He turned to face them.
They converged!
He slapped his hands against their hoods, sprang upwards and with a roll, hit the roof of Hammer Malone's car and was over it and behind.
With a grinding shriek of metal, the two sideswiping cars recoiled right and left, spinning in the ice.
Killer Brag's gas tanks must have been ruptured. The sparks of the chains on ice did the rest.
A whoosh of green, orange and red flame enveloped both cars!
Brag was out, racing away.
Hammer Malone was on fire. He dived into a snowbank to put it out.
Heller was racing for Pit 1.
The pit crew was scrambling about.
Heller dived over a pit barricade.
Mike Mutazione was pounding at some sparks lying in Heller's racing suit.
The grandstand was going crazy.
The radio announcer was yelling, "The Whiz Kid's engine died, just like that...."
The TV sportscaster was shouting, "Nine cars in flames...."
The loudspeakers blared, "The Whiz Kid apparently ran out of fuel...."
Hammer Malone could be seen struggling out of the snowbank. He raced back toward his car. He beat out some flames in the upholstery. He leaped in!
The old wreck started! It had only been damaged by the explosion of Killer Brag's!
No other car in the flaming pyre before the grandstand was moving.
Hammer Malone began to drive around the track!
There was a howl of rage from the crowd.
A new voice was in the grandstand loudspeakers. "That God (bleeped) Whiz Kid cost us our shirts!"
Nobody was paying any attention to Hammer Malone, faltering along at about twenty. He had won the demolition and he was now going for the endurance. Totally ignored.
The grandstand loudspeakers blared, "Get that God (bleeped) Whiz Kid!"
The losers spilled in a wave over the grandstand barricades and onto the track!
Howling and shrieking revenge, they tore toward Pit 1.
Heller looked up, watching them come. He muttered, "Just like it said in Hakluyt's Voiages. Very hard to make a safe landing amongst the natives of North America!"
Mike Mutazione's crew was standing in a semicircle around the pit area.
The crowd was plowing down the track like a storm cloud gone crazy. The race was forgotten. All they wanted was blood.
Track security police tried to make a stand to check them. They were hurled aside!
The crowd came storming on. They were screaming, "Get the Whiz Kid!" "Cost me ten thousand!" "Kill him!" and other ferocious war cries.
Heller just sat there watching.
The foremost ring of the mob, mouths snarling, fists shaking, got within twenty feet of the Mutazione line.
"Now!" barked Mike.
Abruptly flame erupted from nozzles!
A dozen oxyacetylene hoses played a fan of fire over the heads of the mob!
There was an instant of incredulous gasps cut by the sizzle of flame.
Then a torrent of screams!
Howls of terror burst out!
The foremost ranks recoiled!
They knocked down people behind them like dominoes!
The crowd was racing away, leaving the fallen and trampled in the snow. And then these, too, found the energy to run.
The oxyacetylene torches popped out as their valves were shut off.
Hammer Malone's old wreck staggered past the grandstand and wrecked cars and knocked along, working to complete his thousand laps.
But the race was over for the crowd. They were going home.
I packed up and drove the van down off the hill, heading for the track and grandstand.
I had seen Heller get into the Peterbilt and knew there was no danger he would spot me.
The disgruntled and disgusted crowd was trailing away. I steered the van slowly through them. I was hoping I could find J. Walter Madison.
Behind Heller's back, Madison had fabricated the Whiz Kid and the controversy around this race. With Heller's spectacular defeat and the bloodthirsty crowd, I had to find what Madison planned next.
The security guards were no longer tending the gates. They did not care who went in or out now.
I went through a tunnel and emerged in the littered grandstand. There was a cluster of people around a box. I recognized one of the nearest ones. It was a reporter I had seen at Madison's office, 42 Mess Street.
I went up to him. Although he had a sheepskin coat up around his ears and although I was wearing a hooded parka, we recognized each other.
I said, "Did Madison start that great riot?"
He said, "No. I did, on the spur of the moment. J. Warbler is in a weird state. Twenty minutes before the race he went into shock and passed out. We had to take him to the hospital tent. He only returned to the grandstand in time to see the end of it."
I looked through the cluster of 42 Mess Street people and saw Madison sitting there on a folding chair. Cold as it was, he had an ice bag on his head! His face was gray and awful!
I went over to him. I said, incredulously, "Are you feeling that way because Heller lost?"
He shook his head. "Oh, no. Win or lose, that wouldn't have mattered. It would only have given us one day's front page and then we would have had the work of doing something else."
I didn't understand it at all. "Well, if winning or losing didn't matter, what are you feeling so bad about?"
He ineffectually adjusted the ice bag. Then he broke down. "Never trust a client! They always do you in!"
"Maybe you better tell me what you think is wrong," I said, puzzled.
He began to cry. In a choked voice, he said, "He wasn't supposed to race at all! Just before the race he was supposed to be kidnapped! We would have had two weeks at least of front page!"
He ground his fists into his knees. "It was all to be so perfect! After two weeks he would have turned up behind the Iron Curtain, a captive of the fuel-hungry Russians!"
He let out a frustrated wail. "It would have started World War III! He'd be IMMORTAL!"
After a period of writhing and pounding his knees, he said, "You just can't ever depend on clients! OH, MY GOD! WHAT DO I DO NOW TO RECOVER THE FRONT PAGE??????"
I crept away.
Sunday morning, the Bentley Bucks Deluxe Arms (to give it its full name) held me in tender and loving, if expensive, embrace. That was the only embrace I was getting these days.
But by ten my feeling of laziness began to give way to a vague disquiet. It occurred to me that it was altogether possible that Heller might recover from that debacle. In life, he was treacherously hyperactive. A type of disposition for which I have no sympathy.
I called down for a breakfast of strawberry shortcake—imported from the Argentine, the menu said—and, wrapped in a robe, was soon devouring it. My carbon-oxygen furnace needed restoking after the shocks and labors of the day before.
Almost indolently, I opened the ten pounds of Sunday paper. I don't really know what I expected to see. But I had not at all anticipated what I did see.
Nothing!
There was absolutely no word about that race in the whole paper!
Not ONE word!
I hastened over to the TV. I ran through the channels. Ah, a program called "The Week in Sports" was just beginning. Several items. Then a few brief clips of the race without any editorial comment, hardly any mention of the Whiz Kid! Just the crashes!
Oh, this was bad. Madison was right. He was off the front page. And not even in a day or two but at once!
I then remembered the local-radio-station dial position I had been listening to on Saturday—a Long Island station, WHOA. I tuned in on it. I was in luck! They were just beginning their news.
It was, apparently, a sleepy, snowed-in, suburban Sunday on Long Island. There were only two items of interest to me, both local.
A burned-out van with ten bodies in it had been found by some Boy Scouts in a picnic area of Jones Beach. Police said that they were burned beyond recognition; that a leaking muffler had overcome them; that they probably had been en route to pick up a load of seaborne narcotics; that Tommy Jones had been awarded his merit badge for snowshoeing.