Ultimate Sports

by Donald R. Gallo

  During the eighth mile I wondered if we could finish at all. Each step my feet and calves throbbed and I had to make up mind games to keep going. Seven miles done, I realized—more than half of my goal. After this there would be only two more miles. And I had already run half a lap. How many yards would that leave me? It would be easier to figure with a calculator or computer, but I couldn’t see myself lugging a laptop around the track with me.

  Three and a half laps to go, 440 yards for each lap, that was 880, 1,320, and a half lap more would add 220-1,540 yards until I could rest. But just in adding that up I had run 110 yards—what would that make it?

  Drivers on the street alongside the track looked over and waved. During the first few miles I had waved back to each one. Then I had merely nodded. Now I didn’t bother. Who cared?

  After I passed Danny, I’d have three laps to go—440, 880,1,320 yards until I finished my eighth mile often. All of us together would have done seventy-eight miles—only twenty-two to go until we set the world’s record. Who cared about the record anymore? But we had started out for the record, it had seemed so important, and I wouldn’t be the one to quit.

  When I finally handed off to Bobby D, I realized he looked even worse than I felt. About the fifth mile his times had gone through the roof, increasing about thirty seconds each mile. His sixth-mile time had been fifth best of all the guys; his seventh mile placed him eighth. His times were getting to be like those of Hecht, who chugged through, grumbling that he hadn’t realized what he was getting into. Seconds after Bobby D took the baton, I wondered if he was running at all. My momentum took me past him, but he didn’t race past the way I had expected. I turned to see where he was. His legs were moving, his knees came up, but there was no forward speed. “Bobby D, you okay?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and finally he passed me and continued around the track.

  Danny came over to show me my time. “You’re still second or third best,” he explained. “Luther beat you on two miles.”

  I nodded toward Bobby D. “What about him?” I asked.

  Danny smiled big. “What’d you expect?” he said. “He couldn’t keep up with the times he had at the beginning. He was between you and Feldman and was determined to keep up with you both. No way he could continue that.”

  “So why’d you put him there if you knew he couldn’t keep up?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody had to bring him down to size,” he said. “And this way he does it to himself.” It was the first time I’d ever noticed Danny looking devious.

  He turned to the scoreboard and wrote my time in big numbers. I flipped the mileage marker to 78. Bobby D was still only halfway around the track.

  When he came by at the end of the lap, the guys started to cheer for him. “All right, Bobby D. You can do it!” He looked over and snarled. Everyone shut up. His teeth were bared, his face squinched with pain—you could see he was working as hard as he could, but his legs were moving in slow motion. When he finally ended his mile—8:30, one of the slowest yet—he came over to the chairs and collapsed, his baseball cap pulled low over his face. “So how’d it feel, Bobby D?” asked Roger. There was no answer. “Just two more to go,” added Andy. Nothing. “Bobby, you okay?” asked Roger. He slapped him lightly on the leg and Bobby D shot upright. “Don’t touch me!” he bellowed, swinging his fists in a circle around him. We suggested that he remove his shoes while he wasn’t running, but he shook his head and said he would never be able to get them back on. Then he fell back on the chair and pulled a towel over his head and shoulders. A few minutes later he was snoring.

  The guys could barely wake him up for his next turn. Danny said he expected Bobby D to lash out at the people around him—“Why didn’t you get me up earlier?”— or to snap at them with his usual sarcasm: “You guys are so lame I can’t even count on you to wake me up!” Instead, he rose silently, stretched stiffly for about a minute, and then hobbled over to the starting line. “Let’s get in a good one, Bobby D,” announced Danny as he took the stopwatches in his hands. Bobby nodded, looking almost meek, took the baton from me, and staggered away.

  Danny came back to the lounge chairs, smiling widely.

  • • •

  During our ninth miles, the crowd returned. All the parents arrived with their cameras, the girls came back, and even Coach Kirby stopped over, probably looking for new runners for the team next year. With fans watching, our times leveled off. I thought they might improve for the last mile, if only because of adrenaline, but only Feldman’s did. We couldn’t ignore our blistered feet, cramped legs, and burned shoulders. But at least our times didn’t continue to soar. Except for Bobby D’s. His ninth mile was ten minutes, his final one almost twelve.

  With a crowd around us, we started joking again—teasing each other, showing off. Not Bobby D. He pulled a lounge chair away from the others, fell onto it as soon as he finished his laps and got a drink of juice, and didn’t move until we dragged him out for his last turn. He didn’t say a word and hobbled with each step. He seemed like a different person from the swaggering show-off who had always made fun of everyone else.

  • • •

  The important thing was that we finished, with a total time of twelve hours, seven minutes, and thirty-six seconds. We posed for photos, everyone in a line behind the mileage marker that finally said “100.” We all put our arms around each other’s red shoulders, then cringed at the pain. That night I soaked in a cold-water bathtub with baking soda for almost an hour, then lay on my bed with a thick coating of aloe vera cream that my mom rubbed on my shoulders and back. The next day we got a two-paragraph article on the third page of the sports section. Everyone’s name was mentioned, so we did achieve a small amount of fame, but that was the final activity for the Counting Cows. We never wrote our newspaper columns or compiled a book. Danny Daniels put out the word on the Internet about our accomplishment, and some guys in Oregon broke our record that August. Bobby D said he wanted nothing more to do with a group that would attempt such stupid projects. Without the availability of his refrigerator, we all went off to other things. I didn’t see Bobby D again until school started. He was still quiet, still limping.

  Stephen Hoffius

  Stephen Hoffius, a half-mile runner in high school, recently entered the field of publishing for young adults with the award-winning Winners and Losers, which die American Library Association named in 1994 a Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. It’s about parental pressure, competition between two friends on a track team, and what happens after one boy’s heart stops during a race.

  Many of the characters in Winners and Losers appear in “The Assault on the Record,” a story that had its beginnings in Stephen Hoffius’s own high-school days. During die summer after his sophomore year, Steve and nine friends (who, he says, “like me, had more energy than sense”) ran a 100-mile relay, one mile at a time. They needed a week to recover, he admits. But they got a little smarter as they got older. The following year he and nine friends ran another 100-mile relay, this time with each runner completing twenty half miles. “A tip for those who would try it: The half miles were easier.” For all Mr. Hoffius knows, they still hold the record for this distance, though he can’t remember their times.

  Stephen Hoffius was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, Susan Dunn (an attorney), and their two children, Anna and Jacob. He is the director of publications for the South Carolina Historical Society and managing editor of South Carolina Historical Magazine. He is also a freelance journalist who covered the Olympic track-and-field trials in Eugene, Oregon, in 1980 and whose articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, the Detroit Free Press, The Progressive, Swiss Air Gazette, and Southern Exposure.

  Mr. Hoffius’s next novel is about three teenage girls in Charleston and how their lives are affected when a hurricane hits South Carolina. He expects to call it Hurricane Coming!<
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  He has been one of the best competitors in the galaxy, No. 1 on the Power Thought Team entered in the Interscholastic Galactic Finals. But is he good enough to handle the Challenger from the Unified High School of the Barren Planets?

  The Defender

  The Interscholastic Galactic Defender was licked awake by ice blue energy rays. Coach gently rocked his floating sleep slab. “Perfect day for the match, No. 1. Low humidity, no sunspots.”

  Coach tipped the slab and the Defender slid to the floor. He stepped out of his paper pajamas and onto the cleansing pedestal. A million beams refreshed his body, scraped his teeth, washed his hair, shaved his chin. The Defender then wrapped himself in a tunic of blue and gold, the school colors.

  The Varsity was already at the training table. The Defender felt their admiration and envy as he took the empty seat at the head of the table.

  He felt calm. His last high-school match. Across the table, his best friend, No. 2, winked. Good old No. 2, strong and steady. They had worked their way up the rankings ladder together since Basic School, rivals and teammates and buddies. It was almost over and he should have felt sad, but he didn’t. One more match and he could be free to—

  No. 4 caught his eye. He sensed that her feelings were the same. One more match and they wouldn’t be numbers anymore, they would be Sophia and Jose, and they wouldn’t have to guard their thoughts, or worse, turn them into darts and bombs.

  Coach lifted a blue and gold competition thought helmet out of its recharging box and eased it down over the Defender’s head. He fastened the chin strap, lengthened the antennae, and spun the dial to the lowest reception and projection power, just strong enough for noncompetitive thought in a small room.

  For a moment, the Defender’s mind was filled with a quivering crosscurrent of thought waves. There was a nasty pinprick from No. 7, only a sophomore but one of the toughest competitors in the galaxy, a star someday if he didn’t burn himself out. There was a soothing velvet compress from No. 4, a hearty shoulder-banger from old No. 2.

  The Defender cleared his mind for Coach, who was pacing the room. Psych talk time.

  “As you know, the competition today, the Unified High School of the Barren Planets, is the first non-Earth team to ever reach the Galactic Finals. It wasn’t expected and our scouting reports are incomplete.”

  No. 7 thought a blue and gold fireball wrecking the barren planets.

  “Overconfidence can beat you,” snapped Coach. “These guys are tough—kids from the orphan ships, the prison planets, the pioneer systems. They’ve lived through things you’ve only screened.”

  The freshperson substitute, No. 8, thought, “What about their Greenie No. 1?”

  “We don’t use the word ’Greenie,’” said Coach. “It’s a bias word.”

  “A Greenie?” sneered No. 7. “A hairy little round Greenie?”

  “Don’t judge a mind by its body,” snapped No. 4, blushing when she saw the Defender’s approving blinks.

  No. 7 leaned back and flashed an image of himself wearing hairy green bedroom slippers. Only No. 8 laughed.

  Coach said, “We respect the Challenger. It wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t good.”

  “‘It’?” asked No. 2. “Male or female? Or a mixed gender?”

  “We don’t know anything about it,” said Coach. “Except it’s beaten everybody.”

  In silence, they drank their pregame meal—liquid fish protein and supercomplex carbs.

  Back on his slab, the Defender allowed his mind to wander. He usually spent his prematch meditation period reviewing the personality of his opponent—the character flaws, the gaps in understanding that would leave one vulnerable to a lightning thought jab, a volley of powerful images. But he knew nothing about today’s opponent and little about Homo Vulgaris, mutant humans who had been treated badly ever since they began to appear after a nuclear accident. They were supposed to be stupid and unstable, one step above space ape. That one of them could actually have become No. 1 on the Power Thought Team of a major galactic high school was truly amazing. Either this one was very special, the Defender thought, or Earthlings hadn’t heard the truth about these people.

  He closed his eyes. He had thought he would be sentimental on the day of his last match, trying to remember every little detail. But he wished it were already over.

  The wall-lights glowed yellow and he rose, dialing his helmet up to the warm-up level. He slipped into his competition robe. He began to flex his mind—logic exercises, picture bursts—as the elevator rose up through the Mental Athletics Department. When he waved to the chess team they stopped the clock to pound their kings on their boards in salute. The cyberspellers hand-signed cheers at him.

  Officials were in the locker room running brain scans. The slightest trace of smart pills would mean instant disqualification. Everyone passed.

  The Defender sat down next to No. 2. “We’re almost there, Tombo.” He flashed an image of the two of them lying in a meadow, smelling flowers.

  Tombo laughed and bounced the image back, adding Sophia and his own girlfriend, Annie, to the meadow scene.

  “Think sharp!” shouted Coach, and they lined up behind him in numerical order, keeping their minds blank as they trotted out into the roaring stadium. The Defender tipped his antennae toward his mother and father. He shook the Principal’s hand.

  “This is the most important moment of your life, No. 1. For the good of humanity, don’t let those Unified mongrels outthink you.”

  The varsity teams from the Physical Athletics Department paraded by, four-hundred-pound football players and eight-foot basketball players and soccer players who moved on all fours. Some fans laughed at youngsters who needed to use their bodies to play. The Defender was always amazed at his grandfather’s stories of the old days when the captain of the football team was a school hero.

  It was in his father’s time that cameras were invented to pick up brain waves and project them onto video screens for hundreds of thousand of fans in the arenas and millions more at home. Suddenly, kids who could think hard became more popular than kids who could hit hard.

  “Let’s go,” roared Coach, and the first doubles team moved down into the Brain Pit.

  The first match didn’t last long. No. 7 and No. 4, even though they rarely spoke off the field, had been winning partners for three years. No. 7 swaggered to the midline of the court, arrogantly spinning his antennae, while No. 4 pressed her frail shoulders against the back wall. The Unified backcourter was a human female, but the frontcourter was a transspecies, a part-human lab creature ten feet tall and round as a cylinder.

  The Defender sensed the steely tension in the Unified backcourter’s mind; she was set for a hellfire smash. He was proud of No. 4’s first serve, a soft, curling thought of autumn smoke and hushed country lanes, an ancient thought filled with breeze-riffled lily ponds and the smell of fresh-cut hay.

  Off-balance, the backcourter sent it back weakly, and No. 7 filled the lovely image with the stench of backpack rockets, war gases, and kill zone wastes and fireballed it back. The Unified brainies were still wrestling with the image when the ref tapped the screamer. Too long. One point for the home team.

  As usual, No. 7 lost points for unnecessary roughness—too much death and destruction without a logical lead-up to it—but as the fens cheered wildly he and No. 4 easily won. Their minds had hardly been stretched; the PsychoChem Docs in the Relaxant Room would need little tranquilspray to calm them down. Good, thought the Defender; No. 4 would be out in time for his match.

  Except for thinking about her, the Defender began to lose interest in the day. How many times had he waited to go down into a Pit and attack another mind? It had seemed exciting four years ago when Coach had pulled him out of a freshperson mental gym class and asked him to try out for the team. His tests had shown mental agility, vivid imagery, and, most important, telepathic potential.

  It was the first thing he had ever been really good at. After he won a few matches, the
popular kids began talking to him in the halls. Teachers asked him about the team. Letters began arriving at home from colleges owned by major corporations. His parents were so proud. He would be set for life.

  But now it seemed like such a waste—fighting with thoughts instead of creating with them. Maybe he was just tired at the end of a long, tough season of defending his title. He thought about the meadow, with Sophia and Tombo and Annie. Instead of thoughts, they would throw an ancient toy around. It was called something like frisbill. Frisboo? Frisbee!

  Coach tapped his helmet. “Pay attention.”

  No. 5 and No. 6 were staggering under a vicious barrage. They lost, and the standings at the end of the doubles were even, 1-1.

  The crowd fell silent as No. 3 lost her singles match and the scoreboard blinked Visitors 2, Home 1. As No. 2 lumbered down to the Pit, the Defender sent an image of a victory wreath to him.

  Good old No. 2, steady and even-tempered and sure of himself Mentally tough. He might have been No. 1 on any other high-school team, but he never showed resentment. For a moment, the Defender almost wished that No. 2 would lose; then the score would be 3-1 and nothing No. 1 could do would be able to salvage the team match. No pressure—he could play the game just for himself. If he won, great, he’d be the first player in history to win the championship twice. If he lost he would only disappoint himself; he wouldn’t be letting his team and his school—and humanity, according to the Principal—down.

  But No. 2 won and the score was tied and it was up to him.

  The No. 1 player for the Unified High School of the Barren Planets, the Interscholastic Galactic Challenger, was waiting for him in the Pit.

  He (she? it?) looked like a green teddy bear. The Defender had never seen one in the flesh. He forced his mind to think of the creature only as an opponent.