The third and second team members roared into their masks, up to Bill Gilbey:

“Jewey Jacobs is dead!”

The sound whirled in the rushing air as far as the sides of the trumpet-shaped flying machine, which repeated three times – for it was enormous enough for two echoes to resound along its length – which repeated from the heights of the heavens onto the fabulous track behind us, like a summons to the Last Judgment:

“Jewey Jacobs is dead! Dead! Dead!”

“Oh! He’s dead, is he? I don’t give a damn,” said Corporal Gilbey. “Stand by: keep Jacobs going!”

It was a tedious task, such as I hope never to see again in any race. The man was kicking backward, counter-pedaling, seizing up. It is extraordinary how this term, which is applied to the friction of machines, was marvelously applicable to the corpse. And it went on doing what it had to do, right under my nose, into its fuller’s earth. Ten times we were tempted to unscrew the rods that bound our five pairs of legs together – counting the dead man’s. But he was harnessed, padlocked, weighted, packaged, and sealed into his seat – and then. . . he would have been a. . . dead weight (I can’t help the pun) and to win this difficult race we couldn’t do with a dead weight.

Corporal Gilbey was a practical man, just as William Elson and Arthur Gough too were practical gentlemen, and Corporal Gilbey ordered us to do what they themselves would have ordered. Jewey Jacobs was under contract to be fourth man in the great and honorable Perpetual Motion Food Race; he had signed a paper that would have set him back twenty-five thousand dollars for nonperformance, payable on his future races. If he were dead, he could no longer race, and would be unable to pay. So he had to race, then, alive or dead. One can sleep on a bike, so one should be able to die on a bike with no more trouble. And besides, this was called the perpetual motion race!

William Elson explained to us later that the stiffness of a corpse, which he called rigor mortis, I believe, means absolutely nothing, and can be overcome by the slightest effort. As for the sudden putrefaction, he himself admitted that he did not know its cause. Perhaps, he said, it was due to the secretion of an extraordinary abundance of muscular toxins.

Soon Jewey Jacobs began to pedal, with a bad grace at first, and we couldn’t see whether he was making any grimaces, as his face was still in his mask. We encouraged him with friendly insults of the sort that our grandfathers used to shout at Terront, during the first Paris-Brest race: “Get going, you pig!” Little by little he entered into the swing of it, his legs caught up with ours, the ankle-play returned, and finally he started pedaling madly.