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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.