Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories

by Mike Resnick

  “He tied it with a basket at the final buzzer,” continued Jeremy, “and then the game went into overtime. We were down one point with ten seconds to go, but we got the ball into Damika’s hands, and we knew that he wouldn’t let us down.”

  “You sound like you were there,” I commented.

  “I wish I’d been,” replied Jeremy. “Ten seconds from galactic glory!”

  “Or galactic obscurity,” said the bartender.

  Jeremy nodded. “Damika drove to the basket, and two hundred billion people knew he was going to leap four feet in the air and stuff the ball through the hoop—and then it happened.”

  “I read about it.”

  “That’s the part I hate to watch,” said the bartender.

  “Everyone hates to watch it,” said Jeremy. “One of the Canphorites gave him an elbow just as he was about to take off. He fell, and even on the holo you can hear that crack! when his ankle broke. It sounded like a rifle shot.”

  “He pulled himself up onto one leg to hop off the court,” said the bartender, “and the Canphorite coach began screaming that the tournament rules said that if a fouled player could stand on his own power, he had to take his own free throws. There was nothing about having to stand on two feet. You could see the bone sticking out through the skin, but Damika tried to take the free throws himself. His eyes were glazed, his whole body was shaking from the effort just to keep from falling down, he missed both shots, and that was that.”

  “He never got rid of the limp,” said Jeremy, “and he never played again. We didn’t have much of a team without him, and in more than four centuries we’ve never made it as far as the quarter-finals of the Sector tournament.”

  “The tourists stopped coming …” said the bartender.

  “The investors stopped investing …” said Jeremy.

  “And we were nothing again, just the way we’d been before Damika.”

  “Still, for one shining moment, we were somebody. People from halfway across the galaxy knew about us. Dozens of holo crews landed on Plutarch to interview us.” Jeremy paused. “We knew we were never going to reach such heights again, so we took our planetary treasury and hired the best sculptor in the Democracy to commemorate the moment that Damika grabbed the last rebound in regulation time and scored with two seconds left on the clock.”

  “You haven’t kept it up very well,” I said.

  “It’s four hundred years old,” said Jeremy. “It costs money to keep it up.”

  “And our citizens desert us as fast as they can,” said the bartender. “We had almost half a million inhabitants when Damika played against Canphor. We’ve got about sixty thousand now, maybe a little less.”

  “He’s here for Damika Drake,” said Jeremy.

  “Big surprise,” said the bartender. “Why else would anyone come to Plutarch?”

  “I couldn’t help noticing the similarity in names,” I said.

  “Three-quarters of the boys born on Plutarch are called Damika,” said Jeremy. “Every parent hopes their Damika will one to restore our former glory.”

  “As if it lasted for more than a month,” said the bartender dryly.

  “You gonna take Damika Drake away?” asked Jeremy.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve got to talk to him, see what he can do first.”

  “I never even asked,” said Jeremy. “Who do you coach for?”

  “The Sagamore Hill Chargers, out of Roosevelt III.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” said the bartender. “You made the semi-finals out in the Albion Cluster last year, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re probably one good player away from a title. I did a little research, and I think the Drake kid might be the answer.”

  “Well, you did your research more carefully than anyone else,” said Jeremy. “We’re so far off the beaten track, you’re the only one who’s shown up to recruit him.”

  “Have you seen him play?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Jeremy. “He’s good, but he’s not what you need to put you over the top.”

  “Kid needs more muscle, and he telegraphs his passes,” offered the bartender.

  “He’s not much from more than twenty feet out, either,” added Jeremy.

  “You make it sound like a wasted trip,” I said.

  “I hate to tell you, but it is,” said Jeremy.

  “As long as I’m here, I might as well take a look, just to justify my expense account,” I said.

  They exchanged looks. The bartender started rubbing the totally clean surface of the bar with a cloth. “Up to you,” he said at last. “But don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  “This was my idea,” I said. “You’re off the hook.” I turned to Jeremy. “You want to point out the school to me?”

  “Walk out the door, and it’s two blocks down on your left,” he said. “It’s mostly empty these days, but back when the real Damika was around, we used to fill just about every desk in every room.”

  I thanked him, left a tip on the bar, and walked out of the tavern. I turned left, walked two blocks, and since I was looking ahead at the school I almost tripped over a drunk who was sleeping it off at the edge of the sidewalk. (It had been a slidewalk, but I suspected the mechanism hadn’t worked in a couple of centuries.)

  “Excuse me,” I said as he grunted in surprise. “Are you all right?”

  “I will be,” he said, getting unsteadily to his feet. “My own fault for not going all the way home last night.”

  “Maybe you’d better head for home now,” I said. “Better late than never.”

  “No, it’s almost practice time.”

  “What are you practicing?” I asked.

  “Not me,” he said. “Them.”

  “Them?”

  “The team,” he said. “It’s the only pleasure I get these days.”

  “So you’re a fan,” I said.

  He spat on the ground. “I couldn’t care less about basketball.”

  “I’m a little confused,” I said. “I thought you said …”

  “Basketball is where we fell from our exalted position,” he said. “It’s the only way we’ll ever recapture it.”

  “There are lots of ways,” I said. I’m a coach. I know. The world doesn’t change because you win or lose a game except that their world did.

  “Not for Plutarch,” he said. “You know, every time a baby boy is born, people gather around it and try to see if he could possibly be the One.”

  “The one?” I repeated.

  “The One who will lead us back to glory.”

  “What makes you so sure it’s got to be a basketball player?” I asked. “Why not some other sport?”

  “Football, murderball, baseball, prongball, they all have bigger teams and take more equipment. Look at us. We’re lucky to field a basketball team.”

  “Well, let’s go take a look at them,” I said, and we walked off toward a playground on the side of the school.

  A few minutes later classes were let out, and about two hundred kids left the building and headed off for their homes. But about twenty stuck around the court to watch, and after another five minutes ten young men came out in shorts and t-shirts. Their coach immediately divided them into two teams—but not with five on a side. One side—the shirts—had seven players; the other—the skins—had only three.

  There was one kid on the skins I couldn’t take my eyes off of. The scrimmage hadn’t started, but he moved with such an animal grace, carried himself with such confidence, I knew he had to be Damika Drake.

  The coach gave the ball to the shirts, and they began bringing it down the court. Drake jumped into a passing lane at the last second, intercepted a pass, dribbled the length of the court, and took off like a helicopter. He couldn’t have stood much more than six feet, but he had a vertical leap of better than forty-five inches. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Next time the shirts came down the court they kept the ball away from Drake, finally shot
it up, and missed. His head was higher than the rim when he grabbed the rebound. He fired an outlet pass to a teammate who waited for him to catch up, then fed him the ball near half-court and he put it up from there. Drained it, as if it was something he did every day (and for all I knew, he did.)

  The kid was everywhere. I wasn’t keeping official score, but in the ten minutes I watched I think he grabbed eight rebounds, blocked five shots, picked up four assists, and scored twenty-three points.

  And I was thinking: Sure, Jeremy, the kid’s not ready for the big time. Sure, bartender, he can’t shoot and he can’t jump and he probably can’t move to his left. Sure, guys. I’m just wasting my time coming here to recruit him.

  And then, on a hunch, I looked around the playground and saw maybe two dozen adults had stopped by to watch Damika Drake through the fence. Ten or twelve more were looking out from the windows of a nearby decrepit apartment building.

  I suddenly realized that most of them were looking at me. And their faces didn’t say, Can he be the One? No, it was He is the One, our last chance, our only chance. Please don’t take him away from us. We’ve waited four hundred years for him. We’ll make him happy, we’ll treat him like a king, hell, we’ll make him king if he asks us to … but leave him here. All you need is a player. We need a savior.

  I didn’t have to watch the rest of the practice. This kid was everything he was cracked up to be, and more. I’m surprised I couldn’t see wings on his back, given the way he flew to the bucket. He’d missed two shots the whole time I was watching him, which meant he hit at better than a 90% rate. The kid who led our conference last year was a 52% shooter, and everyone thought that was phenomenal.

  But that kid’s planet was flush with gold and plutonium deposits, it had some of the best farmland in the sector, and it was the banking center for a dozen nearby worlds. They were proud of him, but if he vanished tomorrow, life there wouldn’t miss a beat. No one was asking him to bring back the self-respect that had been missing for four hundred years. If adults watched him practice, it was because they were fans of the game, and no other reason. He didn’t come from an almost-deserted school on an almost-deserted planet with an almost-proud history that was cut short ten seconds before it came to fruition.

  As I took an aircar back to the spaceport, past the derelict buildings, the forgotten dreams, the dashed hopes of a world, I felt my options disappearing one by one. They were gone by the time I reached the tiny spaceport and contacted my school’s athletic director via the subspace radio.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Easy trip,” I replied. “I should be home tomorrow.”

  “So what about this kid?”

  “He’s okay in the bush leagues,” I said, “but he’s not what we’re after.”

  “Ah, well, I suppose it was worth the trip. On your way back, stop off at Odysseus in the Iliad system. They’ve got a seven-footer there who’s supposed to be pretty hot stuff. Greenveldt’s after him, but he hasn’t committed to them yet.”

  “Will do,” I said, and signed off.

  I turned and looked back at the decaying city.

  Okay, I thought, I’m giving you your future, at the cost of some of my own. You damned well better make the most of it.

  That’s a hell of a burden to put on any kid. Still, he’s got the right name for it. Maybe I’ll see him again, in the finals if we get that far. There’s no question that he’ll be waiting for us there.

  Him and a forgotten world.

  ***

  Monsters of The Midway

  Author’s Note: Football

  This one was written for an anthology titled The Ultimate Frankenstein. I have never been able to take the tropes of horror stories or movies seriously, so when it became time to write about man-made men, I remembered growing up in Chicago, where the Bears were known as the Monsters of the Midway, and the story practically wrote itself.

  SURPRISES ON TAP? July 12, 2037 (UPI) Coach Rattler Renfro, in his initial press conference, has promised fans that his Chicago Bears, coming off a pair of 1-and-15 seasons, will sport a new look this season. When asked to explain why training camp will be closed to both the press and the public, Renfro merely smiled and said, “No comment.”

  • • •

  BEARS TAKE OPENER, 76-0 September 4, 2037 (AP) The “New Look” Chicago Bears made their debut this afternoon, beating last year’s Super Bowl winners, the North Dakota Timberwolves, by a league-record score of 76-0. The Timberwolves were a 22-point favorite.

  Coach Rattler Renfro unveiled an all-new offensive line, consisting of five rookies, all free agents who had never played organized football before. They are right tackle Jumbo Smith (8’4”, 603 pounds), right guard Willie “The Whale” McPherson (7’10”, 566 pounds), center Hannibal Cohen (8’3”, 622 pounds), left guard Mountain O’Mara (7’8”, 559 pounds), and the biggest of them all, right tackle Tiny Tackenheim (8’7”, 701 pounds).

  “Hell, I could have run through the holes those guys made,” said Timberwolves coach Rocket Ryan. “I don’t know where Renfro recruited them, but they’re just awesome.”

  After three decades in eclipse, it looks like the Bears are once again the Monsters of the Midway.

  • • •

  BEARS WIN FOURTH STRAIGHT, 88-7 October 2, 2037 (AP) “Those guys just ain’t human!” said Montana Buttes’ linebacker Jocko Schmidt from his hospital bed, after his team had suffered an 88-7 mauling at the hands of the Chicago Bears. “That Tackenheim ought to be in a zoo, not on a football field!”

  • • •

  NFL INVESTIGATES CHARGES October 24, 2037 (UPI) The National Football League has announced that they are probing into an alleged connection between Nobel Prize winner Dr. Alfredo Rathermann and the Chicago Bears. Rathermann, who won his award for his pioneering work in the animation of dead tissue, was unavailable for comment.

  George Halas VI, owner and general manager of the Bears, who lead their division with a 7-0 record, termed the allegations “ridiculous.”

  • • •

  BEARS CLINCH TITLE, LOOK TO SUPER BOWL December 25, 2037 (UPI) The Chicago Bears celebrated Christmas with a 68-3 thrashing of the Mississippi Riverboats, thus becoming the first NFL team this century to conclude its regular-season schedule unbeaten and untied. The Monsters of the Midway looked awesome as the offensive line opened up hole after hole for Chicago’s running backs.

  Coach Rattler Renfro, in his post-game press conference, praised the Riverboats and said that he was looking forward to the playoffs. When questioned about the ongoing investigation of the dealings between the Bears and Dr. Alfredo Rathermann, he simply shrugged and said, “Hey, I’m just a coach. You’ll have to speak to the Commissioner about that.”

  • • •

  RATHERMANN ADMITS ALL! December 28, 2037 (UPI) Nobel Prize laureate Alfredo Rathermann held a joint press conference with Roger Jamison, Commissioner of the National Football League, and admitted that the five starting members of the Chicago Bears’ offensive line are actually scientific constructs, created from bits and pieces of other human beings.

  This revelation seemed certain to win another Nobel for Dr. Rathermann, but the more important issue of whether linemen Smith, McPherson, Cohen, O’Mara, and Tackenheim will be allowed to compete in the upcoming NFL playoffs remains undecided at present. Commissioner Jamison promised a ruling before the Bears meet the Las Vegas Gamblers in eleven days.

  • • •

  NFL RULES ON “MONSTERS” January 3, 2038 (AP) Commissioner Roger Jamison held a press conference this morning, in which he outlined the NFL’s policy on the Chicago Bears’ offensive line.

  “After extended meetings with our attorneys and the NFL Players Union, we have amended the rules to state that football is a game played by natural-born human beings,” said Commissioner Jamison. “If we were to permit an endless string of Dr. Rathermann’s creations to play in the NFL, the day would soon arrive when not a single natural-born human could make an N
FL roster, and while it would certainly make the games more exciting, we question whether the public is ready for such a change at this time.

  “However,” he added, “our attorneys inform us that we have no legal basis for denying Smith, McPherson, Cohen, O’Mara, and Tackenheim the right to play in this season’s post-season competition, since the rule was changed after they made the Bears’ roster.”

  The owners of the 47 other NFL teams have filed an official protest, demanding that the players in question be barred from the upcoming playoffs.

  • • •

  BEARS WIN 77-10, SUPER BOWL NEXT January 15, 2038 (UPI) The Chicago Bears beat the Hawaii Volcanos 77-10 this afternoon to advance to the Super Bowl. They overcame a 10-0 first-quarter deficit after the Supreme Court overturned the injunction barring linemen Smith, McPherson, Cohen, O’Mara and Tackenheim from playing. The ruling came down at 1:37 PM, and the Bears took the lead, never to relinquish it, at 1:43 PM.

  • • •

  “MONSTERS DON’T SCARE US,” SAYS McNAB January 22, 2038 (UPI) With the Super Bowl only a week away, and the Chicago Bears a 45-point favorite, Coach Terry McNab of the Alaskan Malamutes said that his team didn’t fear the Monsters of the Midway, and looked forward to the challenge.

  When asked how his defensive line, which will be giving away an average of 327 pounds per man, would cope with their offensive counterparts on the Bears, he merely smiled and said that he was working on a strategy.

  The Bears are expected to be 50-point favorites by the opening kickoff.

  • • •

  McNAB MISSES PRACTICE January 24, 2038 (UPI) Coach Terry McNab was missing from the Alaskan Malamutes’ practice this afternoon. Club officials had no comment.

  • • •

  RATHERMAN RESURFACES January 26, 2038 (UPI) Nobel Prize winner Alfredo Rathermann, who had been in seclusion since December 28, was spotted sitting in the stands, watching the Alaskan Malamutes prepare for their Super Bowl meeting with the Chicago Bears.