"Understood. And I too the boat did not wish to rock. Too much fun I was having! Spacedog not welcome on home world any longer. Too oddball, too flippy, too wild! Only racing with new friends my sole raison yo soy. This big secret, not to be broadcast. But you not ever return will, so consequence of my telling nil."
"Let me off this thing, Spacedog! I didn't agree to this!"
"Too late. Observe."
Some kind of deluxe TV screen on a nearby wall flared into life. The whole stinking Earth, small as a cloud-wrapped custom blue gearshift knob, barely registered in a lower corner of the star-filled image.
"Where are we heading?"
"To the hottest track around. Your primary."
"Primary what?"
"Your Sun, your Sun!"
I slumped back against my car. "We're going to play chicken against the Sun?"
"Correct."
"Would you at least tell me why we have to do this?"
Spacedog indicated the hangdog Stella, who looked as if she were suffering from the worst kind of hangover combined with a bad case of the flu. "My exteriorized anima you have psychosomatically contaminated. No longer bonded to me alone, but now partly to you she is. With the death of one of us, she whole will restored be."
There was a lot more talk about entangled muon pairs and hormonal tipping points and morphic resonance and quantum brain structures and the various telepathic alien animals that Stella had been constructed from, and how she had panicked once Spacedog's mentality passed out of contact and how she had fastened on me as his replacement. But I wasn't paying any attention, because all I could focus on was Spacedog's eyes.
He had removed his sunglasses to reveal some kind of chrome robot eyeballs in place of natural ones. Now he levered up the hood of my car, and his eyeballs telescoped out of his green face on flexible stalks to examine hidden parts of my engine.
"Impossible to retrofit. Must dissolve and grow new one."
He went to a cabinet and found what appeared to be a spray can and a silver egg. He sprayed El Tigre's engine that I had labored so many hours on, and the whole thing just crumbled into sand. Then he dropped the egg into the empty space, sprayed that from the same can—only after twisting the nozzle—and closed the hood.
"New powerplant ready by time we Mercury pass. Now to control room for much-needed sustenance."
We three rode some kind of antigravity chute up to the bridge. A ring of TVs showed a dozen different outer space views that sent my brain deeper into a tizzy. The view that really flipped me out was the one that displayed our Sun. That raging furnace swelled even as I watched, and soon filled the whole screen. Then the magnification dropped a notch, and the hellspot was small again. But the whole cycle just kept repeating: swell, diminish, swell, diminish—At this rate we'd be there in no time.
Spacedog and I sat down in some kind of chairs that squirmed around to accomodate our butts. Stella moved half-heartedly about, assembling some kind of space food. I guess I ate, but I don't really remember. Nobody said anything until Spacedog spoke. His manic manner had faded to a thoughtful cast.
"Resistance to Stella by any hominid inseminator futile is, Oblong. This I admit. Also my complicity and unforesightedness in leaving her behind under your exclusive care. And yet our duel in the Sun must still take place. Regrets profound, lo siento mucho, pero que sera, sera."
"Likewise, I'm sure."
In no time Mercury hurtled by us like a forlorn piece of grit under the wheels of a dragster. When the spaceship finally stopped, Spacedog told me were just one million miles from the Sun.
On the TV down in the hanger, the Sun boiled and lashed like an insane beast. Giant prominences erupted, whipped the vacuum, then collapsed back into the white-hot speckled chaos of the surface. Heaving clouds of colored gases shimmied like Gypsy Rose Lee. The scene was like looking into Satan's flaming asshole itself.
I drew my terrified eyes away to focus on the new engine under the hood of El Tigre. A featureless irregular silver blob, the mechanism floated, unattached to any drive train or controls.
"This neutrinos eats. Not from small container source used on Earth, but taking from ambient flux put out by Sun. Think of ramscoop on hood of your car. Power from neutrinos used to warp spacetime geodesics and propel vehicle. Much higher speeds reached out here."
"And how do I control it? I don't have head bumps to run a helmet like you."
"Neutrino drive now interfaced to your standard controls. Pedals, steering wheel, shift."
"So, I assume we both race toward the Sun till one of us burns up?"
"Not so. Contest over too soon if heat a factor. Protective fields surrounding your car absolutely resistant to temperatures of over ten billion kelvins. Sun only one million tops."
"Then what's the danger?"
"Gravity. Drive not powerful enough to overcome Sun's pull. Too close, and trapped forever you are, lost in the turbulence of convection zone. Death when limited oxygen supply in car runs out. Quite painless, actually, with unique scenic surroundings."
"So the first one to chicken out actually survives and wins Stella."
"Yes. But then victor also number one coward fake hotrodder, full of merde, and must forever live with undying shame."
I considered for a moment. The alien logic was all twisted, with the "chicken" getting the girl. But then the matter of honor hit home. My mind ran back to the war, when I had nearly bought the farm a score of times, sticking my head up out of the foxhole to snap off a few rounds, rather than be thought a coward. Maybe Spacedog's logic wasn't so twisted after all.
"With any luck, both of us'll die. Let's rumble."
Stella had been left back on the bridge. I climbed behind the wheel of El Tigre, and noticed a small TV screen that looked like it had been grown somehow right onto my dash. The tiny TV lit up, showing Spacedog in the cockpit of UFO.
"Shields on," said Spacedog, and instantly our two vehicles were surrounded by glowing transparent bubbles of force.
"Actual photons not permitted to truly pass through shields to your eyes. Exterior conditions reconstructed based on information hitting shields, then result displayed on inside of bubble. Sophisticated simulation, all virtual but highly accurate."
The hull hatch opened, air puffed away, and the car we called the UFO zipped out. Tentatively I pressed the accelerator and El Tigre responded like a charm.
Outside the big ship, we aimed our noses at the raving furnace of the Sun. A virtual set of Christmas Tree lights appeared on the inner surface of my shields and began to work down to green.
I didn't wait, but tromped down when they turned yellow, shooting ahead of Spacedog.
Even if I had to cheat, this was one race between us I was going to win. Or lose, depending on your point of view.
All the fear and resignation and dismay I had felt inside the ship had been burned away by the awesome sight of the Sun and realization of the unique chance I had been given.
No one on Earth had ever pulled a drag like this, a neutrino drag. Behind the wheel of the most souped-up car ever, I was blasting down God's own blacktop, toward certain glorious death and a place in racing legend.
Assuming Spacedog was honorable enough to report back to the Bandits.
"You'd better tell Joaquin and everyone else about me winning!" I yelled at the TV screen.
"Factual impossibility! Spacedog to perish here! You chicken out will!"
I looked out my side window and saw that Spacedog had pulled up even with me. "Never!" I yelled, then shifted up.
I noticed then that my speedometer had been recalibrated—into fractions of lightspeed, according to the new label—and that I was hitting point oh one.
This race was going to be over pretty damn fast.
"Entering fringes of photosphere now, coward! Turn back!"
Although my cockpit was cool, I was sweating buckets. The enormous tendrils of the Sun coiled around us in slow-motion horror, arcs of fire big enough to swallow the whol
e Earth.
I put El Tigre in third gear.
"I your shadow am! Cars equal, no outrunning each other!"
"Then join me in hell, Spacedog!"
And at that instant some force yanked my nose ninety degrees off course. I spun my wheel uselessly, screamed and swore, but all to no avail.
"Ha-ha! Spacedog wins! I satisfied die! Oblong, listen! Ounce for ounce, the human body hotter than the Sun burns!"
And with those enigmatic words, he flew on straight for the heart of the star.
El Tigre exited the photosphere at right angles to its entrance path. And there was the big ship, guiding me back inside along some kind of invivisble attraction beam.
Stella had pulled me out of the death race.
Me, not Spacedog.
She entered the hanger once it had filled with air again. I climbed out of El Tigre, exhausted and numb.
But when I saw her restored to her old vivacious ultra-Torchy magnificence, I just couldn't feel down.
She came into my arms and we made love right there, her gorgeous ass resting on the flames painted across El Tigre's fender.
· · · · ·
We sunk the spaceship—including El Tigre, the one item that really hurt me to lose—in the Pacific a mile offshore, more by accident than on purpose. Stella kind of knew how to pilot it, but not really. The swim nearly killed us, and I guess we were lucky to escape alive. We made our way back to San Diego and the old scene: my business, the Bandits, a very frosty Herminia. We tried to fit back into the old routines, but it just didn't work out. I had lost my taste for drag racing, and working as a plain old mechanic on cars just didn't make sense any longer. Besides, although Joaquin and the Bandits never said anything outright, I knew they all thought I had killed Spacedog to get his girl.
And of course in a way I had.
Stella and I moved to San Francisco and opened up a coffee shop. We called it "The Garage," and decorated it with fake posters and lame souvenirs no real hotrodder would have ever approved of. But Stella drew customers like money draws lawyers, and we did well.
I didn't have any regrets about surviving. I knew I had been prepared to run that solar race to the deadly finish line, and that only Stella's intervention had stopped me. The mystery of that one decisive act of hers immediately began to bug me, once we were home safe. Pulling my ass out of the solar fires represented the most initiative and individuality she had ever exhibited, before or since. Was she acting like a loyal slave simply to preserve the "master" she had most recently bonded with? Or did she really love me and prefer my companionship over Spacedog's? After a few years, this question really began to obsess me. I couldn't get the answer out of Stella in words of course. But one day she spontaneously took up a pen and some paper and drew me her reply.
The rough but vivid cartoon showed Stella entering some kind of Buck Rogers device and being melted down to slime, while from a second chamber a different woman emerged, to be welcomed by Spacedog with open arms.
Evidently, Stella feared being traded in for a newer model companion, like a car with too many miles on it. She knew I'd do no such thing.
With that mystery off my mind, the only thing I still worried a little bit about, off and on, was the fate of Spacedog's UFO.
After some thought, I figured that the powerplant inside the protective forcefield was still sucking down neutrinos, and that Spacedog's suffocated corpse was hauling ass in tight orbit around and around the Sun, or was maybe even stuck at the center, doing Lord knows what to the way the Sun worked.
When the astronomy guys began talking in the Sixties about the Sun not making enough neutrinos to fit their theories, I knew my hunch was right.
But what can I do? All this took place fifty years ago, and Earth's still around, right? A little hotter on the average, sure, but everyone agrees that's due to all the chemicals in the atmosphere, not the changing Sun. It's just that I want to tell someone, so that the information survives after I'm gone. I can't count on Stella carrying the knowledge forward. Oh, sure, she hasn't aged one iota in five decades, and she'll probably be around for another century or two. (You should see the envious looks I get from guys as she pushes my wheelchair down the street. I hope she fixes on a nice young fellow when I kick the bucket.) But in all that time she's still never said a word. I don't think she's got the kind of intelligence that needs or uses speech. So I can't rely on her.
And I can almost hear Spacedog say, "Verdad, companero! Every racer ultimately all alone is!"
The End
—The author would like to acknowledge Leah Kerr's Driving Me Wild (Juno Books, 2000) as an important source of information on the history of hot rodding.
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Neutrino Drag Page 3