The 1-1-2041s nodded.
Smiled.
The rebellion began that way, and it culminated moments later when a whippet asked, “But seriously, how can we empty this place out?”
Theresa knew one way, and she said it. Not expecting anything to come of her suggestion.
But Alan took it to heart, saying, “Let me do it.”
He took a step, arguing, “I’m strongest. And besides, if I’m caught, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the Wildman’s usual shit.”
Police in riot gear were busy fighting drunks and bitter millionaires. The running back slipped off in the direction of the locker room, as unnoticed as any blood-caked giant could be. Then after a few moments, as the crowds were finally herded back into the stands, Marlboro Jones came over and looked straight at Theresa, asking everyone, “Where is he?”
No one spoke.
Rickover was waving at his team, asking them to join him.
Theresa felt a gnawy guilt as well as an effervescent thrill.
Marlboro shook his head, his mouth starting to open, another question ready to be ignored—
Then came the roaring of alarms and a fusillade of spinning red lights. Over the public-address system, a booming voice said, “There is nothing to worry about. Please, please, everyone needs to leave the dome now! Now! In an orderly fashion, please follow the ushers now!”
Within fifteen minutes, the dome was evacuated.
Coaching staffs and most of the players were taken to the helipad and lifted back to the mainland, following the media’s hasty retreat.
Twenty minutes after the emergency began, the 1-1-2041s came out of their hiding places. The sidelines were under seawater, but the field itself was high enough to remain mostly dry. Security people and maintenance crews could be heard in the distance. Only emergency lights burned, but they were enough. Looking at the others, Theresa realized they were waiting for her to say something.
“This is for us,” she told them. “And however it turns out, we don’t tell. Nobody ever hears the final score. Agreed?”
Alan said, “Good,” and glared at the others, his fists bleeding from beating all those bilge pumps to death.
Man o’ War cried out, “Let’s do it then!”
In the gloom, the teams lined up for a two-point play. State had ten bodies, and including the whippet still groggy from being unconscious, Tech had its full twelve.
Fair enough.
Theresa leaned low, and in a whisper, called the only appropriate play.
“Go out for a pass,” she told her receivers and her running back. “I’ll think of something.”
She settled behind the minotaur playing center, and she nestled her hands into that warm, damp groin, and after a long gaze at the empty stands, she said, “Hey.”
She said, “When you’re ready. Give it here.”
STREAK
Andrew Weiner
Baseball has been widely popular here on Earth, crossing lines of culture, language, and politics, so perhaps in the future it will become just as popular off Earth as well. Here we’ve taken Out to the Ball Game with some enigmatic baseball fans from very far away in tow, to investigate a red-hot streak that may be a little too good to be true . . .
Canadian author Andrew Weiner has made numerous sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Chrysalis, Full Spectrum, Northern Frights, Prairie Fire, and elsewhere. His short work has been assembled in two collections: Distant Signals and Other Stories, and, most recently, This is the Year Zero. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Station Gehenna. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
* * *
Viktor Garmez was playing centerfield the day the aliens came.
Last season, back in Double-A ball, he had mostly played left field. The Chiefs had started him there, too. But just a few weeks into the season there had been a rash of injuries on the major league team, and the regular center-fielder, Mel Hewlett, had been dispatched to Toronto to join The Show.
Hewlett had been batting only .251 at the time, Garmez .305. But Hewlett was management’s blue-eyed boy, a first-round pick in the college draft. Garmez was just another Dominican. Or so he imagined they thought of him, when they thought of him at all.
Garmez did not miss Hewlett. But he did envy him, all the more so as the iron-gray sky over Syracuse opened up at the top of the third inning and the rain began to fall in torrents. Playing deep, he was soaked through by the time he made it back to the dugout.
They didn’t get wet, up in Toronto. They just closed the roof on the dome.
In the dressing room, some of the players had resumed their endless card games. Others were watching daytime TV on the small monitor perched on top of one of the lockers. Garmez sat down to watch with them. He needed to improve his English.
The actors in the TV show were glossy and well-dressed and lived in palacelike homes. You never saw such people or such homes back in the Dominican Republic. Garmez’s mother, along with his three sisters, lived in a two-room shack.
One day, though, he would make it to the big leagues, and build them a new house. If he didn’t catch pneumonia and die first, this ghastly wet and chilly April.
“There’s something you should know, Jill,” a glossy, well-dressed man with fair wavy hair, who looked just a little like Mel Hewlett, was telling a glossy, well-dressed woman. And then, abruptly, the picture blanked.
“We interrupt this broadcast,” said an authoritative-sounding voice, “to bring you this special bulletin.”
War, Garmez thought. These Yankees have got themselves in another war. Or someone shot their president . . .
The face of a newscaster filled the screen. At first glance, he looked like any other newscaster: dignified, sober, serious. But there was something wild about his eyes.
“Aliens,” said the newscaster, “extraterrestrial visitors to our planet from another part of the galaxy, are currently meeting with world leaders in closed session at the United Nations in New York. We take you now to Diane Kendrick at the UN Plaza. Are you there, Diane?”
* * *
Ken Brady stared in horror at his managing editor.
“You’re assigning me where?”
“You heard me,” Hugh Vernon said. “Sports desk.”
“But I’m a science writer. I don’t know anything about sports.”
“And they don’t know shit about science. I want you on the Garmez story.”
“Garmez?”
Vernon looked at Brady with a mixture of scorn and awe.
“You don’t know? You really don’t know?”
“I’ve been doing stories on the aliens,” Brady said. “Who’s Garmez?”
“Victor Garmez,” Vernon said. “Plays left field for the Blue Jays. Got called up from Triple-A in April as a backup. Got into a game and went 3-for-4. They kept him on the team and he kept on hitting. He’s now hit safely in fifty-one consecutive games . . .”
“And?”
“Fifty-one games,” Vernon repeated. “Six more to get past Joe DiMaggio. That name ring any bells for you?”
“Sure. Wasn’t there a song about him?”
“DiMaggio set the record for a hitting streak in 1941. No one else has even come close. Until this kid from the Dominican Republic.”
“And this is a big deal?”
“A big deal?” Vernon echoed. “The greatest accomplishment in the history of baseball is on the line. I think you could say that was a big deal.”
“Okay,” Brady said. “But what does it have to do with me?”
“I want a think piece on probability theory. What are the odds against a streak like this? Baseball fans eat up this statistical crap. I need two thousand words for Saturday.
Front page of the sports section.” “What’s so special about Saturday?”
“Jays finish up their home stand. And Garmez goes for number fifty-seven. Assuming he gets that far.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Vernon shrugged. “We’ll run it on the science page.”
“I was supposed to finish this piece on the aliens.”
“Screw the aliens,” Vernon said. “The aliens are boring. This is the big story.”
* * *
Boring. While Brady did not personally agree with his assessment, he could see how interest in the aliens might have begun to wear a little thin.
Following their meeting with world leaders, and a single, carefully orchestrated press conference, the aliens had been keeping a studiously low profile. They were here, they claimed, strictly in a touristic capacity. They wished only to obtain the requisite visas to, come and go as they liked, along with a supply of native currencies. In exchange for this they had offered certain philosophical constructs and technological devices. Details of their offerings had not yet been revealed, but apparently the deal had been satisfactory to all concerned.
Afterward the aliens had flitted here, there, everywhere. They had been sighted buying jewelry at Tiffany’s in New York, shopping for native art in Manila, dining on caviar in Moscow, observing the work of the Zurich sanitation department. There had even been reports, still unconfirmed, of aliens seen in Montreal, eating smoked meat, although so far none had been spotted in Toronto.
At their one press conference, the aliens had not been terribly forthcoming. They had declined to identify their planet of origin. Neither would they discuss the technology that had powered their ship. As to the nature of their own society, they offered only the barest clues. And they declined to be drawn into comment on Earthly ideological and religious squabbles.
It was not surprising that the aliens were evasive on these issues. But it made for rather thin gruel when you had to write background pieces on them. Brady was in some ways relieved to lay down the burden of speculating endlessly on the basis of little or no data. Even to have to write about baseball, of all things, a game about which he knew almost nothing and cared less.
“Garmez, yeah,” said the hitting coach. “I expected good things of him, you know. But not this good.”
“He didn’t make the team in spring training,” Brady said.
“Only just came up from Double-A. We thought he needed more seasoning. Still does, to tell you the truth. But when he’s hitting like that . . . I mean, when you’re hot, you’re hot, right?”
“Right,” Brady said.
“Garmez, he’s a good little hitter. Reminds me of Wade Boggs.”
“Wade Boggs never hit in fifty-one consecutive games.”
The coach shrugged. “Streaks,” he said. “I never understood them. I mean, not to take anything away from Garmez, but he’s had some real luck along the way. Back around game twelve, he hits this little looper and it just drops in because the right-fielder plays it too deep. Could have been scored an error, but they give him the hit. Another time he hits a chopper back to the mound and legs it out to first base. The umpire says safe, but it looks awfully close. Take away those hits and there’s no streak, just a guy having a real good season.”
“DiMaggio had some luck, too,” Brady said. “From what I’ve read, there were a couple of very close judgment calls.”
“Were there? Maybe that’s true. But you know, I remember seeing DiMaggio when I was a kid. He was a giant, a real giant . . . It’s some strange kind of world where some green kid can come this close to topping DiMaggio. But don’t print that, okay? The line around here is, we’re right behind him.”
* * *
Victor Garmez was tall and thin, with mournful eyes and a wispy mustache. According to team records, he had just turned twenty-two.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Nothing like this ever happened to me before. Once I went eleven, maybe twelve games in winter ball. But fifty-one? It’s crazy.”
He spoke quietly, shyly. His vocabulary was quite good, but his accent was thick, and Brady had to strain to understand him.
“I guess you never expected anything like this to happen.”
“Expected? I never expected to be here. It was a fluky thing, you know. One guy breaks an ankle, another guy gets the flu, another one runs into the wall trying to catch a ball and throws out his shoulder—” Garmez allowed himself a brief smile at the fate of Mel Hewlett “—no chance of catching it, he’s just hot-dogging. So they got to call me.”
“You must have been pleased when you got the call.”
“Stunned, more like. One minute I’m watching TV and they’re talking about these aliens. And then the manager comes in and tells me to pack because I’m going to The Show. Between the aliens and The Show, my head was spinning so fast I thought it was going to fall off.”
Garmez was cradling a bat in his arms, waiting to take batting practice. As they watched, the man in the batting cage smashed a home run ball into the upper deck. He turned, grinning broadly, and caught sight of Garmez and the journalist. The grin turned to a scowl.
“That guy,” Garmez said. “Two million dollars a year. Cleanup hitter, he’s supposed to be. And you know how many RBIs he hit in April? Three.”
A week ago, Brady would not have known what an RBI was. Now, after studying the sacred texts of sabermetrics, he knew all too well. At night, when he closed his eyes, all he saw were tables of names and numbers.
“They hate me,” Garmez said. “All these guys. Because I’m showing them up. Me and a couple of others, we’re carrying this team.”
He ran his hand along his bat.
“That bat,” Brady said. “Is that the one you’ve been using? Kind of a lucky bat?”
Garmez shook his head. “I’ve used five, six different bats since I came up. A lot of guys, they got lucky bats and lucky socks and lucky Ninja Turtles, all kinds of lucky crap. But I don’t believe in that stuff. What happens to me out there, it’s down to me. And God.”
“You think God is helping you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe so.” Garmez’s voice trailed down to a whisper. “It’s kind of hard to explain it any other way.”
“How does it feel, taking on a legend like Joe DiMaggio?”
“I never heard too much about DiMaggio. Married Marilyn Monroe, right? They say he was a hell of a ballplayer.”
“You think you’re going all the way?” Brady asked
“I know it. You see, it’s like they say: when you’re hot, you’re hot.”
“Yes,” Brady said. “Like they say.”
They shook hands, and Garmez headed off to the batting cage. Then he turned back. “Hey,” he said. “Maybe I get to marry a movie star, too.”
“Yeah,” Brady said. “Maybe you do.”
* * *
When you’re hot, you’re hot.
Victor Garmez believed that. So did his batting coach. So did a lot of other people. And certainly it sounded plausible: the more you succeeded, the more confident you felt, and the better you did next time up.
The only problem, Brady thought, was that it wasn’t true. Not in baseball or any other sport. He had pored over the studies, and they all pointed to the same conclusion.
There was a Stanford psychologist who had studied the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, tracking every basket for more than a season. He found that the probability of making a second basket did not rise after a successful shot. The number of baskets made in succession was no greater than you would predict on the basis of the laws of chance. If your chance of making each basket was one in two, for example, you would get five baskets in a row, on average, once in thirty-two sequences.
Longer runs occurred, but there was no mystery to them. A more talented basketball player might shoot at, say, a 0.6 probability of success each time out. He would get five in a row about once every thirteen sequences.
The same applied to baseball. There was almost no statistic in the game, no sequence of wins or losses or hits or strikeouts, that went beyond the frequency predicted by the laws of chance. There was no “hot” or “cold” about it: only skill intermeshing with the danc
e of probabilities.
Brady could have told Garmez this. But Garmez would not have believed it. No athlete would. No sports fan, either. People didn’t seem able to think in probabilistic terms. They saw patterns emerging from the random flux of existence, and they rushed to impose meaning on them to spin tales of heroism and villainy, or to look for the hand of God.
No, Garmez would not have believed it. No more than Brady’s readers were going to believe it.
Besides, there was one exception to the rule. One gigantic, spooky exception: DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. A sequence of events, as the biologist and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould had once observed, “so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all . . . the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports.”
Like DiMaggio, Victor Garmez was heading off the probabilistic map. And no one could predict where he might end up.
* * *
Brady had Saturday off. He rose early and picked up the newspaper from his front step. His own article was on the front page of the sports section. Obviously Garmez had come through with hit number fifty-six the night before.
Brady glanced briefly at his work, then tossed it aside. It was solid stuff, but he wasn’t really satisfied with it. For all his research, he had finally been unable to penetrate the mystery of Garmez’s streak.
Garmez would be going for number fifty-seven that afternoon. Fame and fortune—and perhaps the lifelong endorsement contract with the ketchup manufacturer that had finally eluded DiMaggio—beckoned.
Brady had liked the shy young Dominican, and wished him well. But he had no interest in seeing the game. Besides, he was supposed to meet Janice, his fiancée, at the Eaton Centre shopping mall to select a china pattern for her forthcoming bridal shower. Janice believed in doing things properly.
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