during the night.

During the day he stopped twice. Once he stopped for gas, and the other time for water. He forgot to eat. Toward evening the heat got worse and he passed truck after truck loaded with melons, lettuce, and more melons. The Imperial Valley. The dragnet was far behind. When Catell saw the sign that said Brawley, he took the next road to the right. He avoided big towns and traffic with a sure habit, catching the main highway again on the other side.

That’s when he blew the tire. The car took a wild lurch and threw Catell sharply against the side of the door. He grabbed for the wheel, fighting it while the car bumped to a halt on the soft shoulder of the road. He got out and changed the tire. It took him only a short time, but when he straightened up from the wheel, he suddenly felt deathly tired. Waves of fuzzy blackness came and passed; his eyes burned with a purple ache. He had to lean against the car and wait for his strength to come back. Then he went back behind the wheel and started the car. The wheel with the shredded tire was left behind. It lay near the edge of the road, forgotten. Or perhaps Catell just hadn’t cared.

He should have.

In the middle of the night, two trucks loaded with produce came barreling down the road. They piled up on top of each other, spraying fruit and leaves, because the lead truck had hit the discarded wheel. From the time that the state troopers checked the scene to the time when they knew that Catell was nearby, only a few hours had passed. They checked the odd-sized tire; they wondered about the wheel; then they took a routine rundown of cars wanted, and they found that a man who had slipped them in Los Angeles was driving a car like the one that had lost the wheel.

“Did you hear that?” Rosen said, turning down the shortwave.

“No, I didn’t hear that. I was musing to the soft hum of the tires on the shiny road. I have no other interests in mind, so I don’t listen to the radio.”

“Now, Jackie, don’t act like it was my fault. Didn’t we do everything there was to be done?”

“Obviously, no.”

“Well, it beats me how he got out. We had every crossing sealed up, the planes—”

“Yeah. And now I’ll tell you how he did it. He left the road and went straight across the prairie, as big as life and as long as he pleased.”

“But the planes—”

“At night, my friend, they couldn’t tell one shadow from another, even if they had been flying. And all Catell needed to get around was a little moonlight. Now, where I come from we got ditches next to the highway. You couldn’t just barrel off the road and into the prairie, even if we had prairie.”

“Don’t think we won’t keep that in mind from now on. Besides, there’s no prairie in the Imperial Valley. We got him bottled up but good this time. Just let him try hiding in a lettuce field. There’s only one way out for him now, Jackie, and that’s straight up. Or straight down, maybe.”

And Catell began to notice it.

He began to notice how the cars were bunching up in front of him. They were coming fast and at even intervals from the other direction, but his side of the road had become slow and glutted with cars.

Roadblock.

He couldn’t see it yet, but that didn’t mean a thing; there were twists in the road. Creeping more slowly all the time, Catell edged forward, hoping for a side road before the roadblock came in sight. There weren’t any, just fields and fields with plants standing low and in straight rows as far as the horizon. His hands started to sweat. Closer, slowly closer.

He had almost passed it before he saw the dirt lane that angled off through the fields. It was a wide, rutted road, used only by the trucks that picked up the produce from the fields.

With a sharp swing Catell jerked the car out of his line, across the highway, and into the field. Everybody could see him, but he didn’t worry about it. In a cloud of dust he raced along the planted rows, which seemed to come at him like a spreading net.

There were no turns, no dips. When the end of the field came in sight, Catell noticed that the next highway