"Faster!" The voice that spoke in my mind was cold, unmoved, arrogant in its knowledge of power.
And I obeyed, letting myself relax, trying to ease the aching muscles of my arms and legs, not thinking about what I was going to do or what was about to happen to me. The speedometer's needle began to waver erratically above one hundred and ten miles an hour.
"Faster! Faster!"
The one word, repeated over and over, drumming in my brain until it obliterated thought. I was an automaton, steering the lurching, whining car along the blurred ribbon of road, a puppet controlled by tenuous strings of mental force, a wooden puppet without will or thought of its own, dumbly responding to the master's word.
And at last it came, the command, so dreaded in the deep recesses of my consciousness that protest shrieked in my mind, breaking me out of the stupor.
"Turn the wheel!"
And in that instant, when the immediate pull of obedience was almost overwhelming, a final frenzied cry of defiance was heard. I saw ahead the slanting curve of a ramp shooting out toward the ocean causeway. For long agonizing seconds I held out against the pressure—and when my hands moved on the wheel it was at that precise and last possible second which sent the car careening onto the ramp and into a long banked curve.
The maneuver caught my pursuer by surprise. There was a brief, bewildered respite before the clear cold voice spoke again, stamping out the elation that gripped me. The line of the causeway beckoned, so near now, less than a quarter of a mile away—
"Turn! Turn now!"
And I had spent the last remaining reserve of strength to resist. My hands obeyed. I spun the wheel.