Everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do a hundred and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly-timed hour; but very few drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal big souped-up Specials can wheel. Most people simply haven’t got what it takes to open one up. “Storm” Cloud found out that day. He held that six-thousand-pound Juggernaut onto the road, wide open, for mile after mile after mile. But it didn’t help. Drive as he would, he could not out-run that which rode with him. Beside him and within him and behind him; for Jo was there. Jo and the kids, but mostly Jo. It was Jo’s car as much as it was his. “Babe, the big blue ox,” was her pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan’s fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes. Jo was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there . . . and behind him, just beyond eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous by far than the emptiest reaches of inter-galactic space. Damnation! he couldn’t stand much more of. . . . High over the roadway, far ahead, a brilliant octagon flared red. That meant “STOP!” in any language. Cloud eased up on the accelerator; eased down on the brake-pedal; took his place in the line of almost-stalled traffic. There was a barrier and a trimly-uniformed policeman. “Sorry, sir,” the officer said, with a sweeping, turning gesture, “but you’ll have to detour over to Twenty. There’s a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead. . . . Oh, it’s you, Doctor Cloud! You can go ahead, of course. Couple of miles yet before you’ll need your armor. They didn’t tell us they were sending for _you_. It’s just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it over into the badlands with pressors.” “They didn’t send for me.” Cloud tried to smile. “I’m just driving around. No armor, even, so I might as well go back.” He turned the Special around. A loose vortex—new. There might be three or four of them, scattered over that many counties. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family—spawn of that damned Number Eleven that that bungling nitwit had tried to blow out. . . . Into his mind there leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like the blow of a fist. He thought. _Really_ thought, now; intensely and clearly. If he could do it—could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex . . . not exactly revenge, but . . . it _would_ work . . . it would _have_ to work—he’d _make_ it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive now in every fiber, he drove back to the city almost as fast as he had come away.