"Paul Di Filippo - Neutrino Drag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Neutrino Drag
by Paul Di Filippo


I know why the Sun doesn't work the way the scientists think it should.

Me and a guy who called himself Spacedog fucked it up back in 1951, racing our
roadsters in a match of Cosmic Chicken out in space, closer'n Mercury to hell itself.

I never told a soul about that last grudge match between me and Spacedog.
Who'd've believed me? Spacedog never returned to Earth to back my story up. And
no one else was there to witness our race anyhow, except Stella Star Eyes. And she
never says anything anytime, not even after fifty years with me.

But now that I'm an old, old guy likely to hit the Big Wall of Death and visit the
Devil's pitstop soon, I figure I might as well try to tell the whole story the exact way
it happened. Just in case Spacedog's car ever maybe starts eating up the Sun or
something worse.



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



I got demobbed in '46, went back home to San Diego and opened up a welding shop
with the few thousand dollars I had saved and with the skills the Army had
generously given me in exchange for nearly getting my ass shot up in a dozen
European theaters from Anzio to Berlin. Palomar Customizing, Obdulio Benitez,
proprietor, that was me. I managed to get some steady good-paying work right out
of the holeshot, converting Caddies and Lincolns to hearses for the local funeral
trade. The grim joke involved in this arrangement didn't escape me, since I still
woke up more nights than not, drenched in sweat and yelling, memories of shellfire
and blood all too vivid. If any of a hundred Nazi bullets had veered an inch, I would
have already taken my own ride in a hearseтАФassuming any part of me had survived
to get baggedтАФand never been here building the corpse wagons.
One of the first helpers I hired at my shop was this high-school kid, Joaquin Arnett.

You heard me right, Joaquin Arnett, the legendary leader of the Bean Bandits, that
mongrel pack of barrio-born hotrodders who started out by tearing up the California
racing world like Aztecs blew through captives, and then went on to grab national
honors from scores of classier white-bread teams across the nation. By the time he
retired from racing in the Sixties, Joaquin had racked up more trophies and records
than almost any other driver, and fathered two sons to carry on his dream.
But back in the late Forties, all that was still in the future. I hired a wiry, smiling,
wired kid with skin a little lighter than my own, a kid with no rep yet, but just a
mania for cars and racing.

Joaquin got his start picking up discarded car partsтАФcoils, magnetosтАФand fixing
them. He had taught himself to drive at age nine. By the time he got to my shop,