenty five miles per hour—flashed his number at the control station, and shoved his right foot down to the floor.
Everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do a hundred and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly-timed hour; but very few drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal big souped-up Specials can wheel. Most people simply haven’t got what it takes to open one up.
“Storm” Cloud found out that day. He held that six-thousand-pound Juggernaut onto the road, wide open, for mile after mile after mile. But it didn’t help. Drive as he would, he could not out-run that which rode with him. Beside him and within him and behind him; for Jo was there.