But the reflexes took hold again as his eye caught the track of the
same vehicle as it hit the crossover from white to green, squeezed
into the faster lane and continued its sloping run towards the next
faster crossover. Now Martin followed the movement of the car almost
constantly. The moving blip had made the cut-over across the half-mile
wide green lane in the span of one crossover and was now whipping into
the merger lane that would take it over the top of the police lane
and drop down into the one hundred fifty to two hundred mile an hour
blue. If the object of his scrutiny straightened out in the blue, he'd
let it go. The driver had been bordered on violation in his fast
crossover in the face of heavy traffic. If he kept it up in the
now-crowded high-speed lane, he was asking for sudden death. The
monitors flicked to the next block and Ben waited just long enough to
see the speeding car make a move to the left, cutting in front of a
speeding cargo carrier. Ben slammed Beulah into high. Once again the
bull horn blared as the cocoons slammed shut, this time locking both
Clay and Kelly into their bunks, sealing Ben into the control seat.
Beulah lifted on her air cushion and the twin jets roared as she
accelerated down the police lane at three hundred miles an hour. Ben
closed the gap on the speeder in less than a minute and then edged
over to the south side of the police lane to make the jump into the
blue lane. The red emergency lights and the radio siren had already
cleared a hole for him in the traffic pattern and he eased back on the
finger throttles as the patrol car sailed over the divider and into
the blue traffic lane. Now he had eyeball contact with the speeding
car, still edging over towards the ultra-high lane. On either side of
the patrol car traffic gave way, falling back or moving to the left
and right. Car 56 was now directly behind the speeding passenger
vehicle. Ben fingered the cut-in switch that put his voice signal onto
the standard vehicular emergency frequency--the band that carried the
automatic siren-warning to all vehicles.
* * * * *
The patrol car was still hitting above the two-hundred-mile-an-hour
mark and was five hundred feet behind the speeder. The headlamp bathed
the other car in a white glare, punctuated with angry red flashes from
the emergency lights.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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