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SAM AND THE SUDDEN
BLIZZARD MACHINE

By Dean Ing

Sam's sudden blizzard is history now, and like all motor racing disasters its memory is rusting out in a junkyard of legends. Some claim Sam's design was faulty. Others say the fault was mine for listening to him. Smythe, our sports car club archivist, warns that we all orbit too closely around Sam, like moths around a rally car spotlight-but Smythe's a poly sci professor, so that's got to be wrong.

I blame it on the weather. The snow came a month early and all at once and froze out our plans for late fall competition.

"Tee-boned yer slalom event, did it?" Sam grunted happily as we slumped at his fireplace.

"Black-flagged us," I admitted. I sat watching flames as Sam arranged blazing chunks of hardwood. Now, anybody can poke at a fire with a Bugatti dipstick, but Sam was feeding his fire with old trophy bases. Pretty expensive way to heat a hangar, from the standpoint of effort expended. Actually, Sam only had to heat the
living quarters in his surplus hangar, which is the only structure on his property. The rest of the place is crammed with machine tools, surplus aerospace materials, his vehicles, and his clean room, where he doesn't build racing cars. I mean, he doesn't anymore. That is, he does, but not as a business now. Sam was with Lockheed's "skunk works" until after the U-2 and SR-71 were public knowledge and then he turned to designing racing cars.

His series of fabled cars might have gone on forever had he not stolen computer time from Lockheed to make a study of racing trends. Sam took one hard scan at the printout and quit serious competition in mingled disgust and fear. In 1990, he predicts, go-carts will outgun Indy cars and dune buggies won't need wheels. Something to do with new power units, he says, with a glint in those gray granite eyes.

With all his engineering know-how and all his stolen hardware and both of his magician's hands in that hangar, Sam is roughly as important and predictable as the weather. His sudden blizzard was inevitable from the moment Sam softly rasped, as if to the fire, "You don't really have to hole up all winter, y'know."

I glared at him. "No, I could get me a sled and name it Rosebud, " I grumped. "Great sport."

"Sled; mm, yeah." Brief pregnant pause, then breech delivery: "You remember the old quarry course?"

I shivered, and not from the cold. The quarry racecourse had been outlawed after our first

competition event there. We had had 73 entrants, and 21 didn't finish, and 52 canny dudes found excuses not to start. Any idiot could add that up. It was a week before we got the last car hauled out of there. I reminded Sam of this.

"Yup; and if you remember, I told you not to touch it with or without gloves," Sam countered. "But with a few, ah, minor changes I just might give it a try."

"This winter?"

He nodded.

"In thirty inches of snow?"

He hummed a snatch of "White Christmas."

"You're weird," I said. "We'd kill somebody."

"Quoth the craven," he said. "Shut up and let me think . . ."

I'm convinced now that Sam cheated; he must've been plotting the idea for a long time. He cupped his big stubby hands over one knee and smiled to himself. "Ever do any sledding?"

"Exactly once."
"Me, too. Never got used to the lack of power on the uphill straights."

"But what's that gottadowith . . ."

Sam raised a restraining hand. "Just listen," he soothed. "Take the old quarry course and run down it instead of up. Build your own frame. Use-heh, heh-any power plant you please, add steering, put a windscreen on, and be a hero at the quarry."

I gnawed my lip a moment. "Sounds simple," I hedged, "but if anybody goes off the edge-"