A roaring surge of anger! From the radio, audible in the open air. Ten thousand people howling in outrage! Berserk!
Loudspeakers: "Ladies and gentlemen, please be calm. Please be calm, ladies and gentlemen...."
Snarls, batterings!
Then a hasty voice on the loudspeaker: "The officials have just this minute reached a new finding. They will suspend all rulings concerning chains, spikes and wheels! The race will go on!"
Heller muttered, "That's all I've been waiting for."
The snow let up momentarily. Through his peephole he watched two huge vans punching their way through the gate. They turned and drew up behind Pit 1. They both had signs:
JIFFY-SPIFFY GARAGE, NEWARK, N. J.
Men were spilling out of the vans!
I had a sinking feeling. He had Mike Mutazione's people as his pit crew! And what else?
Heller reached for a full-visored racing helmet. He pulled the dark shade down. He put the semi in gear and, creeping along the heavily trafficked road, made his way to the gate.
At the guard point he slid down his window. He was holding up a NASCAR card and a ten-dollar bill. The security man sucked in his breath. Heller hastily said, "Don't yell who it is."
The guard shut his mouth, took the bill and Heller was through. He pulled up behind Pit 1.
Mike opened his door. "Hell of a rush, kid, but we made it. We been working all night for three nights. And I got a great pit crew for you."
Heller handed Mike the garbage sack. "Hide this for me, will you, Mike?"
I had another disappointment. It had been in my mind to sort of slide in and pick up that sack. Now I wouldn't know where it was! But what was this?
Mike's crew was unloading huge tanks of oxyacetylene and putting them in padding. What were they going to do? Start the world's most active welding shop?
And another thing, as Heller glanced around I could see from bulges in their heavy tank suits that this crew was armed!
Mike said to Heller, "Why didn't you let the family bet on you? We worked like hell on the wheels. You're sure to win now."
The cover had come off the Caddy. It was visible from the grandstand. A surging cheer went up from the massive crowd.
When he could be heard again, Heller said, "I don't really know, Mike. This is just too crazy a race. Let's get the wheels on."
It was snowing again, undoing all the previous snow-plow work. The crew had the Caddy off the trailer. They pushed it to pit position. It had a huge black 1 on it outlined in gold, and WHIZ KID. The crew was fixing straps across the area where the windscreen was missing.
Three officials, wrapped to their crowns, came up. "You're late," said the first one.
Heller said, "Please satisfy yourselves there is no gasoline tank in, under or around the car and then certify that."
The crew was lifting the Caddy's right side with a hydraulic jack. The inspectors numbly did as they were told.
Heller then said, "Now please inspect the hood and the pan under the engine and testify that they are sealed. Put your own seals on them."
They did. Then an inspector said, "Those wheels!"
The crew had removed the two right-side regular wheels and were rolling up two others. They looked strange. All silver colored. They did appear to be wheels but they had very deep zigzag grooves and they bristled with spikes.
An inspector tapped one. It gave a hollow clank! "Hey, that's not rubber. That's metal!"
"They're internally braced steel doughnuts," said Heller. "And you just allowed a suspension of all rules on wheels."
The inspectors seemed calm about it. But I sure wasn't! They wouldn't blow out!
Or wait. Yes, a .30-06 Accelerator slug travelling at 4,080 feet-per-second muzzle velocity could gouge Hells out of one of those and unbalance it. I was still all right.
The crew had all the wheels on now. Heller bent down behind each wheel. I saw there was a kind of disc above the brake drums. Heller was pulling a wire from the car engine area and putting in place something that looked like an electrical brush. I understood what he was doing. That carburetor developed more power in electricity than it did in fuel. He was grounding it through the four metal wheels instead of trailing a metal strap.
The inspectors wanted to know if the wheels had motors in them. In that event, they'd be disallowed as they were supposed to be wheels, not motors.
"Just grounding them," said Heller. "Lot of electricity around today. No motors in the wheels."
That was all right then. Those inspectors knew better than to antagonize that crowd. Cold as it was, they were cheering and howling.
The snow was coming down about five times as thick. Anything the snowplows had just done was being undone fast.
It was about twenty minutes to starting time now. Heller went into the Peterbilt cab. He stripped and put on a garment that looked like an insulation suit. Then he put on a warm racing outfit of red synthetic fur with some heat coils in it. He slid into fur-lined rubber boots that had enormous cleats in the soles.
I suddenly realized that racing in bitter cold did not seem strange to him. A spacer flashed through temperatures approaching absolute zero! Today's minus ten Fahrenheit might even seem warm weather!
He put on some Voltar insulator gloves. Then he pulled on a red racing helmet that had a microphone across his mouth and, apparently, a radio in it. He pulled down its dark visor.
He got out and went to the Caddy and got in. He started it up to let it warm. All up the line, through the snow, bombers were starting and warming up. The sound of engines at their pits was low and threatening. The snowing increased.
Heller buckled himself in, tested the quick release and rebuckled it. His pit crew was checking about.
Heller said into his microphone, "Are you there, Fancy-Dancy?"
A voice came back in his earphones, "There."
Wait. Who was this "Fancy-Dancy"? And where was "there"?
Then I realized he must be testing the radio with his pit crew.
The flagman and the pacer car were out, trying to make it through the snow.
Heller revved the Cadillac.
"Sounds sweet," said Mike at his window.
Suddenly I remembered to start my stopwatch. Heller now had about five hours left on that carburetor. But I wasn't going to wait on that.
Somebody signalled. Heller turned his steering wheel to roll out into the starting parade.
"Bye-bye, Heller," I said. Oh, how I was going to enjoy watching this (bleepard) fail! Him and his stinking, snobbish Fleet officer manners and ways! His lousy popularity was about to go up in smoke!
Through snow made thin by a sudden gust of wind, the crowd saw that the Caddy was moving toward its starting position. A thundering roar of cheers burst from the grandstand, "Whiz Kid!" "Whiz Kid!" "There he is!" "Give it to 'em, Whiz Kid!"
The radio: "Car Number 1, the Whiz Kid himself, is moving out to position. Look at that beautiful car!"
And indeed, from my vantage point, even through snow, I could see a flash of red down there on the track. His pit crew must have raked the snow off at the last minute.
I turned on my small, portable color TV. Yes, there was a camera on him. And then it switched to the others.
Those bombers, what you could see of them under the accumulated snow, were real wrecks—glassless, battered street vehicles, picked because they could be expended. The Caddy, I had to admit, looked like an aristocrat amongst winos.
Hammer Malone had some kind of a PA system in his own black car. What was it? A cut-down hearse? He yelled, "You stole my starting position, you (bleepard)! You ain't gonna have enough car to get yourself to the morgue when I'm done with you!" What were those things on his hubs? Knives? They stuck way out. Probably to cut tires!