was working against me.
The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the
damn thing and didn’t understand its purpose. It was no
more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades
setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to
rock my own hovercar.
Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house
arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt
that I would work for them, and there was no chance that
I could stir up any sort of hornet’s nest about Melinda
Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last
vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded
me into the howler and took me quietly away.
But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it
that easy for them.
Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous
and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the
time, under my breath, was “fool” and “congenital idiot”
and “raving madman,” but that is neither here nor there.
Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler,
I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my
craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost
my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took
hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.
The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the
blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation
was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot
forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung
three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate
dandelion fluff—which turned abruptly into a lump of lead
and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.
I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air
cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back
against full stop so that none of the power could be used
to drive the craft forward or backward—it all went
straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped
the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.
The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I
hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a
hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have
been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the
story would have ended much differently indeed.
The last thirty feet, the building column of air under
the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of
contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too
much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into
the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the
grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded
me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the
blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet
above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise some-
where below, but it could not be that serious if the car
still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceler-
ation, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.
Taking the car out next to the curling waves that
foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the
cliff to see what was transpiring there—and was just in
time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush
to follow me.
Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to
ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev
four times faster than a small car’s blades ever can; extra
compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim
to add extra boost if the time should come when they are
needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot
embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on
foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But
ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundred-
foot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge
howler fell like a mountain.
In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed
and force that the blades at full and the compressed air