Authors: Matthew Reilly
Add to that pit stops - magneto drives overheated, coolant tanks needed to be refilled, compressed-air thrusters had to be replaced - and all the many vagaries of racing, and you had a serious strategy contest on your hands.
* * *
The
Argonaut
screamed across the marshland, rushing through a narrow alleyway flanked by walls of eight-foothigh reeds, kicking up a whitewash of skanky swampwater behind it.
610 km/h…620…630…
With his steering fins flapping uselessly inside his broken rear spoiler, Jason steered with his two rear thrusters instead - alternating left and right, incredibly using his pedals to control the speeding bullet that was his hover car.
The Bug had plotted their course well. Every trip to the pits allowed Jason to see the big electronic leaderboard mounted above the main grandstand, with its up-to-thesecond tally of all the racers’ accumulated scores so far:
DRIVER
NO. CAR
POINTS
1. BECKER, B
09
Devil’s Chariot
1,110
2. RICHARDS, J
24
Stormbreaker
1,090
3. TADZIC, E
19
San Antonio
1,010
4. YU, E
888
Lantern-IV
1,000
5. CHASER, J 55
Argonaut
990
The accident had hurt them.
Lost them a lot of time. And no matter how hard Jason tried - and he tried as hard as he could - steering with his feet just wasn’t as good as steering with his hands.
And with each trip to the pits, he could see the
Argonaut
falling further and further behind the leaders, dropping ever further down the leaderboard.
What made it a hundred times worse was the identity of the driver who was leading: Barnaby Becker, a senior from Jason’s school back home in Hall’s Creek.
Becker was 18, red-haired, freckled, cocky and rich. His father, Barnaby Becker Sr, was a businessman who owned half of Halls Creek.
Mr Becker had bought his son one of the best production hover cars money could buy - a beautiful Lockheed-Martin ProRacer-5. He had also once employed Jason’s dad, a fact which Barnaby - a nasty kid if ever there was one - never failed to remind Jason of.
Nevertheless, Jason flew on, right to the end, zinging through as many arches as the broken but valiant
Argonaut
could manage, following the Bug’s revised course.
It didn’t matter.
As the giant clock above the Start-Finish Line ticked over from 2:59:59 to 3:00:00, and the last hover cars shot across the Line to the cheers of the 80,000-strong crowd, the
Argonaut,
piloted by Chaser J, was at the bottom of the leaderboard.
Jason pulled his beloved car to a halt in his pit bay and dropped his head.
In the most important race of his life - in front of 80,000 people; in front of the most distinguished pair of spectators he would ever race in front of - Jason Chaser had come stone-cold last.
The world was changed forever with the invention of the hover car.
Indeed, over the course of human history, few inventions could claim such an instantaneous and immediate global impact.
Gutenberg’s printing press, Nobel’s dynamite, the Wright brother’s flying machine - sure they were all impressive, but their impact on the world paled in comparison to the global
revolution
that was brought about by Wilfred P. Wilmington’s hover car.
Much of the fuss had to do with the 80-year-old Wilmington’s extraordinary decision to make his amazing new piece of technology freely available to anyone who wanted to exploit it.
He didn’t patent it. He didn’t sell it to a major corporation. Not even a special delegation led by the President of the United States himself could convince him to keep the technology solely for the benefit of the US.
No. Wilfred P. Wilmington, the eccentric backyard inventor who claimed that he had more than enough money to live out his twilight years in relative comfort, did the most extraordinary and unpredictable thing of all: he gave his technology to the world for free.
The response was immediate.
Since hover technology required no gasoline to fuel it, the oil-producing countries of the Middle East crumbled. Oil became meaningless, and the United States - the world’s largest consumer of oil - cancelled all its Mid-East contracts. The fortunes of the Saudis and the Sultan of Brunei went up in smoke in the blink of an eye.
Car companies embraced the new technology and - aided by their already-existent factories and massproduction assembly lines - they pumped out hover cars by the million. The first Model-T/H (for ‘Hover’) Ford rolled off the Ford Motor Company’s production line barely one year after Wilmington’s incredible announcement. BMW, Renault and Porsche followed soon after.
They were quickly joined, however, by an unlikely set of competitors: aeroplane-makers. Lockheed-Martin, Airbus and Boeing all began to produce family-sized hover vehicles too.
Overland travel became faster - New York to L.A. now took 90 minutes by car. Seaborne cargo freighters now crossed the world’s oceans in hours not days.
The world became smaller.
* * *
Professor Wilmington had originally named his discovery an ‘electromagnetically elevated omni-directional vehicle’, but the world gave it a simpler name: the hover car.
The technology underpinning the hover car was disarmingly simple and wonderfully universal.
Every moment of every day, upwardly-moving magnetic waves radiate outward from the Earth’s core. What Wilmington did was create a device - the ‘magneto drive’ - that
repelled
this upwardly-moving magnetic force. And while scientists marvelled at Wilmington’s clever fusion of ferro-magnetic materials and high-end superconductors, the general public revelled in the result.
For the result was perpetual hover.
So long as the world kept turning, hover cars could retain their lift. And so the public’s greatest fear about hover technology - cars dropping out of the sky - had been assuaged.
And so hover technology spread.
Passenger cars and hover buses filled cities. Cargo freighters zoomed across the seas. Children’s hover scooters became all the rage. And of course the world’s military forces found their own uses for the new technology.
But the advent of any new form of travel technology - boats, cars, planes - always brings forth a certain kind of individual and the hover car would be no exception to this rule.
Soon after the spectacular arrival of this new form of human movement, came the arrival of a new kind of person: part race-car driver, part fighter pilot, all superstar.
The hover car racer.
The official presentation of prizes was enough to make Jason puke.
Smiling for the cameras, LeClerq handed Barnaby the winner’s trophy, a gigantic bottle of Moet champagne, and a cheque for a thousand dollars.
Jason did notice, however, that Principal LeClerq’s offsider, the ex-racer Scott Syracuse, was not on the stage. In fact, Syracuse was nowhere to be seen.
LeClerq shook Barnaby’s hand, then he took the mike. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘This being the end of the regional season, I have another presentation to make. With his victory today, young Master Becker has topped the local competition ladder, and as such, has won for himself another prize: he has won an invitation to study at the International Race School. Master Becker, it would be our honour to have you as a student next year.’
With that, LeClerq handed Barnaby the famous goldedged envelope that every young racer dreamed of receiving.
The crowd roared their approval.
Barnaby took the envelope, thanked LeClerq, and then he punched the air with his fist and popped the cork on his champagne bottle and the festivities began.
Watching from Pit Lane, Jason just stared at the scene with his mouth agape, devastated.
Beside him, the Bug shook his head. He whispered something in Jason’s ear.
Jason snuffed a laugh. ‘Thanks, man. Unfortunately, you’re not the Principal of the Race School.’
Then he spun on his heel and went back to their pit bay to load up the
Argonaut
.
The Bug scurried after him.
When they got back to their bay, they were surprised to find that someone was already there.
Scott Syracuse was standing in the doorway to their pit bay. He was leaning inside it, peering up at the
Argonaut
‘s damaged tail section.
‘Er…hi there. Can I help you?’ Jason said.
Syracuse turned, leaning on his cane. He levelled his cool gaze at Jason. ‘Master Chaser, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘An appropriate name for you based on today’s effort, don’t you think? Scott Syracuse. I’m here with Professor LeClerq. I teach with him at the Race School.’
‘I know who you are, sir. I have your bubble gum card.’ Jason felt stupid as soon as he said it.
Syracuse nodded at the
Argonaut
. ‘Your steering rudder’s broken.’
‘Yeah. I got hit by some debris from that crazy kid who tried to pull a 9-G banking turn.’
‘When did that happen?’
‘About nine minutes in.’
Syracuse stopped, turned abruptly.
‘Nine minutes in? So how did you steer after that? Thrusters?’
‘Yep.’
‘Let me get this straight. You lost your steering nine minutes into the race. But you continued on anyway, steering with your
pedals
instead of your steering wheel.’
‘That’s right, sir.’
Syracuse nodded slowly. ‘I wondered…’
Then he looked directly at Jason. ‘I’ve got another question for you. You started the race differently to everyone else - you headed out for the gates on the western side of the course while most of the others went north-east. Then you got hit and changed your race-plan.’
Syracuse pulled a map of the course from his back pocket. On it were little markers depicting all of the 250 gates on the course.
‘Can you tell me what your original plan was?’
Jason swapped a glance with the Bug. ‘What do you say, Bug?’
The Bug nodded - eyeing Syracuse warily.
Jason said, ‘My little brother here does our navigating. He’s the guy who plotted our course today. We call him the ‘Bug.’
Syracuse offered the map for the Bug to take.
The Bug stepped behind Jason.
Jason took the map instead. ‘He’s a little shy with people he doesn’t know.’
Jason handed the map to his brother, who then quickly - and expertly - drew their race-plan on it. He handed the map back to Jason who passed it on to Syracuse.
Syracuse stared at the map for a long moment. Then he did a strange thing. He pulled out
another
map of the course, and compared the two. Jason saw that this other map also had markings on it, showing someone else’s race-plan.
At last, Syracuse looked up, and gazed closely at Jason and the Bug, as if he were assessing them very, very carefully.
He held up their race-plan.
‘May I keep this?’
‘Sure,’ Jason shrugged.
Scott Syracuse pursed his lips. ‘Jason Chaser, hover car racer. It’s got a nice ring to it. Farewell to you both.’
Jason and the Bug arrived back home in Hall’s Creek around seven that evening, with the
Argonaut
strapped to a trailer behind their dusty old Toyota hover-wagon.
Hall’s Creek was a little desert town in the far northern reaches of Western Australia. The exact middle of nowhere, Jason liked to say.
The lights were on in the farmhouse when they arrived, and dinner was on the table when they walked in.
‘Oh, my boys! My boys!’ Martha Chaser cried, running to the door to greet them. ‘Jason! We saw it all on the television: that silly boy who crashed right in front of you! Are you both all right?’
She swept the Bug up into her arms, engulfing him in her wide apron-covered frame. ‘You didn’t hurt my little Doodlebug, did you?’
The Bug almost disappeared in her embrace. He seemed very content in her arms.
‘He’s okay,’ Jason said, taking a seat at the table. ‘Only thing he suffered was the humiliation of coming dead last in front of Jean-Pierre LeClerq.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind, mum.’
Just then, their father, Henry Chaser, came into the kitchen, his overalls caked with dust from a day’s work on the station.
‘Well, hey there! The racers return! Good racing today, sons. Tough call with that kid who banged up your tail.’
‘Damn idiot mangled our steering,’ Jason groaned as he wolfed down some mashed potato. ‘Wrong place, wrong time, I guess.’
‘Oh, no,’ Henry said, smiling. ‘No, no, no, no.
You
lost your steering, Jason. You
put yourself
in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Now, Henry, leave them be…’ Martha rolled her eyes. Her husband was a hover car racing enthusiast. He watched it on the television all the time, loved to analyse it - the classic couch coach. It was he who had introduced the boys to mini-cart racing in the back paddock at the ages of five and three.
Jason took the bait. ‘No way, Dad! I didn’t put myself in the wrong place. It was just plain bad luck…’
‘No it wasn’t,’ Henry said. ‘It was
racing
. I think this was a good lesson for you both. Racing not only involves beating the other top contenders - it also involves
avoiding
those who
aren’t
as talented as you are.
‘Sometimes racing isn’t fair, Jason. Sometimes you can do everything right in a race and
still
not win. Hell, I remember once in the Sydney Classic, the leader was ahead by two whole laps and then he got sideswiped by a tail-ender coming out of the pits. Just like that, he was out of the race - ‘
The doorbell rang.
Henry Chaser got up, didn’t stop talking. ‘…Guy was way out in front and he just got
nailed
by this stupid rookie. God, what was his name? Hell of a driver, he was. Young fella. Got wiped out a couple of years ago. Ah, that’s it, it was…’