Sinister Barrier Read Online Free PDF

of other chasers, raised his eyes as something threw a dark shadow over the gyrocar’s transparent roof. It was a police helicopter hanging from spinning vanes, its landing wheels a yard above the hurtling car.
    The two machines raced level for a few seconds. Wohl jabbed an authoritative finger at the police star across his vehicle’s bonnet, then waved urgently toward the crazy car ahead.
    Making a swift gesture of comprehension, the helicopter’s pilot gained height and speed. Hopping great roofs, his machine roared through the air in desperate attempt to cut the skyway bend and beat Dakin to the intersection.
    Without slackening pace in the slightest, Wohl hit the bend at full one twenty. Tires shrieked piercingly as they felt the sidewise drag. Graham leaned heavily on the nearside door; Wohl’s bulk pressed crushingly on him.
    While centrifugal force held them in that attitude, and the tortured gyroscope strove to keep the machine upright, the tires gave up the battle and the car executed a sickening double-eight. It swooped crabwise across the concrete, missed a dawdling phaeton by a hairbreadth, flashed between two other gyrocars, wiped the fender off a dancing four-wheeler and slammed into the side. Miraculously, the rails held.
    Wohl gaped like a goldfish while he dragged in some air. He nodded toward the hump where the skyway curved over another elevated route which swept past it at right angles.
    “Holy smoke!” he gasped. “Look at that!”
    From their vantage point four hundred yards away the crest of the hump appeared to bisect the midget windows of a more distant pile of masonry. Dakin’s machine was precisely in the center of the crest with the police helicopter hovering impotently over it.
    The fleeing car did not sink in perspective below the crest as it should have done in normal circumstances. It seemed to float slowly into the air until it reached the tops of the bisected windows and exposed a line of panes between its wheels and the crest. There, for one long second, it poised below the helicopter, apparently suspended in defiance of the law of gravity. Then, with still the same uncanny slowness, it sank from sight.
    “Mad!” breathed Graham. He dabbed perspiration from his forehead. “Utterly and completely mad!”
    He rolled his window downward until a deep dent in its plastiglass prevented it from descending farther. Both men listened intently, apprehensively. From over the crest came a short, sharp sound of rending metal, a few seconds of silence, then a muffled crash.
    Without a word they struggled out of their battered gyrocar, sprinted along the skyway, over the long, smooth hump. They found a dozen machines, mostly modern gyro-cars, drawn up beside a thirty-foot gap in the rails. White-faced drivers were grasping twisted railposts while they bent over and peered into the chasm beneath.
    Shouldering through, Graham and Wohl looked down. Far below, on the side of the street opposite the lower and transverse skyway, a mass of shapeless metal made a tragic heap on the sidewalk. The face of the building that reared itself ten floors from the spot bore deep marks scored by the wreckage on its way down. The ruts of the road to oblivion.
    A rubbernecking driver jabbered to nobody in particular, “Terrible! Terrible! He must have been clean out of his mind! He came over like a shell from a monster, gun, smacked the side-rails, went right through and into that building. I heard him land down there.” He licked dry lips. “Like a bug in a can. What a wallop! Terrible!”
    The speaker’s emotions were voiced for the rest. Graham could sense their awe, their horror. He could sense the excitement, the sadistic thirst, the corporate soul-stirring of the inevitable mob now gathering three hundred feet below. Mob hysteria is contagious, he thought, as he felt it rising like an invisible and hellish incense. One could get drunk on it. Men who were cold sober individually could be drunk collectively;