They got out of town.  The last of the street lamps was behind them.  There was only starlight ahead, and an unknown road with many turns and curves.  Sometimes there were roadsigns, dimly visible as uninformative shapes beside the highway.  They warned of curves and other driving hazards, but they could not be read because Lockley drove without lights.  He left the car dark because any glare would have been visible to the men of the trailer-truck for a very long way.

Starlight is not good for fast driving, and when a road passes through a wooded space it is nerve-racking.  Lockley drove with foreboding, every sense alert and every muscle tense.  But just after a painful progress through a series of curves with high trees on either side which he managed by looking up at the sky and staying under the middle of the ribbon of stars he could see, Lockley touched the brake and stopped the car.

“What’s the matter?” asked Jill, as he rummaged under the instrument panel.

“I think,” said Lockley, “that I must have damaged something in that truck.  Otherwise they’d have turned their beam on us just to get even.

“But maybe they’ll be able to make a repair.  In any case there are other beams.  Those are probably stationary and the truck knows where they are and calls by truck radio to have them shut off when it wants to go by.  That would work.  Using the Wild Life truck was really very clever.”

He wrenched at something.  It gave.  He pulled out a length of wire and started working on one end of it.

“If they guess we got a car,” he observed, “they’ll expect us to run into a road block beam that would wreck the car and paralyze us.  I’m taking a small precaution against that.  Here.”  He put the wire’s end into her hand.  “It’s the lead-in from this car’s radio antenna.  It ought to warn us of beams across the road as my watch spring did in the hills.  Hold it.”

“I will,” said Jill.

“One more item,” he said.  He got out of the car and closed the door quickly.  He went to the back.  There was the sound of breaking glass.  He returned, saying, “No brake lights will go on now.  I’ll try to do something about that dome light.”  With a sharp blow he shattered it.  “Now we could be as hard to trail as that Wild Life truck was the other night.”

Jill groped as the car got into motion again.

“You mean it was—­Oh!”

“Most likely,” agreed Lockley, “it was the thing that went out of the park and occupied Maplewood, flinging terror beams in all directions.  Some of the truck’s crew would have had footgear to make hoofprints.  They committed a token burglary or two.  And there was the illusion of aliens studying these queer creatures, men.”

They went on at not more than fifteen miles an hour.  The car was almost soundless.  They heard insects singing in the night.  There was a steady, monotonous rumbling high above where Air Force planes patrolled outside the Park.  After a time Jill said, “You seemed discouraged when you talked to that general.”