"It's not," he told the tormal with a sort of despairing humor, "that I'm ashamed of you, Murgatroyd, but I'm afraid I may become ashamed of myself. Keep low!"
He started the car and drove away.
He passed through a business district, with many smashed windows. He passed through canyons formed by office buildings. He crossed a manufacturing area, in which there were many ungainly factories but no sign of any work going on. In any epidemic many men stay home from work to avoid contagion. On Tallien Three nobody would be willing to risk employment, for fear of losing much more than his life.
There there was a wide straight highway leading away from the city but not toward the spaceport. Calhoun drove his stolen car along it. He saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter Esclipus Twenty.
They'd failed. Now Calhoun went past the place from which they had been launched, and did not notice. Once he could look across flat fields and see the spaceport highway. It was empty. Then there was sunset. He saw the topmost silvery beams and girders of the landing grid still glowing in sunshine which no longer reached down to the planet's solid ground.
He drove. And drove. Government Center might put a road block to the spaceport, just in case. But they'd really believe him still hiding somewhere in Government Center with no hope of—actually—accomplishing anything but his own destruction.
After sunset he was miles beyond the spaceport. When twilight was done, he'd crossed to another surface road and was headed back toward the city. But this time he would pass close to the spaceport. And two hours after sundown he turned the car's running-lights off and drove a dark and nearly noiseless vehicle through deep-fallen night. Even so, he left the ground car a mile from the tall and looming lacework of steel. He listened with straining ears for a long time.
Presently he and Murgatroyd approached the spaceport, on foot, from a rather improbable direction. The gigantic, unsubstantiated tower rose incredibly far toward the sky. As he drew near it he crouched lower and lower so he was almost crawling to keep from being silhouetted against the stars. He saw lights in the windows of the grid's control building. As he looked, a lighted window darkened from someone moving past it inside. There was an enormous stillness, broken only by faint, faint noises of the wind in the metal skeleton.
He saw no ground cars to indicate men brought here and waiting for him. He went very cautiously forward. Once he stopped and distastefully restored his blaster to lethal-charge intensity. If he had to use it, he couldn't hope to shoot accurately enough to stun an antagonist. He'd have to fight for his life—or rather, for the chance to live as a normal man, and to restore that possibility to the people in the ghastly-quiet city at the horizon and the other lesser cities elsewhere on this world.