Ultimate Sports (18 page)

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!

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.

The Defender served first, a probing serve to test the quickness of the Challenger. He used an image, from a poet who had written in the dying language called English, of a youth gliding over a hilltop at night to catch a star falling from a shower of milk-white light.

The Challenger slapped it right back; the star was nothing but a burnt-out children’s sparkler made from fuel wastes. The youth on the hilltop was left with a sticky purple mess.

The Defender was surprised at how long he struggled with the sadness of the thought. A Judge hit the screamer. Unified led, 1-0.

Coach called time-out.

The falling-star image had been one of his best serves,
a frequent ace. No one had ever handled it so well, turning the beautiful vision of humanity’s quest for immortality into an ugly image of self-destruction.

They decided to switch tactics—to serve a fireball, No. 7 style. The Defender hurled a blazing tornado of searing gases and immeasurable heat. The Challenger’s mind scooped it up like a hockey puck and plopped it into an ocean filled with icebergs.

Off-balance, the Defender tried to give himself time by thinking steaming vapors from the ocean, but the Challenger turned the vapors into great fleecy clouds that shaped themselves into mocking caricatures of famous Earthlings.

Desperately, the Defender answered with another fireball, and a Judge hit the screamer, calling it a Non Sequitur—the thought had not logically followed the Challenger’s thought.

Unified led, 2-0.

The Defender served a complex image of universal peace: white-robed choruses in sweet harmony, endless vials of nutrient liquids flowing through galaxies aglow with life-giving stars, and hands—white, brown, green, orange, blue, black, red, and yellow—clasped.

The Challenger slashed back with mineral dredges that drowned out the singing, lasers that poisoned the vials, and a dark night created by monster Earth shields that were purposely blocking the sunlight of a small planet. The clasping hands tightened until they crushed each other to bloody pulp.

The Defender was gasping at the bitter overload when he heard the screamer. He was down, 3-0. He had never lost his serve before.

The Challenger’s first serve was vividly simple: black
Earthling trooper boots stomping on thousands of green forms like itself.

Screamer.

The Judge called “Foul” and explained that the thought was too political—the Galactic League was still debating whether Earth colonists had trampled the rights of the hairy green offspring of the accident victims.

The Challenger’s second serve was an image of black-gloved Earthling hands pulling apart Greenie families and shoving parents and children into separate cages.

Foul screamer.

The third serve was an image of Earth rocket exhausts aimed to burn down Greenie houses.

Foul screamer.

Tie score, 3-3. The Judge called an official time-out.

Coach’s strong thumbs were working under the Defender’s helmet. “Register a protest, right now. Don’t let that little fur ball make a farce of the game.”

“He’s allowed to think freely,” said the Defender. He wondered if the Challenger was a “he.” Did it matter?

“He’s using the game just to further his cause.”

“Maybe he has a just cause.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Coach. “This is a game.”

“I’ll get him next period,” said the Defender, trying to sound more confident than he was.