"Dean Ing - Sam and the Sudden Blizzard Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

SAM AND THE SUDDEN
BLIZZARD MACHINE

By Dean Ing

Sam's sudden blizzard is history now, and like all motor racing disasters its
memory is rusting out in a junkyard of legends. Some claim Sam's design was
faulty. Others say the fault was mine for listening to him. Smythe, our sports
car club archivist, warns that we all orbit too closely around Sam, like moths
around a rally car spotlight-but Smythe's a poly sci professor, so that's got
to be wrong.

I blame it on the weather. The snow came a month early and all at once and
froze out our plans for late fall competition.

"Tee-boned yer slalom event, did it?" Sam grunted happily as we slumped at his
fireplace.

"Black-flagged us," I admitted. I sat watching flames as Sam arranged blazing
chunks of hardwood. Now, anybody can poke at a fire with a Bugatti dipstick,
but Sam was feeding his fire with old trophy bases. Pretty expensive way to
heat a hangar, from the standpoint of effort expended. Actually, Sam only had
to heat the
living quarters in his surplus hangar, which is the only structure on his
property. The rest of the place is crammed with machine tools, surplus
aerospace materials, his vehicles, and his clean room, where he doesn't build
racing cars. I mean, he doesn't anymore. That is, he does, but not as a
business now. Sam was with Lockheed's "skunk works" until after the U-2 and
SR-71 were public knowledge and then he turned to designing racing cars.

His series of fabled cars might have gone on forever had he not stolen
computer time from Lockheed to make a study of racing trends. Sam took one
hard scan at the printout and quit serious competition in mingled disgust and
fear. In 1990, he predicts, go-carts will outgun Indy cars and dune buggies
won't need wheels. Something to do with new power units, he says, with a glint
in those gray granite eyes.

With all his engineering know-how and all his stolen hardware and both of his
magician's hands in that hangar, Sam is roughly as important and predictable
as the weather. His sudden blizzard was inevitable from the moment Sam softly
rasped, as if to the fire, "You don't really have to hole up all winter,
y'know."

I glared at him. "No, I could get me a sled and name it Rosebud, " I grumped.
"Great sport."

"Sled; mm, yeah." Brief pregnant pause, then breech delivery: "You remember
the old quarry course?"

I shivered, and not from the cold. The quarry racecourse had been outlawed