Free Psyche by Phyllis Young Page A

full-scale man-hunt had already been launched against him, that the hunters were at that moment setting up their traps ahead of him, and that only by a miracle had he escaped those even now in place behind him, he would not have believed it.
    Mesmerized by the steady hum of the car engine, so unvarying a rhythm it scarcely qualified as sound any more, his brain fogged by lack of sleep, he was unaware that his speed was decreasing, and that his driving was becoming more and more erratic, the old car wandering from one side of the road to the other like a drunk unlikely to reach home safely.
    As the stars began to fade, and darkness was diluted by a thin promise of dawn, the trees fell back to give way to what at first appeared to be rolling pastureland; pastureland that grew, with sudden, appalling lack of forewarning, into squat, unnaturally smooth mountains rearing up in stark silhouette against the dying night.
    The mines, the man thought dully.
    The hydro pole into which he crashed two miles further on seemed to come to meet the car, rather than the car going toward it. He was aware of a sickening jar and a sharp agony in his left side, while his ears rang with the harsh discord of splintering wood, tortured metal, and shattered glass.
    The rippling echoes of a disturbance too slight to affect the grim slag hills that had borne witness to it, had long since dissipated before he was able, or even dared, to move.
    Dragging himself out of this trap of his own devising, a wounded animal concerned now with nothing beyond its own immediate safety, he took stock of a situation which, bad though it was, could have been considerably worse. Once on his feet, he found that he had sustained, apart from cracked ribs, nothing more than minor bruises. His hand pressed to his side to ease thepain there, his pallid mouth funneling a steady stream of obscenities, he examined the car.
    In a grey light, belonging neither to night nor to day, he saw that it had fared, if anything, better than he had himself. One headlight was smashed, the grill was buckled, and the front bumper, embedded in the shredded side of the wooden pole, had been torn loose, but there was no really serious damage visible. If the wheel alignment was still true, it could be driven with safety.
    Hope flaring up in him again, he struggled into his seat, started the motor, and, in reverse gear, roared the engine. The chassis vibrated noisily, and the wheels spun, but the car did not move. Flinging open the door, he got out to discover what was the matter.
    On first sight of the front wheel overhanging the edge of the ditch, he thought it would be comparatively easy to push the car free of both ditch and pole. Five minutes later, blind with sweat, his side a torment he wished he could tear out with his bare hands, he knew he was beaten: even uninjured he could not have done it. Wildly he looked up at the lightening sky, desperately searched with bloodshot eyes a landscape devoid of life or movement of any kind, a world in which nothing grew and no birds sang. Shivering with cold and fear, his breath coming in short laboured gasps, he knew he must run, and made an enormous effort to pull himself together sufficiently to think of what must be done before he started running.
    The license plates—he must get them off. With the spanner he did this as fast as he could, and then, bending and hammering them, reduced them to a size he could stuff into his pockets.
    Taking out a comb, he ran it through lifeless dark hair, combed too often and washed too little, while he wondered confusedly if there was anything else he could do to remove any possible connection between himself and this wreck he should leave behind him as quickly as possible. The black bag—he dared neither leave it nor open it. Eventually, his connection with the car would be established: to abandon the black bag would be madness. Yet— the fear which he had been forcing into the farthest recesses of his