Captain Jordan Quince, Bay Area Police Department, slammed the door that had his name on it with as much force as he could. Had the upper section of the door been glass instead of frosted plastic, it probably would have shattered. As it was, it simply trembled in its frame and provided the Captain with some much needed emotional relief without costing the taxpayers any money.
Quince then walked past the two officers standing stiffly at attention in front of his desk and sat down in his chair. He stared at them, his eyes narrowed in anger, and snapped, "All right, tell me what happened. Tell me how you managed to total your hovercraft."
Officer Mike Shannon, a tall thin Irishman with brownish-blond hair, looked solemn. He had been keeping his face solemn for several minutes, and the strain was beginning to tell on him. Deep in his eyes was a twinkle of suppressed merriment.
"Well, sir," he said slowly, "It was like this. We were patrolling down near Schaeffer Street when we spotted a stolen vehicle. Well, we--"
Quince cut him off. "That 'craft wasn't listed on the hot sheet," he said angrily. "I checked. What made you think it was stolen?"
"It was called in," Shannon crowed, a grin sneaking over his face as his reserve started to crack.
"Then why wasn't it on the hot sheet?!" Quince asked ominously.
"Because the thief had only called it in a few minutes before," Shannon replied, the grin blossoming.
The Captain's mouth worked up and down a few times before he found his voice, and then he bellowed, "Are you telling me that someone stole a vehicle, called you up and told you that he had stolen it, and that you still couldn't catch him?!!"
Shannon nodded, his grin finally reaching its full wattage. "That's it!" he agreed. Then he looked critically at his superior. "You really ought to do something about that blood pressure, sir. When your face gets that red, it means--"
"Shut up!!" Quince screamed, cutting him off. His hands slapped his desk, and he leapt to his feet, trying to breathe slowly. Through clenched teeth, he managed to ask, "Which one of you was driving?"
"I was, sir," Shannon's partner said, speaking for the first time.
Officer Mae Linn Tomashi had classic Oriental features, stood precisely five feet tall, and spoke with the slightest whisper of an accent. Her quiet demeanor was the perfect counterpoint to Shannon's boisterous good cheer.
"You were driving?" Quince asked quietly, suddenly calmer. Mae Linn tended to have that sort of effect on people. "All right. Tell me what happened."
She took a moment to marshal her thoughts and then said, "We spotted the vehicle and ordered the driver to pull over. He responded by accelerating rapidly, and we pursued him."
"That's right!" Shannon confirmed. "I've heard about people going the wrong way down one-way streets, but I never thought I'd live to see it!"
Quince sighed deeply. "He went the wrong way down a one-way street?" he asked.
"Well, no sir," Mae Linn answered quietly. "I did that."
The Captain's eyebrows rose sharply. "You--" he began, but Shannon interrupted him.
"You should have seen it, sir. Mae was trying to cut him off, so she--"
"Shannon," Quince said softly.
"--whipped around this corner. Well, when we found ourselves--"
"Shannon." The Captain's voice was getting louder.
"--going the wrong way, she never batted an eye! She just--"
"Shannon!!" Quince barked, finally overriding his subordinate.
"Well, it was a good piece of work!" Shannon protested. "And it would have come out all right if it hadn't been for that cement mixer."
Suddenly, Quince was very tired. "All right," he said. "Don't worry about it. This guy was probably just a one-time joy rider. Just get back--"
"No, he wasn't," Shannon said, ignoring his partner's warning gestures.
"What do you mean?" Quince asked dangerously.
"Well, this is the third time we've chased him. It's just the first time we've wrecked the car."
The Captain was beyond speech. He simply sat there and stared helplessly at the two officers while the red hue his face had taken on began to deepen.
"It was not our fault, sir," Mae Linn said, trying to ward off the coming explosion. "The thief is very careful about what he steals."
"She's right about that," Shannon agreed. "He always steals a Whistler, or a Sprinter, or something. One of those high powered sports models. There's no way we can catch him in our patrol craft."
The anger drained out of Quince's face, and he was silent for a moment. When he finally spoke, it was in a friendly tone that neither Shannon nor Mae Linn trusted for an instant.
"Well, now," he said, "That seems to me to be perfectly reasonable. You certainly can't catch a vehicle that can leave you in the dust."
"You never spoke a truer word," Shannon told him.
"So," continued Quince, "Since this fellow seems to like calling you, I suppose we'll just have to do something about that."
"That's the stuff!" Shannon said, visions of himself behind the steering bar of one of the department's three pursuit vehicles dancing in his head.
"And I think that Research and Development have come up with something that will help you out."
Shannon's face froze. "R and D?" he asked plaintively.
"Yes," the Captain answered with a smile. "So why don't you two get right down there and ask for Dr. Woszynsky?"
The partners made the trip down to the research and development labs in complete silence. Neither one of them had field tested equipment before, but they’d heard enough stories from people who had to make them nervous about what might be waiting for them below.
Dr. Woszynsky turned out to be a short, pudgy, balding man with a perpetually preoccupied look in his eyes. He was wearing a dirty white smock. In his right hand he carried a clipboard that was overflowing with papers. In his left, he held a marker that he used as a pointer. "I really don't know," he told Shannon and Mae Linn, "Why we have such a bad reputation. I mean, any prototype device is going to have a few bugs in it. Field testing isn't really dangerous."
"What exactly is it that we get the honor of trying out?" Shannon asked warily, eyeing the cloth covered hovercraft in front of him.
"The Mark Seven," Woszynsky said proudly, pulling the cloth cover off of the vehicle with a flourish. The car thus revealed appeared to be a standard departmental hovercraft. It was only when Shannon peered underneath the thing that he noticed several incomprehensible modifications.
"What is it?" he asked, standing up and dusting his hands off.
"This is the ultimate pursuit vehicle," the scientist told him. "No other craft can escape from it."
Mae Linn eyed the car calmly. "It does not appear to be radically different from our previous vehicle," she observed quietly.
Woszynsky tapped his marker thoughtfully against the side of his face, leaving several bright green streaks on his skin, and said, "Ah, but your old 'craft didn't have an anchor beam, did it?"
"Anchor beam?" Shannon asked. "Well, no."
"There you are then." Satisfied that his irrefutable logic had carried the point, he handed them the clipboard and a set of keys. "Here's the manual. Take the car and try it out. I think you'll be very surprised at what it can do."
Shannon eyed the keys suspiciously and then tossed them to his partner. "I don't doubt that you're right," he said with a wry smile.
The two police officers slid into the front seat, and Mae Linn steered the car out of the garage and into the street.
"It handles well, anyway," she said. "Or, at least, no worse than any other department vehicle that I have driven."
Shannon was slumped comfortably in his seat studying the thick stack of papers and staring at several unfamiliar knobs and switches on the dashboard. Idly, he thumbed the switch that opened his window.
The normally calm and quiet Mae Linn was generally regarded by her fellow officers as overly cautious, almost to the point of inaction. This was an assessment with which Mike Shannon, who had been her partner for nearly two years, would have agreed, except where driving was concerned.
Mae Linn loved to drive. She spent untold hours on the department’s driving course honing her skills. She loved pursuit, because it gave her a chance to stretch her abilities in ways that would otherwise be denied her, such as by going the wrong way down a one-way street.
This explains the delight with which she greeted the radio message that came over the car's speaker a few moments after they left the garage.
"Alpha Michael Two, we have a call for relay to you."
Mae Linn looked at the radio, her eyes sparkling, and keyed the mike. "Patch it through," she said.
There was a moment of static, and then a familiar voice came through. A voice that they had heard three times before.
"Hello, children!" the voice said. "Guess who! You didn't have much luck yesterday, but maybe you can handle me today. Try near the corner of Harper and Skye streets. You'll know me when you see me. 'Bye, now!!"
"That's it!!" Mae Linn cried, slapping the steering bar and kicking down the accelerator.
Shannon should have known that would be her reaction, but he hadn't been paying attention. He was flipping through the papers on the clipboard when she sped up. The wind rushed madly though his open window, caught the sheets in his hand, and flung them wildly around, in and out of the car. With a yelp of dismay, Shannon scrambled after them, recapturing as many as he could.
Siren howling, the police car whipped around a corner and slid down a seldom used back road.
"We'll get him this time," Mae Linn said, narrowly missing a lamp post as the vehicle floated off the street and onto the sidewalk. "He won't expect us to come this way."
She twisted the steering bar sharply and sent the car flying toward a narrow alley. When Shannon saw the mouth of the alley, which didn't look wide enough for the car to pass through, coming at him, he threw his hands across his face. The papers that he had managed to collect flew though the air and were caught by the wind again.
The police vehicle spun out of the alley, only to find another craft parked at the side of the road in its way. Reflexively, Mae Linn hit the large red panic button above the steering bar. The fans on the underside of the hovercraft revved into high and lifted the vehicle an extra ten feet into the air, carrying Shannon and Mae Linn over the parked car and dropping them jarringly down again on the other side. The car slewed wildly to one side for a moment before Mae Linn managed to regain control of it, and then she had to spin the steering bar madly to send them streaking down the road instead of into the building that had been directly in front of them when they’d come out of the alley.
As they shot down the street, and Shannon began to breathe again, the parked craft they had leaped over lifted three feet off the ground on a cushion of air, and then it took off up the street at high speed.
Mae Linn caught the motion in her rear scanner and slung the car into a hundred and eighty degree turn, taking off in pursuit at maximum acceleration.
Shannon, meanwhile, had managed to recover about twenty pages out of the original hundred or so and was desperately trying to make some sense out of Woszynsky's new toy. It didn't help that the pages he had found were not consecutive ones.
"Okay," he said after a moment, "Get him on a straight road and get directly behind him."
"All right."
As the two vehicles continued their race, Shannon began to flip switches. "Alignment," he said, reading aloud. Click. "Power." He glanced at the bright orange speedster they were pursuing. "Maximum." Click. He looked at the instructions again.
"After alignment and charging of grid, engage tractor and anchor beams simultaneously. CAUTION: Make certain that--"
He turned the page and continued reading. "--the grid was designed by Dr. Woszynsky. The couplings were also designed by--" In a panic, Shannon looked at the papers again. They were numbered 57 and 93.
"Swell," he said with a grimace, throwing the papers down. "Are you ready?"
Mae Linn was smiling a cat-like smile. "Whatever that thing does," she said, "Turn it on."
With a fatalistic shrug, Shannon reached out and flipped two switches at the same time. A shudder ran through the vehicle as it ground to a stop. A brilliant blue beam shot out, touched the fleeing car and clung, binding it to the police car with an unbreakable link. A second beam flickered from the bottom of the police car, anchoring it firmly in place. The thief was trapped.
"Fantastic!" Mae Linn cried, throwing her hands up in delight. "We've got him!"
Shannon sat back in his seat and grinned at the motionless car a short distance away. He grinned at the blue beam. He began to feel an odd vibration in the seat beneath him, and he grinned at that. A piece of paper that had been lodged in the map rack above his head fluttered gracefully into his lap. He glanced at it.
"--the vehicle detained does not exceed 27,000 DWP, otherwise damage to the frame of the cruiser may result." The shuddering was getting worse. Shannon looked at the page number: 58.
"Uh...Mae?" he asked casually. "What's the dead weight pull of a--"
There was a terrible squeal as overstressed metal gave way, and they were suddenly in motion again. Behind them, the rear section of their hovercraft remained in place, anchored solidly by the beam sunk into the street.
The front part of the vehicle, with Mae Linn and Shannon in it, was still locked to the stolen craft by an electronic leash, and, as the thief continued his attempted escape, they swung wildly behind him, dragged along like a child trying to hang on to a runaway great dane.
"Turn it off!" Mae Linn had to shout to make herself heard above the sound of rushing wind and the scrape of metal and plastic against the street.
"I can't!" Shannon yelled back, flipping switches in a futile effort to disconnect the tractor beam. "It won't turn off!"
"I don't suppose the radio still works!" Linn yelled. She was keeping both hands firmly on the steering bar. It wasn't helping her control the car, but it gave her a feeling of stability despite the wild, bucking gyrations the vehicle was being subjected to.
"No!" Shannon answered as he tossed the useless microphone out the window. "It doesn't! In fact, nothing works but Woszynsky's damn beam!"
"Good think we're strapped in," Mae Linn said after a moment.
Shannon flashed her a manic grin. "I knew there had to be something good in all this!" he replied.
The gyros of a hovercraft, the delicately controlled mechanisms that keep it balanced while it moves, are not exceedingly tolerant of unusual conditions. The fact that the stolen vehicle was dragging half of a police car behind it while its driver pushed it at top speed through a series of sharp turns was more than enough to upset them. With a loud snap, the speedster's balance systems jerked out of alignment, and a warning light flashed on. The hovercraft was moving far too fast for the driver to react to the light in time.
The car slewed wildly to the right and then canted sharply to the left. The driver tried to compensate, and the car responded to his frantic tugs on the steering bar by grazing a building and then flipping completely upside down. The lift fans, which were now pointed toward the sky, drove the car top first into the pavement. It skidded along on its roof for fifty or sixty meters before slamming to a stop against the front of another building.
Under stresses well beyond Woszynsky's expectations, the tractor beam shorted out and snapped off. The remnants of the police hovercraft, with all its momentum behind it and no control systems, continued helplessly to follow the path the stolen car had been pulling it along. It skimmed just over that now crippled vehicle and slammed spectacularly though a large window, splintering the glass and sending the people in the building, who had come running to see what the noise was all about, scattering wildly.
The vehicle then smashed into and through a wall before being jerked to a violent stop. Dazed and stunned, though saved from serious injury by the car's anti-impact equipment, Shannon and Mae Linn sagged limply in their seats.
Shaking his head to clear it and looking up, Shannon noticed Captain Quince standing nearby, giving an impressive demonstration of rage. Then he glanced around and realized why the room looked so familiar. They were in Quince's office.
As people scrambled around trying to free them, Shannon reflected that things certainly could have been worse. "At least," he told Mae Linn, looking around at the damage, "We got the guy. Imagine how upset the Captain would have been if we'd done all this for nothing."
E-mail: benedet@esn.net
I am a college biology teacher living in the southeastern US with my wife, one dog, and one cat, which is plenty of cats but several dogs too few. All in all, I think the universe is a lot sillier than we can possibly imagine, which won't stop me from trying."
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