"Murray Leinster - The Nameless Something" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

It was flagged down by a motorcycle cop beside the highway. But Bud Gregory did not stop. The
decrepit car plunged ahead. The motorcycle cop mounted his steed and pursued. The decrepit car
moved more swiftly. It looked as if an asthmatic twenty miles an hour would be its limit. But it hit forty
within seconds of the cop's attempt to halt it. It was making eighty when it ran into Los Angeles traffic.
And still it did not stop.
The motorcycle cop sweated blood, envisioning catastrophe. He gave his motorbike everything it
would take, blaring his siren continuously and shrilling his whistle when he passed policemen on foot in
the hope that they would telephone on ahead.
The next fifteen minutes gave a dozen members of the traffic police—who joined in the chase—gray
hairs and a tendency to babble quietly to themselves. The dilapidated car left all pursuit behind. It ran into
traffic in which it should have smashed up fifty times over. It left behind it a stream of crashes and
collisions and nerve-racked pedestrians, but it did not even touch another vehicle or a single individual.
The collisions came from other cars swerving frantically to avoid it as it rocketed through Los
Angeles' swarming streets. Half the time it rode on the wrong side of the highway, cutting in and out,
speeding up with an incredible acceleration, slowing down with completely impossible abruptness, and
turning corners at a rate which even those who saw it did not believe.
On Wilshire Boulevard it reached a climax of preposterous performance. It came streaking through
traffic at something like ninety-two miles an hour. It left a mounting uproar behind it. And it came to a
crossing where a red light had halted everything, came eeling down the wrong side of the street, swerved
so that it should have turned somersaults, but observers said that it ran as if its wheels were glued to the
ground, and—there in front of it, in the only space by which it could move on—was a monstrously fat
woman in the act of crossing the street as the light permitted.
Women fainted on the sidewalk after it was all over. There was no time to faint before. The
dilapidated car headed for the fat woman at ninety-eight miles an hour. Then, when it could not possibly
stop in time, it began to slow.
Some witnesses said that it stopped in fifteen feet. Certainly it stopped so suddenly that the
gunnysacks dangling from its top-supports swung and stood out stiffly before it, and one of them burst
and potatoes shot out before the stopped car like bullets. A small one—a cull—smacked the fat woman
smartly, in a highly, indecorous manner. She shrieked and leaped, and the rattletrap shot through the
space she had vacated.

IN TWENTY feet it was traveling sixty miles an hour. In forty, it was going better than ninety again,
and it went on out of town like a bat out of a belfry. No motorcycle cop came anywhere near it. Not
even the two policemen on the farther side of town who took up the chase on a clear highway. One of
them pushed his bike—so he claimed—up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
The decrepit jalopy, which should have collapsed far below the speed limit, left him behind as if he
were standing still, and a towheaded child poked its head through the flapping back-curtain and stuck out
its tongue at him as it went on.
On that same day the Government of the United States received a very blunt note from the European
Power whose satellites had revealed their possession of atomic bombs and which had itself sent apology
to Iceland for landing a guided missile near Reykjavik.
The note was not an ultimatum in form, of course. But it expressed the desire of the European Power
to negotiate with the United States regarding changes in the American form of government, which
changes were necessary to make the European Government feel that the United States was sincerely
desirous of peace.
In other words, the European Power had decided that democracies were dangerous to it, and
amiably offered America the choice of surrendering to a small, fanatical party within its borders, or of
facing an atomic war.
And that night Bud Gregory drove into a tin-can-tourist camp and he and his family settled down for
a comfortable stay, as soon as he made sure that the dirt-track races nearby were still going on.