No one caught us. When it was over and I had stopped panting, we dressed again and rejoined the crowd.
Spacedog returned from his mission in under an hour. With the replacement fuel source installed in his car, he rejoined the field and proceeded to whomp Bakersfield ass.
Finally, around sunset, he came triumphantly to where Stella and I waited for him. But as soon as he got within a few feet of us, Spacedog somehow knew. He threw his arms toward the sky and wailed.
"Ruined! Polluted! The imprinting of my gyno-symbiote all shattered! Now either Oblong or Spacedog must die!"
· · · · ·
Behind the wheel of El Tigre, heading south out of San Diego toward Ensenada in early darkness, following the tail-lights of Spacedog's sleek UFO down the highway, I felt a crazy mess of emotions. Shame, fear, pride, anger, happiness—I could hardly begin to sort out my feelings. Sure I had betrayed a friend. But I hadn't made the first move. His girl had jumped my bones. And what a jumping! But was she responsible for her own actions? Was Stella simple-minded? Had I taken advantage of a beautiful moron? And what part of Italy grew girls with blue fur and starry eyes?
I tried to dismiss all these confusing questions by concentrating on the road. I didn't know where we were going, but I was honor-bound to go there.
Back at Paradise Mesa, the Bean Bandits had held an impromptu court to decide how the affair between me and Spacedog would play out. (I confessed everything up front. Stella, natch, stayed silent through the whole debate.) Spacedog, as the affronted party, had gotten to call the tune.
"I this cabron challenge! Cosmic Chicken the trial!"
Joaquin wore a sad and solemn look. "I don't know about that, 'dog. Playing chicken usually ends up with someone getting killed. We don't want any heat from the cops. That would spell the end of the Bandits."
"No worry. Not here ritual of the Chicken enacted. Distant place, only Oblong and Spacedog present, no witnesses."
"Well, whatever's gotta be." Joaquin gripped both our hands. "May the best Bandit win."
I didn't relish playing Chicken with Spacedog, especially at night. But I owed him something for my betrayal of his trust, and this was the method of payment he had chosen.
Halfway to Ensenada, in the middle of nowhere without a sign of civilization around, Spacedog flipped on his turn signal, then pulled a left offroad. His headlights, then mine, illuminated an empty field.
Empty for the first second or two of our arrival. Then a giant lighted hatch opened in mid-air about twenty feet above us. From the lower edge of the hatch a corrugated ramp extruded itself to the turf, and Spacedog drove straight up it and into sheer impossibility. El Tigre was right behind him, but the car must have been driving itself, since my brain was frozen in disbelief.
We came to a halt inside a vast vaulted hanger, full of strange machineries and stranger smells and a couple of smallish spindle-shaped craft that looked like the Air Force's worst nightmares.
I climbed out of my car to join Spacedog and Stella.
"This thing is a spaceship! A real UFO! You two aren't from Italy at all! You're aliens!"
"Verdad, traitorous companero of yore. Now must you the limits of your primitive worldview finally acknowledge. But surely Bandits one and all already knew as much."
I considered Spacedog's words. "I guess we all did. But we just didn't want to admit it. So long as you were winning races for us, it didn't matter."
"Understood. And I too the boat did not wish to rock. Too much fun I was having! Spacedog not welcome on home world any longer. Too oddball, too flippy, too wild! Only racing with new friends my sole raison yo soy. This big secret, not to be broadcast. But you not ever return will, so consequence of my telling nil."
"Let me off this thing, Spacedog! I didn't agree to this!"
"Too late. Observe."
Some kind of deluxe TV screen on a nearby wall flared into life. The whole stinking Earth, small as a cloud-wrapped custom blue gearshift knob, barely registered in a lower corner of the star-filled image.
"Where are we heading?"
"To the hottest track around. Your primary."
"Primary what?"
"Your Sun, your Sun!"
I slumped back against my car. "We're going to play chicken against the Sun?"
"Correct."
"Would you at least tell me why we have to do this?"
Spacedog indicated the hangdog Stella, who looked as if she were suffering from the worst kind of hangover combined with a bad case of the flu. "My exteriorized anima you have psychosomatically contaminated. No longer bonded to me alone, but now partly to you she is. With the death of one of us, she whole will restored be."
There was a lot more talk about entangled muon pairs and hormonal tipping points and morphic resonance and quantum brain structures and the various telepathic alien animals that Stella had been constructed from, and how she had panicked once Spacedog's mentality passed out of contact and how she had fastened on me as his replacement. But I wasn't paying any attention, because all I could focus on was Spacedog's eyes.
He had removed his sunglasses to reveal some kind of chrome robot eyeballs in place of natural ones. Now he levered up the hood of my car, and his eyeballs telescoped out of his green face on flexible stalks to examine hidden parts of my engine.
"Impossible to retrofit. Must dissolve and grow new one."
He went to a cabinet and found what appeared to be a spray can and a silver egg. He sprayed El Tigre's engine that I had labored so many hours on, and the whole thing just crumbled into sand. Then he dropped the egg into the empty space, sprayed that from the same can—only after twisting the nozzle—and closed the hood.
"New powerplant ready by time we Mercury pass. Now to control room for much-needed sustenance."
We three rode some kind of antigravity chute up to the bridge. A ring of TVs showed a dozen different outer space views that sent my brain deeper into a tizzy. The view that really flipped me out was the one that displayed our Sun. That raging furnace swelled even as I watched, and soon filled the whole screen. Then the magnification dropped a notch, and the hellspot was small again. But the whole cycle just kept repeating: swell, diminish, swell, diminish—At this rate we'd be there in no time.
Spacedog and I sat down in some kind of chairs that squirmed around to accomodate our butts. Stella moved half-heartedly about, assembling some kind of space food. I guess I ate, but I don't really remember. Nobody said anything until Spacedog spoke. His manic manner had faded to a thoughtful cast.
"Resistance to Stella by any hominid inseminator futile is, Oblong. This I admit. Also my complicity and unforesightedness in leaving her behind under your exclusive care. And yet our duel in the Sun must still take place. Regrets profound, lo siento mucho, pero que sera, sera."
"Likewise, I'm sure."
In no time Mercury hurtled by us like a forlorn piece of grit under the wheels of a dragster. When the spaceship finally stopped, Spacedog told me were just one million miles from the Sun.
On the TV down in the hanger, the Sun boiled and lashed like an insane beast. Giant prominences erupted, whipped the vacuum, then collapsed back into the white-hot speckled chaos of the surface. Heaving clouds of colored gases shimmied like Gypsy Rose Lee. The scene was like looking into Satan's flaming asshole itself.
I drew my terrified eyes away to focus on the new engine under the hood of El Tigre. A featureless irregular silver blob, the mechanism floated, unattached to any drive train or controls.
"This neutrinos eats. Not from small container source used on Earth, but taking from ambient flux put out by Sun. Think of ramscoop on hood of your car. Power from neutrinos used to warp spacetime geodesics and propel vehicle. Much higher speeds reached out here."
"And how do I control it? I don't have head bumps to run a helmet like you."
"Neutrino drive now interfaced to your standard controls. Pedals, steering wheel, shift."
"So, I assume we both race toward the Sun till one of us burns up?"
"Not so. Contest over too soon if heat a factor. Protective fields surrounding your car absolutely resistant to temperatures of over ten billion kelvins. Sun only one million tops."