while behind it, the wrecker hooked onto the disabled
car and swung north into the crossover. Clay checked both the
chronometer and radiodometer and then reported in. "Cinncy Control
this is Car 56 back in service." Cincinnati Control acknowledged.

Ten minutes later, Ben reappeared in the cab, slid into the left-hand
seat. "Hit the sack, kid," he told Ferguson. The chronometer read
2204. "I'll wake you at midnight--or sooner, if anything breaks."

Ferguson stood up and stretched, then went into the galley. He poured
himself a cup of coffee and carrying it with him, went back to the
crew quarters. He closed the door to the galley and sat down on the
lower bunk to sip his coffee. When he had finished, he tossed the cup
into the basket, reached and dimmed the cubby lights and kicked off
his boots. Still in his coveralls, Clay stretched out on the bunk and
sighed luxuriously. He reached up and pressed a switch on the bulkhead
above his pillow and the muted sounds of music from a standard
broadcast commercial station drifted into the bunk area. Clay closed
his eyes and let the sounds of the music and the muted rumble of the
engines lull him to sleep. It took almost fifteen seconds for him to
be in deep slumber.

* * * * *

Ben pushed Beulah up to her steady seventy-five-mile-an-hour cruising
speed, moved to the center of the quarter-mile-wide police lane and
locked her tracks into autodrive. He relaxed back in his seat and
divided his gaze between the video monitors and the actual scene on
either side of him in the night. Once again the sky was lighted, this
time much brighter on the horizon as the road ways swept to the south
of Cincinnati.

Traffic was once again heavy and fast with the blue and green carrying
almost equal loads while white was really crowded and even the yellow
"zoom" lane was beginning to fill. The 2200 hour density reports from
Cinncy had been given before the Ohio State-Cal football game traffic
had hit the thruways and densities now were peaking near twenty
thousand vehicles for the one-hundred-mile block of westbound NAT 26
out of Cincinnati.

Back to the east, near the eastern Ohio state line, Martin could hear
Car 207 calling for a wrecker and meat wagon. Beulah rumbled on
through the night. The video monitors flicked to the next ten-mile
stretch as the patrol car rolled past another interchange. More
vehicles streamed onto the westbound thruway, crossing ove