"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 whole 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.