Neutrino Drag

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I know why the Sun doesn't work the way the scientists think it should.

Me and a guy who called himself Spacedog fucked it up back in 1951, racing our roadsters in a match of Cosmic Chicken out in space, closer'n Mercury to hell itself.

I never told a soul about that last grudge match between me and Spacedog. Who'd've believed me? Spacedog never returned to Earth to back my story up. And no one else was there to witness our race anyhow, except Stella Star Eyes. And she never says anything anytime, not even after fifty years with me.

But now that I'm an old, old guy likely to hit the Big Wall of Death and visit the Devil's pitstop soon, I figure I might as well try to tell the whole story the exact way it happened. Just in case Spacedog's car ever maybe starts eating up the Sun or something worse.

· · · · ·

I got demobbed in '46, went back home to San Diego and opened up a welding shop with the few thousand dollars I had saved and with the skills the Army had generously given me in exchange for nearly getting my ass shot up in a dozen European theaters from Anzio to Berlin. Palomar Customizing, Obdulio Benitez, proprietor, that was me. I managed to get some steady good-paying work right out of the holeshot, converting Caddies and Lincolns to hearses for the local funeral trade. The grim joke involved in this arrangement didn't escape me, since I still woke up more nights than not, drenched in sweat and yelling, memories of shellfire and blood all too vivid. If any of a hundred Nazi bullets had veered an inch, I would have already taken my own ride in a hearse—assuming any part of me had survived to get bagged—and never been here building the corpse wagons.

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