“So we can try to kill each other again?” I rasped.
“That’s right, nail. Only next time there will be some rule changes. No more flying wedges. No more unnecessary roughness. Just a good game of football.”
“So we don’t get to beat the crap out of ’em?” Fragger asked.
Hammer grinned. “I didn’t say that.”
I waited until everybody was asleep, then sneaked down to the mess hall and turned on the WindO.
Bork?
I waited. A few seconds later a face swam into view. It was not Bork but rather a dark-skinned man with a head of tightly curled white hair. He was wearing a black suit with a pink shirt and a green bow tie. His mouth opened. A bright white blob oozed from between his lips and expanded into a word balloon.
BO MARSTEN, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST.
My hands hung like dead limbs over the keyboard as I gaped at the screen, heart pounding, unable to move or even think a coherent thought. A second word balloon emerged from the dark man’s lips.
HA HA, JUST KIDDING.
The man’s irises began to spin.
Bork? Is that you?
YES, BO.
What do you think you’re doing?
I AM PRACTICING MY SENSE OF HUMOR. ARE YOU AMUSED?
No.
I AM SORRY.
We didn’t win the game. It was a tie.
THEN YOUR SENTENCE WILL NOT BE REDUCED?
No. He wants us to play again in six weeks. I gotta get out of here, Bork.
I HAVE BEEN THINKING, BO, AND ACCORDING TO THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE PROVIDED, MCDONALD’S IS IN VIOLATION OF SEVERAL FEDERAL STATUTES, INCLUDING PROMOTION OF DANGEROUS SPORTING ACTIVITIES, RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT, AND ILLEGAL WAGERING. I COULD PROVIDE THIS INFORMATION TO THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL AUTHORITY. THE MOST PROBABLE OUTCOME OF SUCH AN ACT WOULD BE TO TRIGGER AN INVESTIGATION OF MCDONALD’S PLANT NUMBER 387. IT WOULD NOT, HOWEVER, REDUCE YOUR SENTENCE.
I imagined government agents swarming over the 3-8-7, finding our football gear, interviewing inmates and guards, hauling Hammer off in chains. The investigation would probably spill over to the Coke plant, and maybe to others. If the news got out, it could become a national scandal on par with the pro wrestling scandal of the 2050s, when some of the fake blood used by the performers turned out to be real. There was much to like about the idea of blowing the whistle on Hammer.
On the other hand I’d be back to eating nothing but pizza.
Let me think about that.
THERE IS ANOTHER POSSIBILITY.
Explain.
IF ONE WERE TO SUGGEST TO ELWIN HAMMER THAT ONE HAD THE MEANS TO REPORT HIS ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES TO THE AUTHORITIES, HE MIGHT BE PERSUADED TO OFFER YOU A SENTENCE REDUCTION.
Elwin?
THAT IS HIS NAME.
You want to blackmail him?
YES. MY COMPUTATIONS INDICATE A HIGH PROBABILITY THAT THIS WOULD RESULT IN YOUR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Either that or he’d destroy all the evidence and feed me to the bears.
THAT IS POSSIBLE. HOWEVER, I HAVE NOTICED THAT HUMANS OFTEN HESITATE TO DESTROY COSTLY ARTIFACTS. WHAT YOU SUGGEST IS NOT SO PROBABLE AS THE FIRST SCENARIO.
You don’t know Hammer.
Bork raised a hand to his chin and adopted a thoughtful expression.
That’s a very good visual, Bork. You look almost real.
I HAD EXCELLENT SOURCE MATERIAL. DO YOU RECOGNIZE ME?
No.
I AM PRESIDENT DENTON WILKE.
President Wilke was a white guy.
I MADE SEVERAL IMPROVEMENTS TO PRESIDENT WILKE’S BASIC PHYSICAL APPEARANCE, INCLUDING IMPROVED SKIN TONE. I ALSO REPOSITIONED HIS MOUTH AND EYEBROWS, ALTERED HIS HAIR PATTERN AND TEXTURE, AND INCREASED HIS EARLOBE LENGTH. I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE USEFUL TO BE ABLE TO PASS FOR HUMAN.
You’re pretty close. But your skin looks a little too even. You need some blemishes, like those dark spots old people get on their faces.
Four spots appeared on Bork’s face.
Make them different sizes.
Two spots got bigger and one got smaller.
Not bad. Now smile.
The mouth widened into an idiotic grin.
Not so big!
Bork adjusted his smile. It still looked strange, but not completely unbelievable. That is, if you assumed the man on the screen to be a mental patient.
Okay. Now lose the bow tie. . . .
I worked with Bork on his image for almost an hour—I don’t know why. Maybe because it was easier than thinking about my own problems. By the end of the hour he looked quite convincing—as long as he didn’t smile or spin his irises. That last thing was difficult for him. My original version of Bork had a beanie with a propeller that spun every time Bork performed a difficult computation. Despite all the changes Bork and I had made to his design, the urge to spin was so much a part of who he was that he seemed unable to expunge it. In the end I suggested sunglasses, which made him look more like Ray Charles than Denton Wilke.
I think you’ve got it.
THANK YOU, BO.
Except for the speech balloons, of course.
I AM CAPABLE OF SOPHISTICATED VERBAL INTERCOURSE. HOWEVER, YOUR TERMINAL IS NOT EQUIPPED FOR SONIC COMMUNICATION.
I heard voices, clattering, and laughter from behind the serving area of the empty mess hall.
Gotta go, Bork.
I hit the reset key.
“Hey! What are you doing in here?” It was one of the guards. I gave him the standard inmate-to-guard shrug and let him escort me back to my bunk.
The next week at the 3-8-7 was marked by depression, sluggishness, and petty violence. We were a pitiful sight. There were more splints, bandages, bruises, and missing teeth among the twenty-odd Goldshirts than I had seen in my entire pre-prison lifetime.
With most of us incapacitated, Hammer had temporarily suspended training, so we all had too much time on our hands. We were all a bit testy. Fragger got into a fight with Pineapple over absolutely nothing. Pineapple lost another tooth, and Fragger had to spend a week in solitary, eating pizza and washing it down with water. Rhino, with no hope of a liposuction shortcut, had gone on a liquid diet, consuming nothing but Pepsi and cranberry cider. He had a hollow-eyed, desperate look that made us all treat him like an unstable explosive device. Gorp, dealing with his re-broken collarbone, sank into a funk, ignoring everybody. Nuke never came back from Winnipeg, and nobody asked about him. I was wordless as well as worthless—it hurt to talk, and I had nothing to say.
The results of our visit to the Coke plant were noticed by the paperpants, and suddenly they were no longer the submissive, fearful herd we had come to expect. They saw a bunch of guys with bruises, cuts, and broken bones. Naturally they assumed we had taken the worst of it.
“Hey,” said Dodo as we passed each other in the mess hall. “I hear you guys got your asses kicked.”
I ignored him, walked over to the Goldshirts’ table, and sat next to Bullet.
“The natives are getting restless,” Bullet said.
Sharing a cell with Rhino had never been a source of great conversation. With him on his hunger fast it was downright bleak. I couldn’t talk, and Rhino wouldn’t. The only bright side was that there were no more Frazzie farts, just a plaintive gurgling.
At one point I got so bored that I leaned over and rasped, “So what are you weighing in at?”
Not that I cared.
Rhino opened his red-rimmed eyes and glared. Try to imagine a 300-plus-pound famine victim and you’ll get the idea.
“Less,” he said.
That was the most talking we’d done in days.
I heard the rattle of a baton dragged across steel bars.
“Marsten?” A guard stood outside our cell.
I sat up.
“Hammer wants you.”
Since I hadn’t done anything wrong recently, I wasn’t nearly as scared as I had been the first time I visited Hammer’s office. I was actually looking forward to it in a way. Something to break the boredom and despai
r. The guard escorted me through the plant to the elevator, and a few minutes later I was standing at attention before Hammer’s desk.
Hammer was working on his WindO, punching commands into the screen with a thick forefinger, his face bound up in a ferocious grimace. He looked like a gorilla working a vending machine. Finally he looked up at me.
“I knew you were trouble the first time I laid eyes on you,” he said.
I looked back at him, confused.
Hammer crossed his arms over his massive chest. “I got a message from a lawyer named I. B. Orkmeister. Friend of yours?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know any lawyers named Orkmeister.
“Well, he knows you.” Hammer spun the WindO to face me, and I found myself looking at the frozen image of an elegant white-haired man of African ancestry wearing sunglasses and a dark brown suit.
Bork. Of course.
Hammer stabbed his finger at the screen. “Mr. I. B. Orkmeister is threatening to make trouble for us here at the three-eight-seven. He seems to be under the impression that we have been mistreating our inmates. Have we been mistreating you, Marsten?”
I did not reply.
“What would you rather do—make pizzas or play football?”
“Football,” I croaked. It was true. Even after all we’d been through, football was still preferable to long hours on the pizza line.
“This Orkmeister is threatening to blow the whistle on us, Marsten. Do you know what that means? It means no football. No Frazzies. No wraps. No soyburgers. Pizza, every meal, pizza. Sixteen-hour days on the line. Is that what you want?”
I shook my head.
“He wants me to let you go, Marsten. What do you think about that?”
I shrugged. Hammer was looking at me as if I were a slice of reject pizza.
“Is that what you want?” Hammer asked, leaning forward, his mouth spreading into a wolfish, humorless smile. “You really want me to let you go?”
“I guess,” I said.
Hammer sat back in his chair and stared at me, his tiny eyes hooded.
“Okay, then,” he said after several seconds had passed. “You’re out of here at dawn.”
“What do you suppose that means?” Rhino asked.
“I guess he’s going to let me go.”
I listened to the sound of Rhino breathing on the bunk below.
“Just like that?”
“I guess it pays to have a good lawyer.”
“How do you afford a lawyer?”
“He’s doing it pro bono. For free.”
“You think this lawyer could get me out?”
“I’ll ask him,” I said.
It took me forever to get to sleep. A confusing array of images and conversations tumbled through my head: football and Frazzies mixed in with my family and all the kids at Washington Campus and making pizza and Fragger and Bullet and . . . it went on and on.
I was as afraid of going home as I was of not going home. But most of all I was worried that Hammer had given in too easily. It wasn’t like him to cave without inflicting some damage of his own. I had a feeling that leaving the 3-8-7 would not be as easy as he had made it sound.
I was wrong. Hammer let me go just like he said he would. Two blueshirts escorted me out through the main gate at dawn.
“Good luck, kid,” said the blueshirt as he closed the gate between us.
I looked around. The airstrip was empty.
“Wait a second. Where’s the plane?”
“No plane this morning, kid.”
“The bus, then.” But there was no bus in sight. A creepy feeling started at the base of my spine. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“Churchill is only twenty-six miles east.” He pointed. “If I was you, I’d start walking.”
The creepy feeling wrapped its tendrils around my belly and shot up into my heart.
“On foot?”
The blueshirt laughed. “You know any other way to walk? You keep moving, you maybe got a chance.”
“About one chance in hell,” said the other blueshirt. They both turned and walked away.
The sun had barely mounted the low horizon. It was chilly. The arctic summer was coming to an end. A sparkle of frost gave the tundra a magical fairyland look.
I was not enchanted. I was terrified.
Shivering in my gold T-shirt, I took a few steps toward the pale sun. Ice crystals crunched loudly beneath my feet. Stealth was not an option.
I began to run.
Moss, rock, rock, tuft of grass, grass, rock, grass, moss, rock rock rock rock . . . each footfall made a different sound: phhhut, crunk, tok, tok, shht, tchuf. Every ten seconds or so I would look to the left, to the right, and behind me. Twenty-six miles of polar-bear infested tundra between me and the town of Churchill. What were my chances?
Rock, grass, rock rock rock. . . .
In a way, Bork’s strategy had worked. I was free. In the short term he had succeeded. In the long term he had almost certainly gotten me killed.
Each step brought me closer to safety. But each step might also be bringing me closer to a bear. Any one of those frosty hummocks could rise up at any moment to display white teeth and a black tongue, the last thing I would ever see.
I was probably the best runner the 3-8-7 had ever seen. Maybe even the fastest human being in the USSA. But I was not the fastest runner on the tundra. The bears were faster.
I looked back. The 3-8-7 was smaller now, maybe two miles away.
No bears yet. I slowed to a comfortable jog, watching my feet. If I kept moving, I might reach Churchill in two or three hours.
There had been no ceremony, no good-byes, no drama. Hammer had simply ordered two of the guards to escort me to the east gate and let me go.
I was not the first inmate to be banished. One kid had been kicked out for refusing to work, so the story went. Another, according to legend, had been booted for attacking one of the guards with a homemade knife. I was the first to be banished for retaining a golden-eyed cybernetic troll masquerading as a lawyer.
So far as anyone knew, no banished prisoner had ever survived the journey across the tundra. I came up over a low rise to see the gray, white-flecked waters of Hudson Bay on the horizon. The wind cut at me from the right, carrying away the smell of my fear-tainted sweat. If a bear smelled me, he would come from the north. Every few strides I looked to my left.
The football program would probably be dismantled, all evidence hidden or destroyed. Hammer would feed the shoulder pads and helmets to the incinerator. He would take away the gold T-shirts and the jeans and the Frazzies and threaten the players with an eternity of anchovy pizza should they ever breathe a word.
It hadn’t been a bad life, being a Goldshirt. I’d been in prison, sure. I’d been forced to work twelve hours a day. I’d been living on a diet of fast food and Pepsi. I’d been in constant danger of serious injury, forced to play a violent, dangerous, and highly illegal team sport from the 20th century. But still . . . it had had its good points. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt like part of a team.
Would they miss me? No, they would hate me. The Goldshirts would have to wear paper coveralls and eat pizza and work just like everybody else while Hammer waited to see if Bork unleashed the Federal Correctional Authority on the 3-8-7. Maybe after it all blew over he would start the training again. He still had that bet with Hatch, and he had his pride.
I descended into a shallow bowl, a protected area where a few stunted spruce trees were making a valiant effort to survive. Near the bottom of the bowl was a shallow pond. I stopped and gulped handfuls of ice-cold water. How long had I been running? Two hours? Three? My legs still felt full and strong. I might actually make it. With a surge of confidence I ran up the slope to the lip of the bowl and I saw, nestled against the choppy waters of the bay, the town of Churchill—still many miles away. I took a moment to scan the horizon. To the west I could no longer see the 3-8-7 buildings. I was surrounded by rolling tundra.
> Then to the northwest I saw something moving. For about three seconds I stood rooted, not wanting to believe it was what I knew it to be. A bear, coming straight at me, loping across the land, following my wind-borne scent.
I ran. The bear was a good 400 yards away, the length of four football fields. I ran straight for Churchill, eyes on the ground. Moss, rock, grass, lichen, rock. Spongy, hard, grippy, crunchy, smooth. Don’t trip. You trip, you die.
The bear didn’t care where its feet fell. Those enormous paws rode the tundra easily, relentlessly. It flowed easily over the odd, uneven surface. The bear did not have to worry about twisting an ankle.
Would it devour me entirely, or leave a few bits of bone and gristle for the birds?
I knew I couldn’t run faster than a polar bear, but could I run longer? A full-grown polar bear weighs three quarters of a ton. It takes a lot of energy to keep something that big in motion. How hard would the bear work to sink its teeth into my scrawny hide? How long could it run?
I paced myself, breathing deeply. Don’t panic. You panic, you die.
I looked back. The bear was closer, only about 200 yards behind me. I’d run less than half a mile and the bear had closed the gap by half. I willed my legs to move faster, making myself count the strides. I counted to one hundred and looked back again—the bear was still there, but only a little closer. With renewed hope I continued to fly across the land, feet skimming over rock, grass, lichen, moss. Again I looked back.
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