A week later the Mercury Three stood ready for takeoff on the rooftop of IDCC Headquarters. In reply to the queries that appeared on the pilot's console display screen, Hunt specified the Ocean Hotel in the center of Houston as their destination. The DEC minicomputer in the nose made contact with its IBM big brother that lived underground somewhere beneath the Portland Area Traffic Control Center and, after a brief consultation, announced a flight plan that would take them via Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and Fort Worth. Hunt keyed in his approval, and within minutes the aircar was humming southeast and climbing to take on the challenge of the Blue Mountains looming ahead.

Hunt spent the first part of the journey accessing his office files held on the computers back in Metadyne, to tidy up some of the unfinished business he had left behind. As the waters of the Great Salt Lake came glistening into view, he had just completed the calculations that went with his last experimental report and was adding his conclusions. An hour later, twenty thousand feet up over the Colorado River, he was hooked into MIT and reviewing some of their current publications. After refueling at Santa Fe they spent some time cruising around the city on manual control before finding somewhere suitable for lunch. Later on in the day, airborne over New Mexico, they took an incoming call from IDCC and spent the next two hours in conference with some of Borlan's engineers discussing technicalities of the scope. By the time Fort Worth was behind and the sun well to the west, Hunt was relaxing, watching a murder movie, while Gray slept soundly in the seat beside him.

Hunt looked on with detached interest as the villain was unmasked, the hero claimed the admiring heroine he had just saved from a fate worse than death, and the rolling captions delivered today's moral message for mankind. Stifling a yawn, he flipped the mode switch to MONITOR/CONTROL to blank out the screen and kill the theme music in midbar. He stretched, stubbed out his cigarette, and hauled himself upright in his seat to see how the rest of the universe was getting along.