（外文电子版资料）Paul Di Filippo - Neutrino Drag.pdf

Neutrino Drag by Paul Di Filippo I know why the Sun doesnt 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, closern Mercury to hell itself. I never told a soul about that last grudge match between me and Spacedog. Whodve 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 Im an old, old guy likely to hit the Big Wall of Death and visit the Devils pitstop soon, I figure I might as well try to tell the whole story the exact way it happened. Just in case Spacedogs 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 didnt 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. One of the first helpers I hired at my shop was this high-school kid, Joaquin Arnett. You heard me right, Joaquin Arnett, the legendary leader of the Bean Bandits, that mongrel pack of barrio-born hotrodders who start