"Oh… hell." Glenn-Lewis glared at the cop car, as if it were somehow responsible. "Maybe if we found a really back road…" "Not a chance, Margo. In fact, they're likely to have even heavier coverage of such roads, on the theory that an escaping prisoner is mostly likely to seek them out himself." He shook his head. "No, I'm afraid we're stymied for the moment." Margo began making a three-point turn.

Not, probably, because she was worried about getting a ticket for making a U-turn, but simply because the road was too narrow for one in the first place. "Now what?" she asked, as they drove away from the roadblock. Richard had been considering the question himself. Not with any great hope of finding what he needed, he looked in the glove department. "Alas. No maps, as I feared. Do you know how to get to Collinsville?" "Never heard of it. And there must be a hundred Collinsvilles in the U.S." A bit defensively, she added: "Look, I'm from Manhattan. There's New York, there's Jersey, there's California way out there on the other coast, and a bunch of stuff in between."

Richard sighed. "Collinsville, Illinois. It's near Scott Air Force Base." "There's an air force base inIllinois?" She whistled, softly.

"Jeez, and here I thought they were all in South Dakota or Nevada or someplace like that." Richard had noticed before that most American intellectuals were astonishingly ignorant about any and all military affairs. In that respect, quite unlike British intellectuals. Or French, for that matter. He supposed it was a residue from the Vietnam War. American intellectuals tended to see that war as a manifestation of imperialist behavior, which they'd not expected from their country.