Neutrino Drag

"Hey, Stella, what's the matter? Don't worry, the old Spacedog will be back soon. And he actually looked like he knew how to drive my car, so he probably won't get in no accidents. Don't worry about nothing. You need a drink? Come with me and we'll grab a couple of cold sodas."

I walked the jittery woman over to where I knew a cooler of drinks waited, on the far side of one of the car trailers. The races had already begun, and everybody who wasn't tinkering with their machines or driving was busy watching. Stella and I were totally alone for the first time since we had met, and Spacedog was accelerating away from us.

I bent over, fishing for two bottles of pop from the cracked ice. "You like grapefruit? All I see here is Squirt." When I straightened up with the drinks and turned to face Stella, I nearly died.

She still wore her blue angora sweater, but she had stripped off her pants. Her bush blazed as platinum as her hairdo.

Now she lunged at the waistband of my trousers, and I dropped both bottles to fend her off.

"Stella, no! We can't! Not here!"

She wouldn't listen. Her hands fastened on my pants and popped the top button. The sound of my zipper unladdering sounded louder to me than the engines a few hundred yards away.

Stella leaped up and wrapped her legs around my waist, and suddenly there was no more possibility of resistance. I was harder than Egyptian algebra, all the stifled lust of several months coming to a head.

I grabbed her boobs as she wriggled her pelvis to fit me into her wet heat, and despite my enthusiasm and hers I nearly wilted.

That was no sweater Stella always wore. Her torso was covered in blue fur. I had twin handfuls of shaggy tit, like grabbing a combination of Lily St. Cyr and Lambchop.

But underneath the short fur they were still the most incredible boobs I had ever handled.

I pivoted around to brace Stella's back against the side of the trailer, and in less time than it takes to tell we finished the hottest, wildest, most surprising knee-trembler I had ever dared to imagine. She never made a sound the whole while.

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 wi

"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.