Chapter 11

The average citizen, faced with an impressive uniform, falls into one of two very widely divided camps. One of these camps contains those of us who are impressed by the visible, exalted rank of the wearer.

So, by the simple process of snapping, “Official business!” at the driver of a skycab and simultaneously tossing the driver his official I. D. card in its ornate leather folder, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed succeeded in commandeering a skycab.

He took off, leaving the driver in a razzle-dazzle dream of collecting mileage from the Space Service whilst he spent the time comfortably relaxing in a pub. Protected from public gaze by the camouflaging skycab, the junior spaceman proceeded to cruise up the middle level of Ancient Fifth Avenue, driving a full eighteen inches below the legal altitude set for cruising skycabs.

He turned on his pocket set to listen to the details of the search that was being organized for him.

Above him, all around him, even in the subways below him, the vast and efficient organization of the Military Space Service was converging. This organization had the will and the manpower to scour this city of twenty million people almost literally soul by soul if the need be, to locate a young officer in the uniform of a Junior Spaceman. He might be driving a Military Vehicle, but more likely would be found in one of the many public vehicles or public carriers that the city offered for civilian transportation. There was also the high possibility that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed might be located afoot on the static sidewalk or on one of the tramways.

And so, mentally clocking each time-point and making a careful note of the check-points, the junior spaceman built up a mental map of the city and its danger points. Until the laws of simple logic failed to operate, he was going to be exactly where they weren’t.

He was, in the driver’s seat of a skycab, precisely as invisible as The Purloined Letter. But now, if he were to drive his skycab away from the cruising level, he needed one more accessory. He had time. So long as the Military was looking for a Military man in Military surroundings and in a Military manner, he was as safe from detection as if he really owned the skycab he’d commandeered.

The civilian police were closer to success.

Called by the chief of the arresting party who’d arrived at Gloria Hanford’s apartment too late by minutes, the minions of Law and Order converged in their civilian efficiency. Logistically, it was a simple matter of hare and hounds. The hare couldn’t win. Only one question was important: Which of the hounds would?

Afoot and by jetcopter that englobed the area, they closed in. By the application of stored memory and studied information they erected invisible barriers at every exposed point along the most probable trail of their quarry, from the street outside of her apartment door to the garage stall in Monticello. Then, as a final clincher, they installed three men in Gloria Hanford’s airscooter itself.

By virtue of the unexpected movement one can elude the cops for a time. Gloria, on the street before her apartment building, almost went into despair when she saw that there was no skycab within hailing distance. She almost took it as a personal affront.

But this was hardly the time to stamp her sandals on the hard pavement or to write letters to the Commissioner of Public Carriers.

She turned and disappeared into the tramway entrance heading North along Waterfront Avenue. Her coin had hardly hit the bottom of its slot when the mobile police converged to land on the spot she’d just vacated. The foremost of them saw her trim figure disappearing into the distance, eclipsed by the myriads of innocent souls whose only desire was to make use of the same Northbound Tramway.

The pursuit began to reshape its surface of detection from englobement to a cylinder, the axis of which lay congruent with the Northbound Tramway.

Again, she held the advantage of knowing her own decision whereas her pursuit had to divine her plans by analysis of her actions and making use of extrapolation. Gloria Hanford abruptly stepped off the Tramway at Fifty-third, walked briskly three long blocks to LaGuardia’s Sixth, found herself facing a group of burly policemen, and stopped long enough to think. One of the cops shoved a galton whistle between his teeth and blew a supersonic blast that registered on every cop’s detector within a quarter mile. Audibly a siren wailed. Inaudibly and invisibly the drawstring web of civic forces began to close in.

Once more Gloria stepped into the kiosk of a tramway, the Crosstown. She rode one more block to Ancient Fifth and stepped off. With a wave of her hand, and then the most startling process to be found in a woman, Gloria Hanford poked two fingers in her mouth and let go with a shrill, piercing whistle that made every skycab driver within a half mile come to the point of ‘customer’s alert!’

She made her point.

The one accessory that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed needed was a passenger, preferably a female passenger that could be identified as a female for a hundred yards through a high fog driven by a blinding gale. Old, beautiful, young or ugly didn’t matter, so long as it was unmistakably woman. The Military wouldn’t stop a skycab with a female passenger.