 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
“Hey, Boze, you not really gonna custer me, are you? Back’m, Boze. No bad trips, true. The
kid’ll drop back, hang a couple of biggies on ya, just to teach ya little lesson, letcha swimaway.”
The voice of the driver was hard, mirthless, the ugly sound of a driver used to being challenged.
“Listen, you young snot,” George said, grating his words, trying to sound more menacing
than he felt, “I’m going to teach you the lesson!”
The Merc’s driver laughed raucously.
“Boze, you de-mote me, true!”
“And stop calling me a bozo, you lousy little degenerate!”
“Ooooo-weeee, got me a thrasher this time out. Okay, Boze, you be custer an’ I’ll play
arrow. Good shells, baby Boze!”
The finalizing queep sounded, and George gripped the wheel with hands that went knuckle-
white. The Merc suddenly shot away from him. He had been steadily gaining, but now as though it
had been springloaded, the Mercury burst forward, spraying gook and water on both sides of the
forty-foot lanes they were using. “Cut in his afterburner,” George snarled. The driver of the Mercury
had injected water into the exhaust for added thrust through the jet nozzle. The boom of the Merc’s
big, noisy engine hit him, and George studded in the rear-mounted propellers to give him more
speed. 175. 185. 195.
He was crawling up the line toward the Merc. Gaining, gaining. Jessica pulled out her
drawer and unfolded her crash-suit. It went on over the g-suit, and she let George know what she
thought of his turning their Sunday Drive into a kamikaze duel.
He told her to stuff, and did a sleeper, donned his own crash-suit, applied flash salve, and
lowered the bangup helmet onto his head.
Back on manual he crawled, crawled, till he was only fifty yards behind the Mercury, the
gas-turbine vehicle sharp in his tinted windshield. “Put on your goggles...I’m going to show that
punk who’s a bozo….”
He pressed the stud to open the laser louvers. The needle-nosed glass tube peered out from
its bay in the Chevy’s hood. George read the power drain on his dash. The MHD power generator
used to drive the laser was charging. He remembered what the salesman at Chick Williams
Chevrolet had told him, pridefully, about the laser gun, when George had inquired about the
optional.
Dynamite feature, Mr. Jackson. Absolutely sensational. Works off a magneto hydro dynamic
power generator. Latest thing in defense armament. You know, to achieve sufficient potency from a
CO2 laser, you’d need a glass tube a mile long. Well, sir, we both know that’s impractical, to say
the least, so the project engineers at Chevy ‘s big Bombay plant developed the “stack” method.
Glass rods baffled with mirrors--360 feet of stack, the length of a football field...plus end-zones. Use
it three ways. Punch a hole right through their tires at any speed under a hundred and twenty. If
they’re running a GT. you can put that hole right into the kerosene fuel tank, blow them off the road.
Or, if they’re running a stirling, just heat the radiator. When the radiator gets hotter than the
engine, the whole works shuts down. Dynamite. Also...and this is with proper CC authorization, you
can go straight for the old jugular. Use the beam on the driver. Makes a neat hole. Dynamite!
“I’ll take it,” George murmured.
“What did you say?” Jessica asked.
“Nothing.”
“George, you’re a family man, not a rodder!”
“Stuff it!”
Then he was sorry he’d said it. She meant well. It was simply that...well, a man had to work
hard to keep his balls. He looked sidewise at her. Wearing the Armadillo crash-suit, with its
overlapping discs of ceramic material, she looked like a ferryflight pilot. The bangup hat hid her
face. He wanted to apologize, but the moment had arrived. He locked the laser on the Merc,
