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The plastic disk fit it perfectly.
The cars must be public taxis. That was convenient. Now, if the cars' destination codes resembled the booths', all he had to do was punch for the police station. And get a gun!
As he reached for the keyboard his hands started to shake. Then other muscles were twitching, and suddenly he was in convulsions. Strange noises came from his mouth. In fury and despair Corbell realized that the felon's corpse had finally failed him; he was dying, and the timing was wrong, WRONG!
Please, no! Not till the battle's over...
He locked his hands together and forced them at the keyboard. He punched the compressed hourglass, tried again and missed, again and hit, had to stop for a minute. Neck muscles locked and twisted his head backward, agonizingly, and he saw a car coming around the gently curved drive like a homing missile.
The convulsions were getting worse. He stabbed at the hourglass key again, and again, and... He didn't know how often he'd hit it. When the car began to move he let the convulsions have their way.
Mental agony. Unconsciousness. Now convulsions. Maybe he ought to be compiling a list of what the silver cane wouldn't do.
It wouldn't stop a bubble-car. The convulsions eased. Presently he could turn his head. Mirelly-Lyra was far behind him, out of her car, still firing. His motion carried her around the curve of the drive.
He tried to relax. Random muscles locked and released in his legs, his back, his neck, his eyelids. He wasn't just feeling the aftereffects of the silver cane. He had been through too much nightmare. He was too old for this kind of thing. He had always been too old to play Monster and Villagers through a maze of cityscape with an armed madwoman behind him.
"Come on, calm down," he whispered. "It's all over. Unless...
Unless there was a tracking device in Mirelly-Lyra's dashboard. Or in her cane.
He would still get there ahead of her. Allow, say, one minute to search the police station for a gun. Then cut his losses, get out via the booths, dial at random and keep ru
Oops! The booths didn't work. He had tried to dial the police station earlier.
The car tilted far over, rounded a corner and was on one of the radial streets. Corbell watched the rear, his chin propped on the back of the seat. It was less u
He saw the edge of the hexagonal dome go past him. The street ended. He was crossing sand. Corbell turned to see barren salt dunes flowing past him. Far ahead, the blue-and-white line of ocean came toward him.
The car ran straight toward frothing white breakers, crossed them and headed out to sea at something like ninety miles per hour.
III
Corbell's voice was a rusty, querulous whine. He didn't like it. It was interfering with his search.
It said, "All right, Corbell! You won the argument. If your medicines were better you wouldn't have tried to steal mine. Now let's talk!"
It wasn't much of a search. He had hoped that Mirelly-Lyra might have stored food in her car. But he'd opened the glove compartment, and he'd looked under the seats, and where else was there? Slit the upholstery?
Corbell was hungry.
"You'll find the talking switch on the far right of the panel. Just push it upward. Corbell?"
Sure. And then you'll track me down and- But Corbell was tempted. He could ask her about food. He could ask her how to turn off the receiver.
The car zipped over the waves toward whatever destination its idiot brain had read from Corbell's spastic directions. Beneath the edges of a thick gray-black cloud deck, the sun and crescent Jupiter had drifted apart along the horizon. The sun was lower now, its underside flattened.
Something lifted out of the red sun glare. He thought it was a bottle-nosed dolphin until its size registered. It was halfway to the horizon, and lifting like a blimp released! Its head tilted just a bit, and it looked him over while it slowly settled back into the frothing red sea.
A dolphin the size of a whale. So we killed the whales off after all, he thought. And later there was an ecological niche...
"I must guess you're hearing me, Corbell. I'm tracking you toward the southernmost continent, toward what used to be the Boys' capital city. You can't lose me from your path because you can't leave your car. Talk to me."
It seemed she was tracking him anyway. He flipped the switch up and said, "Is there any food aboard this car?"
"Hello, Corbell. If you try to steal my drugs again you will kill yourself. I've placed traps."
"Then I won't."
"Then we will be searching in separate places. I give you a year to find the dictator immortality. I wish I could give more, but you know my condition. If you will find the drug, I will become your woman. Otherwise I will kill you."
He laughed. "A difficult choice."
"You have not seen me when I was beautiful. I am the only woman for you, Corbell. There are no others left."
"Don't count on too much. Peerssa says I'm low on sex urge." That upset her. "Have you never desired women, Corbell?"
"I was married for twenty-two years."
"What is married?"
"Mated. Under contract."
"Was there sex? Did you enjoy it?"
Suddenly Corbell missed Mirabelle terribly. He mourned her, not because she was dead, but because she was gone. And her other half went on and on, through a world grown more and more hallucinatory.... If only he could have talked it over with Mirabelle!
"In sex and in all ways, our life was purest ecstasy, as is usual in marriage," Corbell said with a flippancy he did not feel. "I'm sorry I brought it up."
"I had to know."
Just to stick a pin in her, he said, "Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want the dictator immortality? Maybe I'm content to grow old gracefully."
"You tried to steal my drugs."
"You've got me there."
"There is no grace to growing old. One year, Corbell."
"Hey, don't hang up. Have you any idea where I'm headed? I don't even know where we were."
"There is a continent that covers the South Pole. You are aimed there. As for where we were, there is a continent whose long tip points at the southernmost continent. We were nearly at the tip. I suspect your target to be the city of-" And for a moment her own voice broke through, before his resumed: "Sarash-Zillish, the capital of Earth's last civilization."
Departing Cape Horn for Antarctica, he thought. here in Antarctica?
"What destination did you type?"
He risked telling her. "I was trying to get to the police station. What with the way my muscles were jumping around, I really don't know what I hit."
"Could you have struck the key more than four times? Five would send you to World Police Headquarters in Sarash-Zillish."
"Maybe." He laughed. "Well, it got me away from you."
"One year, Corbell."
In a year he could be dead, though in fact he felt pretty good. The aches, the exhaustion, the twitchies were going away. But the hunger had attained a fine cutting edge. "In an hour I'll be dead of starvation. Is there any food in this car?"
"What do I eat?"
"When you reach Sarash-Zilhish, go to the park." She gave him an address for the keyboard of his taxi. "The park is untended now, but any fruits you find are edible, and most of the animals can be eaten if you can catch them."
"Okay."
"You will not find dictator immortality there. There were never adults in Sarash-Zillish."
"Hey, Mirelly-Lyra. How long have you been looking?"
"Perhaps ten years of my life."
He was startled. "I got the impression you'd been at it for a century or so."
"I was unlucky. When the Children revived me from zero-time, they told me they would search out the dictator immortality for me. I had no choice but to believe them, but they lied."