The Race (Isaac Bell 4)

“He’s surprised us before. Stick close. I’ll come back before she lands.”

Bell walked across the infield to the three-hundred-foot-long steel rail on which Platov had promised his engine would race in a final experiment before they installed it in Steve Stevens’s biplane.

The enormously fat Stevens, bulging in a white planter’s suit and glowering impatiently, sat at a breakfast table that his elderly servants had set with linen and silver. Platov and Stevens’s chief mechanician were tinkering with the still-silent jet motor, the mechanician setting valves and switches while Platov consulted his slide rule. Stevens was venting his restlessness by upbraiding his servants. His coffee was cold, he was complaining. His sweet rolls were stale, and there weren’t enough of them. The docile old men attending the cotton planter looked terrified.

Stevens’s arrogant gaze fell on Bell’s white suit.

“Surely Southern blood courses in your veins, suh,” he drawled in dulcet Southern tones. “Ah have never laid eyes on a Yankee who could do justice to the pure white duds of the Old South.”

“My father spent time in the Old South.”

“And taught you to dress like a gentleman. Do Ah presume correctly that he was buyin’ cotton for New England mills?”

“He was a Union Army intelligence officer, carrying out President Lincoln’s order to free the slaves.”

“Ready, sirs,” Dmitri Platov called out.

The Russian inventor’s springy mutton-chop whiskers were quivering with excitement and his dark eyes were flashing.

“Thermo engine ready.”

Stevens glared at his chief mechanician. “Is it, Judd?”

Judd muttered, “Ready as it ever will be, Mr. Stevens.”

“About time. Ah’ve had just about enough sittin’ and waitin’. . Now, where you goin’?”

Judd had picked up a baseball bat and started walking along the rail. “I gotta whack the stop switch as she’s nearing the end to shut the motor off.”

“Is that how you’re goin’ to stop the motor on my flyin’ machine? Are you-all fixin’ to stand in front of me with a baseball bat?”

“No worry!” cried Platov. “Automatic switch in machine. This only test. See?” He pointed at the thermo engine, resting on the rail. “Big switch. Just touch with bat as engine go by.”

“All right, get on with it, for God’s sake. The rest of the race’ll be across the Mississippi before Ah take to the sky.”

Judd ran two hundred feet down the rail and positioned himself. Bell thought he looked as unhappy as a long-ball hitter ordered to bunt.

“Is action!” cried Platov.

The thermo engine ignited with a low whine that soared to an earsplitting shriek. Bell covered his ears to protect his acute hearing and watched the motor begin to shake with awesome power. No wonder the mechanicians all respected Platov. That steel box he had invented was smaller than a steamer trunk, but it seemed to contain the amazing energy of a modern locomotive.

Platov jerked the release lever, and the latches holding it back opened.

The thermo engine shot down the rail.

Bell could scarcely believe his eyes. In one instant, it was throbbing next to him. In the next, it reached the man with the bat. It really worked, and the speed was phenomenal. Then all hell broke loose. Just as Judd was about to bunt the bat against the stop switch, the thermo engine jumped the rail.

It smashed through the chief mechanician as if he were a paper target, knocked what little remained of his body to the ground, and flew a hundred yards, crashing through Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s brand-new New Haven Curtiss parked on the grass and tearing the tail off a Blériot, before it came to rest inside a truck owned by the Vanderbilt syndicate, where it burst into flames.

Isaac Bell ran to the fallen Judd and saw immediately that there was nothing to be done for the man. Then while others ran to the destroyed New Haven and the burning truck, Bell inspected the rail where the engine had escaped.

Dmitri Platov was wringing his hands. “Was so good, ’til then. So good. Oh, that poor man. Look at that poor man.”

Steve Stevens waddled up. “If this don’t beat all! My head mechanician’s been killed, and Ah got no jet engine for my machine. How in hell am Ah supposed to run a race?”

Platov wept. He tore at his thick black hair and beat his hands on his chest. “What terrible thing I have done. Did he have wife?”

“Who the hell would marry Judd?”