“I’m sure they’re just power-assisted brakes,” insisted Chip. He sneaked closer to Fal, cooing: “It’ll be fine when the engine is going; all we’ve got to do is put it in gear as soon as we’re over the hill . . . and I’ll jump up and do it.”
“Shog off, Connolly!” Fal was now a good twenty feet away.
“I’ll do it,” offered Nym eagerly. “Machines like me.”
Chip snorted. “Oh yeah. Do you think we’re stupid, Nym?”
“No, honest,” said the rat. He pointed a stubby foredigit. “All I’ll do is stand on that clutch pedal, push the gear lever up, and then jump off the clutch pedal. Nothing to it. Simple mechanical device.”
“That’s what he said about the drill press,” muttered Pistol darkly.
Chip tried for other volunteers. “Well, Pistol? Mel? Doll? Will you do it?”
“Not shogging likely,” replied Doll and Pistol in unison.
“I’ll go with Nym,” said Melene warily. “And let’s take Doc, too. We’ll make sure he does the right thing, Chip.”
Chip realized he wasn’t going to get any better offers from the rats. And the bats were conspicuous by their silence. Mechanical devices—well, nonexplosive ones, anyway—were a closed book to them. Which they obviously intended to keep closed.
* * *
“A-one, a-two, a-threeee . . .”
It was a far steeper slope.
Their panting was drowned in a sudden roar. A flame, fully twenty feet high, leapt out of the air filter. In its sudden stark light Chip saw Melene and Doc clinging for dear life to the steering wheel. The still valley was filled with an over-revved tractor bellow.
“Told you what it needed was a stoup of good strong drink!” boasted Pistol.
“To be sure,” said Bronstein drily. “And do you think there might possibly be a single Maggot, on the whole southern front, that doesn’t know exactly where we are now?”
Chip was running after the tractor, shouting, oblivious to the danger of alerting the enemy. “Get after them, bats, and tell them to put the brakes on!”
He and Virginia started gaining on the tractor, which had left the road and was now careering wildly in a drunken madcap fashion. Jumping up onto the back stabilizer, Chip seized the wheel around the clutching paws of the manic Nym. He thrust his foot down on what he had decided was the brake pedal. Hard. Nothing happened.
He hauled at the mess of hydraulics levers. The blade came down with a clunk and started rectifying the shell damage to the terrain. The tractor still didn’t stop. Virginia, panting, jumped up next to him. Belatedly, he thought of taking it out of gear.
They stood, stationary at last, in the middle of a war-torn field, the tractor still roaring away at full throttle. Chip vainly searched for a stuck accelerator pedal. Whatever that other pedal was, it didn’t affect the throttle. Trust them to find a buggered tractor. Oh well. They’d just have to do their best.
Eamon fluttered out of the darkness. “Maggots!” he shrieked. “Maggots coming fast! Get up that hill and get the trailer.”
Chip pulled wildly at the hydraulic levers again. The blade started to lift the front end of the tractor. Hastily he pushed the other way. The blade came up and the tractor began to roll downhill again. Desperately, Chip tried to thrust it into gear. Remembered the clutch. Tried again and let the clutch out . . .
With a jerk that nearly threw them all off, they began their blundering passage back up the hill.
“Faster!” yelled Nym, bouncing wildly on the tip of the saddle between Chip’s legs, endangering Chip’s family jewels. Still under the happy delusion he was driving the thing, the big rat was clutching the wheel with one paw, and belaboring the dashboard with a short stick.
“Faster!” shouted Eamon. “The Maggots are gaining!”
Chip ignored them all as he grimly hunched in white-knuckled fifteen-mile-an-hour concentration over the wheel. He proceeded up the once elegantly raked and graveled curve of the winery driveway. Doing his bit for aesthetics, he reduced the last three surviving plump-cherub statuette-befouled pillars to eye-pleasing plaster chips as he wove his way back up to the workshop. There he dropped the blade onto the cobbles in a screaming streak of sparks before getting the tractor out of gear.