"Duperjet is out of the race," the radio announced. "Crackup in the Slalom—"
Fisk bounced over a washboard trap and emerged from the fog. Fogbank hadn't actually been so bad. It would have been another matter in the press of the pack, however.
They were out of the fog and into a forest. Green concrete pseudotrees or pilings rose from the highway in a seemingly solid mass. They were cold—ice had formed on them and snow coated the ground.
"The Slalom," Yola said despairingly. "Doom!"
But the pilings were less impenetrable than they seemed from a distance. In the seconds it took to reach the first, Fisk saw that they were spaced well apart. There was room to skid around them if forward progress were not excessive. The tracks of many wheels showed the routes other cars had taken.
But across the main trail were wheels themselves, and jagged pieces of metal—the debris of a recent accident strewed across the course, Duperjet, surely. This was dangerous territory.
"...Fusion nineteen... Duperjet nine..."
The buyers certainly had little sympathy for a loser. Yet Duperjet was a fine car. It had led the pack after that spinout. Fusion was recovering sales—but what a grisly way to succeed.
Fisk was falling under the sway of stress fatigue again. He willed his remaining strength into his hands and aimed the vehicle at the widest aperture between groups of pilings, following the common trail. Here and there the refrigerative grid showed, scraped temporarily bare by the passage of the pack, giving him slightly improved footing. He was still doing over 300 mph and he knew better than to attempt to change speed here.
Yola covered her eyes. "You drive like a zombie," she said.
The trail split. A piling lay dead ahead. Fisk forced a message down along the resistive nerve tissue of his right arm and the arm convulsed a bit, pulling the wheel around just that necessary fraction. The car slued, scraping against the piling on the left and almost dislodging Yola's hole-stuffing. At this point Fisk hardly cared—it was as though car and racetrack were far away. Even his own extremities were almost beyond reach. His heart was laboring to the point of collapse, but the life-sustaining blood was not getting through. He was numb and terribly tired.
Yet he would not let go entirely. He hung on. A thin rivulet of animation trickled along the buried conduits of his pallid flesh. As the pilings loomed his muscles twitched and the car shaved by, never quite hitting, never quite sacrificing the traction so necessary to keep it from following the Duperjet into destruction. But Fusion's huge mass gave it traction where a lighter car might have skated. The impact of their passage howled about the myriad death traps of the Slalom—if he had been the lyrical type he might have immortalized the experience in poetry—and then they were out of it.
"We're alive," Yola whispered, amazed. "At least I am. For a while I almost wished I was back at the orphanage." She looked at Fisk. "You can stop here. We're out of the woods and nobody's behind us any more."
Fisk ignored her. Now he faced a straightaway, long and level and dry. Far ahead he could see several other cars. The Fusion had actually gained on them during this last hurdle. The race wasn't over yet—and as long as he was in it, why not win it?
It was madness, he knew—the futile delusion of grandeur of an oxygen-starved brain, its frontal lobes anesthetized. He didn't care. Bill needed the large sales tally for his friend's medical bills—and perhaps for his own. Fisk was indirectly responsible for the Fusion's fall from first to last place in the Hurdle and for Bill's injury. There was power under his foot if not in his body or brain. Why not invoke it, double or nothing?
"Daddy, what are you doing?" Yola whispered as the car accelerated.
"You willful little brat—you got me into this," he snapped. "Now you're going to see it through."
He was mad—insane, not angry. His brain had gone berserk and was running faster than the car. He had never suffered this effect of his malady before. It was as though another personality had fought to the surface—a completely un-Fisk monster. No, not true. This was his true personality. Shackled by decades of civilized restraint, it had emerged at last.
"So it's like that, Centers," Yola muttered. "Well, want to know what's next? The Mountain."
Fisk-normal quailed, but the demon aspect who had usurped control of his body said in fine detergent-opera fashion, "Yeah? So watch this." And his right foot crunched down harder.
The speedometer read 400 mph. It climbed rapidly as the tireless machine obeyed the imperious command of a lunatic.
"Steamco eighty-six, Electro fifty-nine, Gasturb forty-nine..." the radio said and continued on through the entire list of twenty-six cars remaining in the race. Fusion was back up to twenty-four.
The car was doing 500 now and Fisk's foot was a marvel of unremitting ponderosity. This was a fair-sized straightaway—the kind where power counted. Fusion's favorite track. The gap between him and the pack was closing. How much would this buggy do?
"This is suicide," a small voice whimpered. At first Fisk thought it was that of his civilized-self conscience, but it turned out to be Yola's.
Fisk's eyeballs seemed to be locked in their sockets, able to move only marginally to cover the contours of the road.
He himself was a machine, his arms levering more or less together, sharing his drastically limited muscular power as though connected by an old-fashioned limited-slip differential.
600 mph...
Suddenly the straightaway was ending and he was overhauling the pack at a phenomenal clip. The demon in him exulted.
"You fool—it's the Mountain!" Yola screamed, afraid. But Fisk saw only his beautiful passing of competitors on the fast track. So they had written off Fusion, had they?
Then his foot came up involuntarily. Yola was down beside the pedal, prying it loose. And the pack moved ahead again and crammed like so much floating refuse into the drainlike access to the next hurdle.
"Fusion has merged with the pack." The radio sounded surprised. "Looked for a moment there as if—but the driver was too smart to risk a pass on Mountain. We thought Fusion had mechanical trouble, but obviously not! Sales: Steamco a hundred and one... Electro seventy-five, Gasturb fifty-five, Vaporlock forty-four, Fusion thirty-eight..."
"Wow!" Yola cried, forgetting her apprehension of the moment before. "You may be crazy, but we're back in the sales money! What's your cut of the gross, Fisk?"
He didn't answer, knowing how little the money meant, compared to the lives depending on it. She had climbed back into Bill's lap and Fisk's foot was free, but now the ascent was too steep to permit high velocity. He trailed the pack at a poor 380 mph.
The course wedged into a two-lane thread, along which cars were spaced like traveling ants. A cliff developed on the right, the drop-off becoming tall and sheer. A car ahead tried to pass another precipitously. The banking of the road reversed, throwing it too far out and the vehicle sailed into space to torpedo into the water trap below.
"Coaldust slipped," the radio cried. "Twenty-four cars remain in the race at the two-thirds point..."
The demon that now governed Fisk's ailing body took note. A lot of cars would not finish because their drivers were too eager. He had better bide his time until he hit another straightaway.
Meanwhile, Mountain was a terror. Visibility declined as the blind curves became sharper. A small thunderstorm was anchored at the crest, pelting the entries with rain and hailstones. He had to slow to 280 and pace himself by the car ahead through the blasting rain. Then came the descent and Fisk accelerated down the glassy slope.
"Steamco one-twenty-nine... Electro one-fourteen... Vaporlock sixty-eight... Fusion fifty-nine..."