"Tayne!" Blair's face blanched, then reddened. "The Taynes, you mean! Gundar and Larsen, with Larsen behind it—"
"Sir? You're being tracked down for—they say, for murdering Larsen. Please follow us sir, Madame...." The look of puzzled bewilderment deepened on the underground leader's face as he motioned his men in screening flanks surrounding the four. One of the men handed him a white bundle from a compact equipment-pack on his back.
"You had better get these on. We would say we have captured your boys—"
They were S-Council uniforms, and the Quadrate and his wife donned them quickly; Blair doing so more in hesitant imitation of Lisa's frantic haste than from the desperation of a situation which he only half-understood.
Murdered Larsen Tayne? Then ... yes of course. The other Blair. But why should the other Blair hate Tayne so? He was of a different Earth, of course.... He would think like those of his own world. He would hate all this world stood for. Hate Tayne for his overbearing, brutish use of authority—criminal cleverness at deception.
Suddenly, he knew the confusion of panic for the first time in his life. Suddenly, his mind was a boiling thing, and all the brilliant solutions that had been forming in it with split-second rapidity were inexplainably invalid, wrong....
And then they were at a half-run, leaving the house, heading for a 'copter painted with the S-Council insigne, counterfeit serial code-numbers beneath it.
In moments, the craft was airborne, and Washington was falling away below them, fading away behind. And now any small thing—an incorrectly acknowledged radio challenge—would undo them, the Quadrate realized, but that was only a part of this terrible gamble they were taking. Gamble, on their very lives, yes—only why? Why?
Slowly, bit by bit, the thing pieced itself together as they flew. A great forest stretched ten miles beneath them, faded, wilted at last into desert as the first shadows of a day dying crept silently upward to engulf them.