As he gunned his plane northward through the night, Price thought of the roller-coaster when he'd been a kid, of how you went faster and faster until you hit the big plunge.

Well, he was on the big plunge now. And what would end this roller-coaster ride--prison, or escape, or a crash? It had to be one of those.

He was to remember that, later. He was to think later that it was well he didn't dream the fantastic fate he was really racing toward....

He looked down, and there was only blackness. The deserts of California and Nevada are dark and wide, and he was keeping well away from the airways beacons and the main highways.

He kept the Beechcraft as high as he could. He was flying without lights, but with what they already had against him, that minor infraction wasn't important. He kept looking back, expecting every minute to see the red-and-green winglights of Border Patrol planes coming up on his tail.

If he was lucky, if he slipped them long enough, if he crossed north without being sighted by the passenger planes that shuttled between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, he might just make it to Bill Willerman's and get the Beechcraft under cover. If--if--if--

There was another if, Price thought bitterly. If he'd had any brains, he wouldn't be in this spot at all.

He turned on the radio. He flipped the dial around, getting loud music from a Vegas hotel, then a political speech, then more music--and then a news broadcast. As he'd expected, he was at the top of the news.

"--so that even while Arnolfo Ruiz, firebrand revolutionary exile, is under arrest by Mexican police, United States authorities are conducting an intensive air-dragnet search for the American pilot who smuggled Ruiz across the border. That unknown pilot is known to have returned across the border an hour ago, and police of three states have been alerted."

The AEC announces that its next test will be that of an experimental small new H-bomb whose effects will be studied for--"

Price savagely cut the radio. He damned the announcer, and Ruiz, and himself. Most of all, himself.

He'd acted like a halfwit. Because a smooth talker had given him a phony story about a secret business trip, he had smuggled the most dangerous trouble-maker in the hemisphere down into a friendly 

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