"My God!" breathed Dusty, "New York at rush hour—in three dimensions."
Their driver turned and winked at them. He flicked a lighter with one hand and lit the smoke that was hanging from one corner of his mouth. "Yeah man," he drawled. "Some of them guys should ought to take lessons."
Then he turned back to his job with a shrug, lost a hundred feet of altitude in three hundred feet of run, and whizzed around a corner and fitted his aircab into a space between traffic that was just large enough to let him in without scratching paint. The other cars moved up, aside, down or sped or slowed to give him elbow room. He fought them for position, dropping on a descending run through this cross traffic until he whipped out of traffic on a spiral over the roof-top of one of the buildings.
Here the driver phlegmatically put the aircab into a tight corkscrew that dropped them onto the roof. Dusty got out slowly, testing the stiffness of his knees after the ride. He helped Barbara out next and the nurse came out on the other side at the same time.
Then they were almost roofed as the aircab took off on a flat, screaming 'U' turn that lofted him no more than ten feet, whipped across the street between levels and swooped him down on the opposite side, where he hit the other roof without a bounce and came to a fast braking stop beside a man who had flagged him.
The man got in and the aircab whiffled off the roof in a crazy climbing turn and burrowed into the fast traffic lane above. It forced its way into the mass of traffic and was lost in a matter of seconds.
"Holy Rockets!"
Barbara wiped her damp forehead with the back of a shaking hand. "Oh—for a film of this!"
Dusty grinned weakly. "Shucks, Barb. What's a fender for if you don't fend with it?"