Inventions -- Fiction; Police -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
When we stopped for a red light I watched a young woman in a business
suit step between a whiskey bottle head-high, and a bean can about
knee-high, and then proceed gingerly waving a colored sphere ahead
of her. This sphere, about eighteen inches in diameter, suddenly
disappeared. She stopped abruptly and began shouting. Before the
traffic light turned green, a man came up with an empty motor oil can
and placed it on the sidewalk, under the point she indicated in the air
before her.
Durstine explained, "When that speck gets large enough to support it,
that can will be hung on it. Meanwhile, other people are forewarned
that the air over the can is out-of-bounds, so they won't waste
detectors on it."
As he spoke, the young woman was fishing another "detector" from her
purse. It was a limp bit of something which she placed to her lips and
inflated until it was a foot-and-a-half in diameter, then she tied off
the neck and proceeded down the walk waving it before her in great
vertical sweeps.
It was as simple as that.
Our undoing had been an 85-cent kid's toy. And our salvation was a
penny-balloon!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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