r and
dropping down into the same lanes they held coming out of the
north-south road. Seven years on patrols had created automatic
reflexes in the trooper sergeant. Out of the mass of cars and cargoes
streaming along the rushing tide of traffic, his eye picked out the
track of one vehicle slanting across the white lane just a shade
faster than the flow of traffic. The vehicle was still four or five
miles ahead. It wasn't enough out of the ordinary to cause more than a
second, almost unconscious glance, on the part of the veteran officer.
He kept his view shifting from screen to screen and out to the sides
of the car.

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 th