that it _was_ Grogan?

That question startled me. I opened my eyes and sat up straight. In
moving so suddenly, my hand knocked over the defense mech and it thudded
to the floor. As I bent quickly to pick it up, it started clicking
again.

Several things occurred to me at once, then, and my stomach wadded
itself into a tight ball and shot up again to press against my heart. My
neck and back muscles tightened.

* * * * *

The first thing that struck me, I think, was that the defense mech had
started clicking _again_. It had been clicking before.... As Maxwell and
I left the bar, the defense mech had begun clicking steadily.
Then--sometime--it had stopped. Probably when I hit Scarface with it.
But I hadn't noticed. And for thirty minutes--closer to forty-five,
now....

There was no particular sequence to the flood of realizations that
rushed my consciousness next and left me feeling weak and shaky.

The desk sergeant had said ten minutes. The policeman had gotten there
in less than five. We were driving, not through side streets toward a
police station, but along a high-speed lane of a main thoroughfare, away
from the city. Two dogs had yapped at my heels. The "police" vehicle was
unmarked--unusual if not illegal.

When I looked at the driver, he was not, of course, a policeman.

He was one of Grogan's bodyguards--the one into whose arms I had thrown
Maxwell not long ago.

He was staring straight ahead at the road, his spread-nosed face
composed. He hadn't noticed anything.

I took a deep breath and leaned back again, half-closing my eyes. But I
did not relax. The clicking of the defense mech seemed thunderous to me,
but if the driver heard it, he gave no indication. Perhaps it would have
meant nothing to him if he did hear it.

I tried to think of the problem at hand, but my mind refused to
cooperate. It kept rushing back to events of the recent past and
demanding reasons and explanations.

When the defense mech faltered and quietly stopped clicking, I was aware
of it this time. My first impulse was to hit it with my hand and try to
make it work again, but I restrained myself.

I controlled my thoughts firmly, holding them tight and shaping them
carefully in my mind before letting them go.

The driver was again a policeman in the gray police uniform. We were
once more driving slowly through city streets instead of speeding along
a highway. Two dogs ran beside the auto, bar