never hit it.
Through the streets of the city they rocketed, lightless while Ballister fumbled for the switch. The construction was somewhat unfamiliar; he collapsed totally before finding it. Kay snapped the running lights on, not daring to glance at the man by her side.
She turned onto the airport road. Behind her there was the roar of a second motor. In the rear-vision mirror she saw two pale purple circles that were the running-lights of a pursuing car.
A brief chatter of metallic slugs on the car's tail told her of a semi-automatic rifle at the least. If it were a machine gun she knew they'd never get out of this chase scene alive. The rattle sounded again. There was no whang of bullets penetrating metal. Kay breathed again, in relief.
Europeans in special cars used to hold the speed-records for ground-travel, on a straight track. That was probably because no American girl had ever bothered to enter the lists against them. Kay had teethed on a piston- ring and broken the speed-laws by the age of twelve. Since then her progress had been rapid; she knew cars backwards and forwards and overturned. She knew every trick of the throttle and gas, knew how to squeeze another mile-per-minute out of the most ancient wreck on the roads.
The municipal car was of unfamiliar make; it took her about five minutes to size up its possibilities; when she had, she sped quite out of sight of the pursuing car.
'Wake up,' she yelled at the man by her side. 'If you aren't dead, for heaven's sake, wake up!'
There was a vague gesture from the figure, and a dim smile on its face.
'Knew you'd do it,' Ballister murmured. 'Keep going, Kay. Get Sir Mallory's plane out, Kay. Back to Oslo we go—' The murmured words were stilled.
Wondering if her friend were dead, she stepped more speed out of the car, hauled up before the deserted airfield. The hangar-doors were merely latched against the weather; she swung them open and switched on the lights.
The ornate, fast plane of the noble was balanced feather-like on its dozen retractable landing wheels; she trundled it out of the shed and managed to load Ballister into it.
From the road came the roar of a motor; far in the night was the gleam of headlights. Kay fiddled with the controls, backed the plane into the wind. The car shot onto the landing field, tried to cross before the plane and force her around. She lifted a little, swung around the auto, ducked at the rattle of a gun. The control panel splintered into fragments of plastic and metal; alcohol ran over her knees.
Mercifully, the plane rose as she yanked wildly at the stick with no response. It headed diagonally up, its course quite straight. The stick and the pedals were quite dead. And there were no dual controls.
Into the night they flew, at the mercy of the wind, far above the landing field, in the heart of the jagged Pyrenees.
Their luck, such as it was, didn't last; one of the peaks loomed before them. Kay had just enough time to cover the body of Ballister, wondering if he were still alive, if he would survive this, if she would, when the plane struck.
5
Revelation
Someone was singing, she noticed, with an altogether inappropriate glee, an objectionable song about his Majesty, the King of Spain.
'Stow it, Hoe,' ordered the voice of Ballister. 'Let the lady rest.'
She sat up violently. 'You!' she said. 'What happened—' She felt a curious weakness in the middle and sat back again. 'What's up?'
Ballister approached, relief glowing all over his face. 'You had us worried. You've been on a liquid diet for a week without once coming up for air. How'd you like to tear into a steak?'
'Love it,' she snapped, realizing that the sense of weakness had been hunger. 'Any potatoes?'
'You'll have rice instead. May I present Jose Bazasch.' He led forward by one hand a shy little old man who wore the Basque beret.
'An honor,' he muttered incoherently. 'Fine ladies—noble gentlemen in my cave—'
'Tell your story, Hoe,' suggested Ballister grimly. He speared a broiled steak from its string where it turned over the fire. A slab of washed bark served very well for a platter.
'The story? This. I am Jose Bazasch, a Basque. A dozen years ago, during the wars, there were many Basques. I was sheep-thief—outlaw. Lived here in the cave. I am no more thief because there are no more sheep.
There are no more Basques except me.'
'If you'll excuse the omission,' said Kay, chomping busily, 'I'm eating too energetically to register surprise. Kindly explain in words of one syllable or less.'
'Okay, child. Your brains would be addled after your long illness. I'll begin at the beginning. There was a slew of Iberians along about the beginnings of the Christian era who were decimated by, in rapid succession, the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns, Saracens and their most holy majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella.
'That brings us down to 1939, the beginning of the war. The few Basques left fight with the French, the Spanish and any other army they fancy. Most of them die. A few thousand are left in the lower mountain villages. One day in 1951 the villages are bombed by German planes—
blown right off the map. Squads of soldiers hunt down the rest of the Basques in the hills and pop them off.'
'But not Jose!' interjected the old man with considerable excitement and a little pride.
'That's right. Not Jose. Hoe was so well hidden that half the time he couldn't find his own den for a month once he had left it. Anyway—
there aren't any Basque villages nor any Basques. Yet the next year the Pyrenese Peoples' Republic is announced and in the next they held DeCuerva's army, which never did get through. Now, a dozen years later we see this uncannily perfect city of the future, achieved by a handful of men and women—whom we've seen—and that's that.'
'That's what?' asked the girl abstractedly.
'That's what I was planning to ask you as soon as you regained consciousness.'
'You've waited in vain,' said Kay, licking her fingers. 'I can't think on a full stomach. Nobody can. By the way, you neglected to explain the events of the night of a week ago. How did you know they suspected us of suspecting them of being not what they seemed to be?'
'You know the Mayor's office building?'
'Like a book. I might almost say I know it backwards.'
'Right, child. You do know it backwards, and what's more you don't know the half of it. Because more than the half of it is underground. I bumbled on the Mayor that night going down into the basement of his building and asked if I could go too. Taking something of a chance I pushed by him before he could make an excuse.
'I guess he didn't have a gun, because I wasn't shot in the back for seeing what I saw. There were some machines there that make their hydroelectric turbines look like a pinwheel. Big—very big—and mysterious in function, to me at least. Simply didn't look like anything at all—except maybe a glorified and electric concrete mixer. And a couple of people mucking around with oiling-cans.
'They drew and fired; I shoved the mayor in and rolled the hall-desk against the door, propped that with my walking-stick for leverage and beat it for your flat.'
'Nice condensed narration,' she said thoughtfully. 'But what made you poke around in the first place? Dashed if I had any grounds for suspicion of conspiracy and such.'
'You've forgotten a lot since we took those psych courses. How do you tell a louse from an honest man?'
'A louse doesn't trust anybody.'
'Right. Not even when he's middle aged does he trust a couple of moonstruck lovers. Any nasty old man who'd break in on a tete-a-tete is bad from head to toe.
'And the clincher, to me at least, was this bloody, mysterious and cancerous growth of the so-called Basque
