"dean_ing_-_sam_and_the_sudden_blizzard_machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

"He'll hit a nice cushy snowdrift instead of a bale of hay. I figure you hay raisers might find that a welcome change. Choice of power train is up to you. Wheels, chains, propeller, spikes, ducted fan, or a team of oxen if that's yer karma. Use any brake system that works at tech inspection. Sky's the limit."

Sam had something there. And it was catching; I tingled at the vision of sledding specials, specially built racers midwifed in our garages. It would be fun; hell, it could become a winter revolution: Speed Week in Springville! "Sam? Ah, would you-"

"Propose it to your club? I just did." Sam's smile seemed open, guileless. Maybe it was a leer. In any event, no pun intended, Sam's recommendation was as good as a direct order. Twenty-seven members of the club swore to build specials, and, oddly enough, many of us did. The rest, including me, gave help. I wanted to help Sam when he announced that he was building a surprise entry. I should've saved my breath.

The appointed Saturday dawned with a knifing chill in the clear sky. Snowballs flurried between early arrivals at the quarry. I checked off the conical pylons, fire extinguishers, doctor, and timing equipment, wishing we had attracted some racing journalists. The man from the local Bugle was worse than nothing; but him we had, like it or not. I fought the temptation to steal his hat for a pylon. It was already the right shape.

Scanning the entry list, I could see our first mistake was the lack of ground rules. Several guys used open propellers, one of 'em a front mounted rig that nearly blew the driver off while it was idling. He got chilblains and became an instant spectator. Another theorist put six little tires across the rear axle to get more adhesion. It worked fine on firm snow, but at the technical inspection, he gunned it and his wheels hungrily chewed a hole two-feet deep. Of course, it dropped backward into the hole like a sounding whale and killed the engine and caught fire, with the usual result. We buried the hulk under a pile of slush and went on with tech inspection.

Sam's pickup eased up the access road with a towering, tarp-shrouded lump looming over its cab. Everything got very quiet. Sam had refused us even the slightest peek at his secretive entry. Small wonder.

With his usual stolid care, Sam flipped back the tarpaulin and revealed most of his special. One of the tech inspectors screamed, saving me the trouble.

To being with, the-thing-broke all the rules or, rather, the assumptions. Everybody but Sam used heavy frames, sand filled tubes, bags of birdshot, or Corvette body parts to add weight. Sam had a gossamer birdcage frame of aluminum wrapped with quartz fiber tape. For a maniacal moment I wondered if he'd crocheted it.

Everybody with wheels used fat little studded tires, but Sam's wheel was two and a half
meters high. Towering between a rear pair of ski runners was a single viciously cleated monstrosity of magnesium, like a kulak's ferris wheel a half a meter wide. It was mounted on an axle held by that spidery tubing frame.
Nearly everybody had cart engines mounted near the wheels. Sam used a turbine powered by a liquid that he handled with something very like terror-and Sam crimps dynamite caps with his teeth. The turbine wasn't near the wheel; it was inside! Sam had bolted it to the nonrotating axle within his hellish great wheel.
If I forgot the gear teeth around the inside of the wheel, forgive me. A simple drive gear transmitted the turbine's torque to the big wheel. Studying the gear ratio, I calculated that the monster wouldn't be very quick. To be competitive, the turbine would have to run at over 50,000 rpm. Later, Sam told me his little aerospace fugitive didn't run well at 50,000. It ran much better at 500.
Thousand. Which partly explains-but I'm getting ahead of myself.
The steering mechanism was a disappointment at first (and to me, a revelation at last): a forward pair of skis, pivoted from a box on the frame ahead of the driver's location. God only knows how any driver would dare to hunker down kneeling, his fanny up to tempt those cleats, and guide that flailing juggernaut over patches of glare ice on a twisty trail near sheer drops at the quarry. To any sane driver that rig was a case of shove at first sight.
A murmur from the crowd drew me back to

the course. High on the trail, a propeller-driven sled had just started when its brakes failed. Worse, the driver was a first-timer, our only woman entrant, wife of an inept mechanic, darling daughter of a city councilman. She had never learned to drive and thought it entertaining to start with something little and cute. I exchanged nervous tics with our club treasurer, Bernie Feinbaum, but everything was fine until Turn One. It always is.
When I first spotted it, the sled was spitting snow, slowly rotating down a short straight until it was directly bass-ackwards and aimed off the cliff face. That's when Bernie crossed himself.
And down she came, idling the prop on down slopes to build up speed. A surge of backward thrust nearly stopped her at each bend. She paddled around the course in just over seven minutes.
Three more stalwarts made their runs. The converted garden tractor managed to convert a patch of ice into hot water halfway down and did not finish. My money was on a twin-tread rig until its driver saw the short straight beyond Turn Two and tromped on it. The thing did a tread-stand just long enough to barf him out, crashed down, ruptured an oil line that made weewee under one tread, and hi-hoed away overland as a free and driverless spirit until it bisected a chicken house a kilometer away.
The guy on skis, sporting five little bitty model engines with propellers on each ski, was protested, but he tried anyhow. In deference
to Sam, the printed rules stated, "The sky's the limit" prophetically-and the sitzmark artist was judged within his rights. He made his mark, all right, just past Turn Four.

During all this, Sam completed tech inspection and only once was seen actually driving his special. He had to fire it up for his braking test, and by the time the crowd leaped around to see what the ruckus was, it was over. The great thing accelerated for 60 meters on a thimbleful of fuel, with the wail of a lost soul in a sausage grinder, then reversed power in a geyser of snow. But it stopped like a Christmas tachymeter.

Sam suggested that the course be walked again, to be sure it was still open. Very few people could testify one way or the other. He also asked if he could make the tour afoot, and some fool said he could. After all, Sam wasn't competing for a trophy. His was to be a demonstration run, like a dragster at the soapbox derby. One more advantage wouldn't matter. So we thought.

Sam spent a few minutes dallying with a black box that evidently plugged into his special. Finally content, he ambled up the gentle black slope of the hill, carrying the little box. I followed at a distance.

Striding away from the start line, Sam pushed something on the box and tucked it under his arm. I watched him pace down the course, "absently" positioning himself for a fast approach to the first turn, and then I got

involved with the Bugle reporter.

The scribbler is the sort who sniffs a story with gore potential from any distance and will end up manufacting most of the story if he feels like it. "I got a list of entrants," he mused, "but durn if I recognize anybody important."

"You might as well go home," I urged. "This is just a local fun-type event; no big prizes."

"Yeah?" He gloomed after Sam, jerked his head in Sam's direction. "Who's the tough old curmudgeon walking down The Last Mile?"

I told him about the former rocket man.

Pause. "Waitaminnit. Don't I know that name from someplace?"