by John Shirley
1:00 p.m. Sunday
“This place looks like a pigpen,” Butcher growled. “You going to clear some of this junk away?” He was carrying a sandwich in one hand, beer in the other; the table was littered with breakfast remains, leftover snacks from the morning and the night before.
Lottie didn’t look at him. “Clear it yourself.”
“I’ll clear it.” He put his sandwich down on the arm of his chair and swept a spot clean, knocking over glasses and cups.
“Pick that up!” Lottie screamed. “I’m sick and tired of cleaning up after you every damn weekend! All you do is stuff and guzzle and expect me to pick up and clean up.”
“Damn right.”
Lottie snatched up the beer can he had put on the table and threw it at him. The beer streamed out over the table, chair, over his legs. Butcher threw down the sandwich and grabbed at her. She dodged and backed away from the table into the center of the room. Butcher followed, his hands clenched.
“You touch me again, I’ll break your arm!”
“Bitch!” He dived for her and she caught his arm, twisted it savagely and threw him to one side.
He hauled himself up to a crouch and glared at her with hatred. “I’ll fix you,” he muttered. “I’ll fix you!”
Lottie laughed. He charged again, this time knocked her backward and they crashed to the floor together and rolled, pummeling each other.
The red beeper sounded and they pulled apart, not looking at each other, and took their seats before the screen.
“It’s the fat lady,” Butcher said malevolently. “I hope the bitch kills herself.”
Mildred had fallen into the stream and was struggling in waist-high water to regain her footing. The current was very swift, all white water here. She slipped and went under. Lottie held her breath until she appeared again, downstream, retching, clutching at a boulder. Inch by inch she drew herself to it and clung there trying to get her breath back. She looked about desperately; she was very white. Abruptly she launched herself into the current, swimming strongly, fighting to get to the shore as she was swept down the river.
Andy’s voice was soft as he said, “That water is forty-eight degrees, ladies and gentlemen! Forty-eight! Dr. Lederman, how long can a person be immersed in water that cold?”
“Not long, Andy. Not long at all.” The doctor looked worried too. “Ten minutes at the most, I’d say.”
“That water is reducing her body heat second by second,” Andy said solemnly. “When it is low enough to produce unconsciousness . . . ”
Mildred was pulled under again; when she appeared this time, she was much closer to shore. She caught a rock and held on. Now she could stand up, and presently she dragged herself rock by rock, boulder by boulder, to the shore. She was shaking hard, her teeth chattering. She began to build a fire. She could hardly open her waterproof matchbox. Finally she had a blaze and she began to strip. Her backpack, Andy reminded the audience, had been lost when she fell into the water. She had only what she had on her back, and if she wanted to continue after the sun set and the cold evening began, she had to dry her things thoroughly.
“She’s got nerve,” Butcher said grudgingly.
Lottie nodded. She was weak. She got up, skirted Butcher, and went to the kitchen for a bag. As she cleaned the table, every now and then she glanced at the naked woman by her fire. Steam was rising off her wet clothes.
10:00 p.m. Sunday
Lottie had moved Butcher’s chair to the far side of the table the last time he had left it. His beard was thick and coarse, and he still wore the clothes he had put on to go to work Friday morning. Lottie’s stomach hurt. Every weekend she got constipated.
The game was between Mildred and Clyde now. He was in good shape, still had his glasses and his backpack. He was farther from his truck than Mildred was from hers, but she had eaten nothing that afternoon and was limping badly.
Her boots must have shrunk, or else she had not waited for them to get completely dry. Her face twisted with pain when she moved.
The girl was still posing in the high meadow, now against a tall tree, now among the wildflowers. Often a frown crossed her face and surreptitiously she scratched. “Ticks,” Butcher said. “Probably full of them.”
Eddie was wandering in a daze. He looked empty, and was walking in great aimless circles. Some of them cracked like that, Lottie knew. It had happened before, sometimes to the strongest one of all. They’d slap him right in a hospital and no one would hear anything about him again for a long time, if ever. She didn’t waste pity on him.
She would win, Lottie knew. She had studied every kind of wilderness they used and she’d know what to do and how to do it. She was strong, and not afraid of noises. She found herself nodding and stopped, glanced quickly at Butcher to see if he had noticed. He was watching Clyde.
“Smart,” Butcher said, his eyes narrowed. “That son-abitch’s been saving himself for the home stretch. Look at him.” Clyde started to lope, easily, as if aware the TV truck was dead ahead.
Now the screen was divided into three parts, the two finalists, Mildred and Clyde, side by side, and above them a large aerial view that showed their red and blue dots as they approached the trucks.
“It’s fixed!” Lottie cried, outraged when Clyde pulled ahead of Mildred. “I hope he falls down and breaks his back!”
“Smart,” Butcher said over and over, nodding, and Lottie knew he was imagining himself there, just as she had done. She felt a chill. He glanced at her and for a moment their eyes held—naked, scheming. They broke away simultaneously.
Mildred limped forward until it was evident each step was torture. Finally she sobbed, sank to the ground and buried her face in her hands.
Clyde ran on. It would take an act of God now to stop him. He reached the truck at twelve minutes before midnight.
For a long time neither Lottie nor Butcher moved. Neither spoke. Butcher had turned the audio off as soon as Clyde reached the truck, and now there were the usual after-game recaps, the congratulations, the helicopter liftouts of the other contestants.
Butcher sighed. “One of the better shows,” he said. He was hoarse.
“Yeah. About the best yet.”
“Yeah?” He sighed again and stood up. “Honey, don’t bother with all this junk now. I’m going to take a shower, and then I’ll help you clean up, okay?”
“It’s not that bad,” she said. “I’ll be done by the time you’re finished. Want a sandwich, doughnut?”
“I don’t think so. Be right out.” He left. When he came back, shaved, clean, his wet hair brushed down smoothly, the room was neat again, the dishes washed and put away.
“Let’s go to bed, honey,” he said, and put his arm lightly about her shoulders. “You look beat.”
“I am.” She slipped her arm about his waist. “We both lost.”
“Yeah, I know. Next week.”
She nodded. Next week. It was the best money they ever spent, she thought, undressing. Best thing they ever bought, even if it would take them fifteen years to pay it off. She yawned and slipped into bed. They held hands as they drifted off to sleep.
In order to play a sport that primarily requires hitting an object with a stick while sliding around on ice once meant you needed a climate that was sufficiently cold enough to provide, at least seasonally, reliably solid ice. Nowadays we have indoor rinks and you can play ice hockey in the desert as long as someone pays for the power and the refrigeration system works. On a planet covered with ice, hockey becomes a game of hundreds of yards rather than inches, meters become miles, and the rules can involve life and death, not just a penalty box. Václav Zajac loves the intoxicating, powerful isolation of the breakaway: no defender between him and the goal, free to skate and shoot at will, ultimately deking (originally a Canadianism for “decoying” or faking out) the goalie to score. In this particular game, both his breakaway and deke turn out to be—at the very least—dramatic.
Breakaway
Geor
ge Alec Effinger
Old Number 12 stood by a port and looked down at the playing field. The port, for some reason, was shaped like the rounded rectangle of a CRT screen. It gave you the feeling that you were watching television, even while you stared out at real life. It had the effect of creating boredom and dissatisfaction, something the ship’s designers never foresaw, because real life never moved so fast or so frantically as television. After thirty seconds at the port, you had a sneaking desire to change the channel. There was no way to do that, of course, and then you’d remember that you weren’t watching television, that you were instead aboard an orbiting plastic and steel ball, and you were so far from home that sometimes your eyes stung with tears.
Václav Zajac, Number 12, turned away from the port. There really wasn’t anything to see: a pale green-white world of ice turning in the dim light of a distant cold sun. He leaned against the bulkhead, feeling the machinery of the orbiting station thrumming in the wall at his back. He chewed his lip and stared at the deck without seeing anything in particular. He was avoiding the locker room, and he didn’t want to take another glance through the port. There wasn’t much else to do. That was one of the main troubles with the station: there was really nothing to do.
“Hey, Jackie,” called another player. “You coming?”
“Sure,” said Zajac. He didn’t look up. The other man went into the locker room. Zajac studied the rippled sole of one shoe. Finally he took a long breath, exhaled slowly, and followed the other through the pastel green door.
Only the lack of personal decoration set his locker area apart from any of the others. Some of the players had adorned theirs, added bits of individuality, audio dots and holoscenes that were intended to portray something about their owners’ tastes. The fact that most of these scenes were the same—running to ghostly, beckoning women apparently afflicted with respiratory difficulties—didn’t diminish their value. Zajac’s locker space was bare except for his uniform suit and a few toilet and training articles on the shelf. He never felt the need to express himself by decorating his person or his belongings. He believed that his personality and his essential nature were well-enough defined downstairs, on the playing field. On the ice.
Václav Zajac was right about that. There wasn’t another hockey player in the Havoc Force amateur league with his reputation and statistics. He didn’t need tiger stripes on his faceplate to unnerve an opposing defenseman. That defenseman was already frightened of him, and had been since before the opening face-off.
He sat on the bench in front of his locker and listened to the cheerful conversation of his teammates. They were excited and just a little artificially high-spirited. They were beginning to wind themselves tighter, to allow their controlled hysteria to get them to the competitive peak they would need to play the game down below. Zajac didn’t participate in their jokes and shouts and laughter and curses. He waited quietly until he felt ready, and then he began to dress. He had always been sober, oddly silent and disturbingly distant, even as a young rookie many years before. He stood up and took a roll of broad tan adhesive bandage from the shelf. He began strapping his ankles. Around him in the locker room soap and protective cups and wet towels flew through the air. If Zajac noticed, he showed no sign. The younger men respected him, but they played around him. Their missiles defied his air space, but no one ever presumed to include him in the locker room play.
The Condors were the station’s entry in the Havoc Force Hockey Association, Second Quadrant champions for the last four seasons, league champions twice in that period. Zajac was a major reason for that success. His ice time was the only real life he knew. The endless days he spent monitoring the emptiness around the frozen rock of Niflhel seemed like punishment, with the occasional reward of liberty two hundred fifty miles below, on the nightmarish surface of the little world.
The game today was against the Rome IV Stingers, a weak team from the Third Quadrant. Rome IV was an outpost halfway across the spiral from Niflhel, and the two teams had never played each other before. Zajac, as he finished taping his ankles, wasn’t even curious about them. He hadn’t watched any of the tapes of the Stingers’ previous games. He hadn’t even studied the defensemen he would be facing. It didn’t make any difference who they were, he thought. When he got down there, on the familiar but deadly pale green ice, he would own the game. He would establish his dominance early, and he would skate and score at will. He told himself this over and over, in a kind of self-hypnotic way. It was as important to his readiness as his physical condition and equipment.
The ice hockey tournament had been invented by the psych maintenance division to deal with the peculiar claustrophobia that always threatened to turn into an epidemic at the isolated outposts. They couldn’t prevent the panic that gripped people who felt themselves lost and permanently abandoned in space, but if the hostile environments and lonely scenes could be made more familiar, the experts said that maybe the screaming red horror would diminish and eventually all but disappear. It was a nice theory, and it even worked after a fashion. None of the hockey players, for instance, ever felt the choking terror growing in them while they glided over the ice fields of Niflhel. The game was great therapy. It was fun, there was an exciting and considerable welcome relief from the tedium of their passive military duties. Down on the ice all was well. But in the shuttle ride back to the station . . .
The temperature on the surface of Niflhel was only a little pocket change of Kelvin, just enough to register on the meters, to differentiate the dusky world from the near-absolute of the surrounding interstellar medium. The place had once been a marvelous laboratory where gases that could be liquefied under difficult circumstances on Earth were found in solid prairies of unusual ice, or pools of sluggish liquid with dreamlike properties. Niflhel would have been of immense interest to physicists and chemists except that since the expansion through the spiral, worlds of this kind had become so common they were no longer even named: silent, lifeless planets circling so far from their central sun that the stars were just a glimmer of divorced energy in the daytime darkness of the sky.
Zajac put on a thin set of long underwear, made of cotton all the way from Earth. He chose only the best when it came to his equipment. He had tried synthetic fiber underwear as a rookie and it had almost cost him his life in a game on a forgotten and nameless world in the First Quadrant. His suit’s climate sensors had failed briefly. The synthetic material didn’t soak up his perspiration and tended to trap body heat. Zajac had almost stifled and dehydrated within the protective armor of his game uniform.
The suits were the most sophisticated pieces of equipment the technical teams could devise. They were lightweight, made of a dynaprene material that gave almost as much freedom as everyday clothing, yet insulated and protected the wearer against the harshest environments in the spiral—or anyway against most of them. The dynaprene had a little trouble dealing with certain atmospheres of very high pressure and very low pH. But in the general realm of conditions, the suits were miracles of efficiency and comfort. Because of them, people inhabited places that were bluntly uninhabitable, a paradox the human beings resolved by ignoring it. The suits were specially modified for the athletes. They were a little larger, a little roomier, in order to fit in pads for shins, ankles, elbows, and shoulders. These fiber and foam pads were snug, comfortable, and didn’t restrict movement in the least.
Clothed in the suit, Zajac sat on the bench and waited. His helmet, his gauntlets, and his skated boots still rested on the shelf. He was finished dressing and there was nothing more for him to do until it was time for the team to head for the shuttle. None of the others had even begun getting into his suit. Zajac closed his eyes and breathed slowly. He relaxed. He felt mildly happy, as though something marginally pleasant was just about to happen, like a healthy sneeze or a good yawn. He remained confident about his performance during the game, but he didn’t think about it any longer.
“Jackie, the rest of you jokers, listen up.”
Zajac opened his eyes. The coach had come into the locker room. It must be almost time, thought Zajac. “These guys we’re playing today are basically your everyday type of clowns,” said the coach. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay attention to what you’re doing down there. They’re clowns and princesses, but they’ve scored a few goals, too. So watch yourselves. Check them hard a few times right in the beginning, and they’ll probably skate clear of you the rest of the day. All right?” There was a murmur from the younger players. Zajac had heard all of this many times before. The coach gave the same speech before every game; every other team in the association seemed to be made up of clowns and princesses.
“Any change in their lineup?” asked Moro, the Condor goalie.
“No, so just go with the game plan. Keep the puck down at their end, don’t pay any attention to their crazy defense. They do that a lot, I don’t know why. Maybe they think it will confuse you. It’s probably why they’re always losers. Almost always. So just play your own game, control the puck, move it up and put it in. Get that first goal, and they’ll have to play catch-up the rest of the day. You know that you can skate rings around them, they don’t have anybody who can catch even Anangi, here.” There was a sharp, quick laugh from the players, and Number 44, Bashake Anangi, spat angrily. He was a Condor defenseman not famed for his winged skates.
“Anything else?” asked the coach. He didn’t look like what a coach ought to look like. He didn’t have a big cigar or a Condor cap on his head. He wasn’t wearing an old sweatshirt or a natty suit or ancient sneakers. He wore a white lab coat with an ID badge clipped to a lapel, and a headset and microphone over his thinning blond hair. He looked more like a communications technician, and when he wasn’t coaching the hockey team, that’s what he was.
There was a silence. The coach looked around the room, then clapped his hands. “So let’s hit the ice,” he said.