fast one of those
brutal big souped-up Sixteens can wheel. They simply haven't got what it
takes to open one up.

"Storm" Cloud found out that day. He held that two-and-a-half-ton
Juggernaut on the road, wide open, for two solid hours. But it didn't
help. Drive as he would, he could not outrun 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 Jo's pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan's
fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes.
Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat beside
him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was
there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the
three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead--a vista of
emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic
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 his accelerator, eased
down his mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and a
trimly-uniformed officer made a gesture.

"Sorry, sir," the policeman said, "but you'll have to detour here.
There's a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead--

"Oh! It's Dr. Cloud!" Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. "I
didn't recognize you at first. You can go ahead, of course. It'll be two
or three miles before you'll have to put on your armor; you'll know when
better than anyone can tell you. They didn't tell us they were going to
send for _you_. It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was that
they were going to shove it off into the canyon with pressure."

"They didn't send for me." Cloud tried to smile. "I'm just driving
around--haven't my armor along, even. So I guess I might as well go
back."

He turned the Special around. A loose vortex--new. There might be a
hundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters
of the one that had murdered his family--the hellish spawn of that
accursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling
ass had tried to blow up.... 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 a blow from a fist.

He thought. _Really_ thought, now; cogently, intensely, clearly