Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories (9 page)

When Iron-Arm McPherson Took the Mound

Author’s Note: Baseball

This is an excerpt from
The Outpost
, which told an unending string of tall tales that actually had an ultimate purpose. And since I was telling tall tales, how could I not include a baseball story about a pitcher whose hummer was clocked at three times the speed of the fastest pitch ever thrown by Sandy Koufax or Roger Clemens?

I still remember him when he was just a kid, making a name for himself out in the Quinellus Cluster. They said he was the fastest thing on two feet, and that he’d break every base-stealing record in the books.

I took that kind of personally, since I’m pretty fast myself—or at least I used to be, before I blew out my left knee and broke my right thigh and ankle during my next-to-last season of murderball. Anyway, I made it my business to head out that way and see if this McPherson kid was as good as his press clippings.

First time up, the kid bunted and beat the throw, then stole second, third, and home, and he was still looking for more bases to steal when the roar of the crowd finally died down. Did the same thing the second time he was up. Bunted his way onto first base a third time—and then it happened. There was a pickoff play that got him leaning the wrong way, and suddenly he fell to the ground and grabbed his knee, and I knew his base-stealing days were over.

I didn’t think much about him for the next couple of years, and then I heard he’d come back, that he was hitting home runs farther than anyone had ever hit ’em, was averaging more than one a game, so I went out to take a look. Sure enough, the kid drilled the first pitch he saw completely out of the ballpark, and did the same with the next couple.

Then they called in Squint-Eye Malone from the bullpen. Old Squint-Eye took it as a personal insult any time someone poked a long one off one of his teammates, so he wound up and threw a high hard one up around the kid’s chin. The kid was a really cool customer; he never flinched, never moved a muscle. Malone squinted even more and aimed the next one at the kid’s head. The kid ducked a little too late, and everyone in the park could hear the crunching sound as the ball shattered his eye socket, and I figured with that, even with the artificial eyes they make these days, it would have to affect his timing or his depth perception or something, and it was a damned shame, because this was a truly talented kid who’d been done in not once but twice by bad luck and physical injuries.

And that was it. I never gave him another thought. Then, about four years later, word began trickling out that there was a pitcher out in the boonies who could throw smoke like no one had ever seen. The stories kept coming back about this Iron-Arm McPherson, who supposedly threw the ball so hard that batters never saw it coming, and I vaguely wondered if he was any relation to the McPherson kid I’d seen who’d had all that talent and all those troubles.

Well, he was too good to stay where he was, so they sold his contract to the Cosmos League, and before long he got himself traded to the Deneb Demons, and you can’t get any bigger than that.

I was playing for Spica II at the time. We won our division and headed off to Deluros VIII for the playoffs, and I got my first look at Iron-Arm McPherson, and sure enough he was the same player I’d seen those other two times. I was batting leadoff, and I figured he couldn’t run too good after that knee injury, and I didn’t think he could have fully adjusted to his new eye, so I decided I’d bunt on the right side of the infield and I should have no trouble beating it out, and when my teammates saw how easy it was, why, we’d bunt the poor bastard out of the game, maybe even out of the league.

So the game starts, and I walk up to the plate, and Iron-Arm winds up and lets fly, and I hear the ball thud into the catcher’s mitt, and the umpire calls it a strike, but I’ll swear I never saw it once it left his hand.

He winds up and throws again, and again it comes in so fast that my eyes can’t follow it, and then he does it a third time, and I’m out of there, and I realize that everything I’ve heard about Iron-Arm McPherson is true.

He strikes out the first eighteen men he faces, and then I come up for a third time to lead off the top of the seventh inning, and he rears back and gives me the high hard one, and I can almost feel it whistle by me even though I can’t see it, and I toss my bat onto the ground in disgust and start walking back to the dugout.

“Hey!” says the umpire. “You got two more strikes coming.”

“I don’t want ’em,” I say.

“Are you gonna come back here and play, or not?” demands the ump.

“Not,” I say. “How the hell can I hit what I can’t see?”

“All right, you’re outta here!” yells the ump, and I get ejected and take an early shower, which suits me fine since the alternative is being humiliated up at the plate again.

We all breathe a sigh of relief when the game’s over, because it means we won’t have to face McPherson again for another three or four days but when we come out onto the field the next afternoon, who’s waiting for us on the mound but Iron-Arm McPherson!

Well, 52 hours into the playoffs we’re down three games to none, and we’re just one game from elimination, and not one of us has reached base yet, and McPherson’s record in the series is 3-and-0, and he’s pitched back-to-back-to-back perfect games, and instead of getting tired he seems to be as strong as ever, and one of the local newscasts announces that they’ve timed his pitches and they’re
averaging
287 miles per hour, and that his hummer was clocked at 322.

That night, while I’m drowning my sorrows in the hotel bar and wondering what to do with myself in the off-season, which figures to start sometime around mid-afternoon the next day, I see the science and computer whiz they call Einstein sitting by himself, lifting a few and jotting down notes on his computer. I recognize him from his holos, and I figure if anyone can help me, it’s got to be him, so I walk over and introduce myself.

He doesn’t respond, and that’s when someone tells me he’s blind, deaf and mute, and I ask how anyone ever talks to him, and it’s explained to me that I have to get
my
computer to talk to
his
computer and then he’ll respond.

I go over to the hotel’s registration desk and rent a pocket computer and then return to the bar and have it tell Einstein’s computer who I am and how much I admire him, and that I’ve got a little problem and could he help me with it.

He taps away at his machine, and suddenly mine speaks up: “What is the nature of your problem?”

I ask him if he knows anything about baseball, and he says he knows the rudiments, and I explain my problem to him, that McPherson’s high hard one clocks in at 322 miles an hour, and that even at an average of 287 none of us can even see the ball when Iron-Arm lets loose.

He does some quick calculations in his head, takes about two seconds to verify them on his computer, and then sends me another message: “The human arm is incapable of throwing a baseball at more than 129.49263 miles per hour.”

“Maybe so,” I answer back, “but they clocked him at more than twice that speed.”

“The conclusion is obvious,” sends Einstein. “The baseball is not being thrown by a human arm.”

And suddenly it’s all clear to me. Here’s this kid who’s already got an artificial knee and a replacement eyeball as a result of injuries. Why not get a step ahead of the game by buying himself a prosthetic arm before he can develop bursitis or tendonitis or whatever? And if he was going to buy a new arm, why not the strongest, most accurate arm that science could make?

I thought about it for a while, until I was sure I was right, and then I told Einstein that I agreed with him, but that didn’t help solve my problem, which was that whether McPherson was using his real arm or one he’d gone out and bought, no one could even hit a loud foul ball off him.

“It’s an interesting problem,” responded Einstein. He began tapping in numbers and symbols, and pretty soon his fingers were almost as hard to follow as one of McPherson’s fastballs, and after about five minutes he quit just as suddenly as he started, with a satisfied little smile on his face.

“Are you still here?” his machine asked.

“Yeah.”

“I am going to transmit a very complex chemical formula to your computer. Print it out and take it to the laboratory at the local university—they’re the only ones who will have everything that’s required—and have them mix it up as instructed and put it into a titanium vial. Then rub it onto your bat.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then don’t trip on third base as you turn for home plate.”

I thanked him, though I didn’t really believe anything could work against McPherson, and I went to the lab in the morning, just like he told me to, and got the vial and poured the entire contents onto my bat and rubbed them in real good about an hour before game time.

I wasn’t real thrilled when the home plate umpire cried “Play ball!” and Iron-Arm McPherson took the mound for the fourth day in row and I had to step into the batter’s box, but the only alternative was to get myself thrown out again, so I sighed and trudged up to the plate and stood there, waiting.

McPherson wound up and reared back and let fly. I’m not sure exactly what happened next, except that I heard a
crack!
like a gunshot, and suddenly the ball was soaring into the left field bleachers and I was jogging around the bases with a really dumb grin on my face, and McPherson was standing there, hands on hips, looking like he couldn’t believe that I’d belted his money pitch out of the park.

He struck out the next eight batters, but when I came up again with two out and nobody on in the third inning, he leaned back and gave me his zinger, and I pickled it again. I nailed another in the sixth, and I led off the ninth with my fourth homer of the day. I looked at the scoreboard as I rounded third, and saw we were still down 7 to 4, and there wasn’t any activity in the Demons’ bullpen (and why should there be? I mean, hell, he was still pitching a four-hitter), and before Shaka Njaba left the on-deck circle and went up to take his raps, I crossed home plate and kept on running until I came to him and told him that if he wanted to win the game he should use my bat. I didn’t have time to tell him
why
, but Shaka’s as superstitious as most ballplayers, and he jumped at the chance to use my lucky bat.

McPherson rubbed the ball in his hands, hitched his pants, fiddled with the peak of his cap, toed the rubber, went into his motion, and let fly—and not only didn’t I see the ball come to the plate, but the bat moved so fast I didn’t see
it
either. But I heard the two meet, and I saw the ball go 19 rows deep into the center field bleachers, and I passed the word up and down the bench that everyone should use my bat.

The next six hitters took McPherson deep, and when his manager finally came out and took the ball away from him and sent him to the showers (for the first time all season), we were winning 11 to 7. I figured our bullpen could hold onto the lead, so I took my bat back before someone broke it, and sure enough, we won 11 to 8.

McPherson was back on the mound the next day, but after we hit his first five pitches into the stands for a 5 to 0 lead, he was gone again, and we didn’t see any more of him in the series.

We won that afternoon, and the next two nights, and became the champions. I sought out Einstein to thank him, but he told me that he’d gotten 30-to-1 odds against Spica II when we were down three games to none. He’d bet a few thousand credits, so he felt more than amply rewarded for his efforts.

As for Iron-Arm McPherson, getting knocked out of the box in front of all those millions of fans was—to borrow a baseball expression—his third strike, after messing up his knee and his batting eye. There just wasn’t a place in the game for a pitcher who couldn’t get anyone out, even if he
could
burn that hummer in there at 322 miles an hour.

Last I heard, he was running a spaceship wash at one of the orbital stations out near Far London.

***

Mwalimu in the Squared Circle

Author’s Note: Boxing

One of my lifetime passions is Africa. (The others, for the record, are musical theatre, horse racing, show collies, writing, and—first and foremost—Carol.) And when I read in a book on Uganda the challenge that begins this story, I knew I had to write a piece in which Idi Amin’s ludicrous proposal was actually accepted. The first time through it was a very funny story. Then I realized there were important things to be said, and I rewrote it as it stands now. It was a 1994 Hugo nominee: only three short stories were nominated, and in a still-incomprehensible turn of events, it easily beat the other two stories, but lost to one of two novelettes that had been added to the ballot to fill it out.

While this effort was being made, Amin postured: “I challenge President Nyerere in the boxing ring to fight it out there rather than that soldiers lose their lives on the field of battle … Mohammed Ali would be an ideal referee for the bout.”

—George Ivan Smith

GHOSTS OF KAMPALA (1980)

As the Tanzanians began to counterattack, Amin suggested a crazy solution to the dispute. He declared that the matter should be settled in the boxing ring.

“I am keeping fit so that I can challenge President Nyerere in the boxing ring and fight it out there, rather than having the soldiers lose their lives on the field of battle.” Amin added that Mohammed Ali would be an ideal referee for the bout, and that he, Amin, as the former Uganda heavyweight champ, would give the small, white-haired Nyerere a sporting chance by fighting with one arm tied behind his back, and his legs shackled with weights.

—Dan Wooding and Ray Barnett

UGANDA HOLOCAUST (1980)

Nyerere looks up through the haze of blood masking his vision and sees the huge man standing over him, laughing. He looks into the man’s eyes and seems to see the dark heart of Africa, savage and untamed.

He cannot remember quite what he is doing here. Nothing hurts, but as he tries to move, nothing works, either. A black man in a white shirt, a man with a familiar face, seems to be pushing the huge man away, maneuvering him into a corner. Chuckling and posturing to people that Nyerere cannot see, the huge man backs away, and now the man in the white shirt returns and begins shouting.

“Four!”

Nyerere blinks and tries to clear his mind. Who is he, and why is he on his back, half-naked, and who are these other two men?

“Five!”

“Stay down, Mwalimu!” yells a voice from behind him, and now it begins to come back to him.
He
is Mwalimu.

“Six!”

He blinks again and sees the huge electronic clock above him. It is one minute and 58 seconds into the first round. He is Mwalimu, and if he doesn’t get up, his bankrupt country has lost the war.

“Seven!”

He cannot recall the last minute and 58 seconds. In fact, he cannot recall anything since he entered the ring. He can taste his blood, can feel it running down over his eyes and cheeks, but he cannot remember how he came to be bleeding, or laying on his back. It is a mystery.

“Eight!”

Finally his legs are working again, and he gathers them beneath him. He does not know if they will bear his weight, but they must be doing so, for Mohammed Ali—that is his name! Ali—is cleaning his gloves off and staring into his eyes.

“You should have stayed down,” whispers Ali.

Nyerere grunts an answer. He is glad that the mouthpiece is impeding his speech, for he has no idea what he is trying to say.

“I can stop it if you want,” says Ali.

Nyerere grunts again, and Ali shrugs and stands aside as the huge man shuffles across the ring toward him, still chuckling.

• • •

It began as a joke. Nobody ever took anything Amin said seriously, except for his victims.

He had launched a surprise bombing raid in the north of Tanzania. No one knew why, for despite what they did in their own countries, despite what genocide they might commit, the one thing all African leaders had adhered to since Independence was the sanctity of national borders.

So Julius Nyerere, the Mwalimu, the Teacher, the President of Tanzania, had mobilized his forces and pushed Amin’s army back into Uganda. Not a single African nation had offered military assistance; not a single Western nation had offered to underwrite so much as the cost of a bullet. Amin had expediently converted to Islam, and now Libya’s crazed but opportunistic Quaddafi was pouring money and weapons into Uganda.

Still, Nyerere’s soldiers, with their tattered uniforms and ancient rifles, were marching toward Kampala, and it seemed only a matter of time before Amin was overthrown and the war would be ended, and Milton Obote would be restored to the Presidency of Uganda. It was a moral crusade, and Nyerere was convinced that Amin’s soldiers were throwing down their weapons and fleeing because they, too, know that Right was on Tanzania’s side.

But while Right may have favored Nyerere, Time did not. He knew what the Western press and even the Tanzanian army did not know: that within three weeks, not only could his bankrupt nation no longer supply its men with weapons, it could not even afford to bring them back out of Uganda.

• • •

“I challenge President Nyerere in the boxing ring to fight it out there rather than that soldiers lose their lives on the field of battle …”

The challenge made every newspaper in the western world, as columnist after columnist laughed over the image of the 330-pound Amin, former heavyweight champion of the Kenyan army, stepping into the ring to duke it out with the five-foot one-inch, 112-pound, 57-year-old Nyerere.

Only one man did not laugh: Mwalimu.

• • •

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

Nyerere stares calmly at the tall, well-built man standing before his desk. It is a hot, humid day, typical of Dar es Salaam, and the man is already sweating profusely.

“I did not ask you here to judge my sanity,” answers Nyerere. “But to tell me how to defeat him.”

“It can’t be done. You’re spotting him two hundred pounds and twenty years. My job as referee is to keep him from out-and-out killing you.”

“You frequently defeated men who were bigger and stronger than you,” notes Nyerere gently. “And, in the latter portion of your career, younger than you as well.”

“You float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” answers Ali. “But 57-year-old presidents don’t float, and little bitty guys don’t sting. I’ve been a boxer all my life. Have you ever fought anyone?”

“When I was younger,” says Nyerere.

“How much younger?”

Nyerere thinks back to the sunlit day, some 48 years ago, when he pummeled his brother, though he can no longer remember the reason for it. In his mind’s eye, both of them are small and thin and ill-nourished, and the beating amounted to two punches, delivered with barely enough force to stun a fly. The next week he acquired the gift of literacy, and he has never raised a hand in anger again. Words are far more powerful.

Nyerere sighs. “
Much
younger,” he admits.

“Ain’t no way,” says Ali, and then repeats, “Ain’t no way. This guy is not just a boxer, he’s crazy, and crazy people don’t feel no pain.”

“How would
you
fight him?” asks Nyerere.

“Me?” says Ali. He starts jabbing the air with his left fist. “Stick and run, stick and run. Take him dancing ’til he drops. Man’s got a lot of blubber on that frame.” He holds his arms up before his face. “He catches up with me, I go into the rope-a-dope. I lean back, I take his punches on my forearms, I let him wear himself out.” Suddenly he straightens up and turns back to Nyerere. “But it won’t work for you. He’ll break your arms if you try to protect yourself with them.”

“He’ll only have one arm free,” Nyerere points out.

“That’s all he’ll need,” answers Ali. “Your only shot is to keep moving, to tire him out.” He frowns. “But …”

“But?”

“But I ain’t never seen a 57-year-old man that could tire out a man in his thirties.”

“Well,” says Nyerere with an unhappy shrug, “I’ll have to think of something.”

“Think of letting your soldiers beat the shit out of
his
soldiers,” says Ali.

“That is impossible.”

“I thought they were winning,” said Ali.

“In fourteen days they will be out of ammunition and gasoline,” answers Nyerere. “They will be unable to defend themselves and unable to retreat.”

“Then give them what they need.”

Nyerere shakes his head. “You do not understand. My nation is bankrupt. There is no money to pay for ammunition.”

“Hell, I’ll loan it to you myself,” says Ali. “This Amin is a crazy man. He’s giving blacks all over the world a bad name.”

“That is out of the question,” says Nyerere.

“You think I ain’t got it?” says Ali pugnaciously.

“I am sure you are a very wealthy man, and that your offer is sincere,” answers Nyerere. “But even if you gave us the money, by the time we converted it and purchased what we needed it would be too late. This is the only way to save my army.”

“By letting a crazy man tear you apart?”

“By defeating him in the ring before he realizes that he can defeat my men in the field.”

“I’ve seen a lot of things go down in the squared circle,” says Ali, shaking his head in disbelief, “but this is the strangest.”

• • •

“You cannot do this,” says Maria when she finally finds out.

“It is done,” answers Nyerere.

They are in their bedroom, and he is staring out at the reflection of the moon on the Indian Ocean. As the light dances on the water, he tries to forget the darkness to the west.

“You are not a prizefighter,” she says. “You are Mwalimu. No one expects you to meet this madman. The press treats it as a joke.”

“I would be happy to exchange doctoral theses with him, but he insists on exchanging blows,” says Nyerere wryly.

“He is illiterate,” said Maria. “And the people will not allow it. You are the man who brought us independence and who has led us ever since. The people look to you for wisdom, not pugilism.”

“I have never sought to live any life but that of the intellect,” he admits. “And what has it brought us? While Kenyatta and Mobutu and even Kaunda have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars, we are as poor now as the day we were wed.” He shakes his head sadly. “I stand up to oppose Amin, and only Sir Seretse Khama of Botswana, secure in his British knighthood, stands with me.” He pauses again, trying to sort it out. “Perhaps the old
mzee
of Kenya was right. Grab what you can while you can. Could our army be any more ill-equipped if I had funneled aid into a Swiss account? Could I be any worse off than now, as I prepare to face this madman in” —he cannot hide his distaste— “a boxing ring?”

“You must
not
face him,” insists Maria.

“I must, or the army will perish.”

“Do you think he will let the army live after he has beaten you?” she asks.

Nyerere has not thought that far ahead, and now a troubled frown crosses his face.

• • •

He had come to the office with such high hopes, such dreams and ambitions. Let Kenyatta play lackey to the capitalist West. Let Machal sell his country to the Russians. Tanzania would be different, a proving ground for African socialism.

It was a dry, barren country without much to offer. There were the great game parks, the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater in the north, but four-fifths of the land was infested with the tsetse fly, there were no minerals beneath the surface, Nairobi was already the capital city of East Africa and no amount of modernization to Dar es Salaam could make it competitive. There was precious little grazing land and even less water. None of this fazed Nyerere; they were just more challenges to overcome, and he had no doubt that he could shape them to his vision.

But before industrialization, before prosperity, before anything else, came education. He had gone from the bush to the presidency in a single lifetime, had translated the entire body of Shakespeare’s work into Swahili, had given form and structure to his country’s constitution, and he knew that before everything came literacy. While his people lived in grass huts, other men had harnessed the atom, had reached the Moon, had obliterated hundreds of diseases, all because of the written word. And so while Kenyatta became the
Mzee
, the Wise Old Man, he himself became
Mwalimu
. Not the President, not the Leader, not the Chief of Chiefs, but the Teacher.

He would teach them to turn away from the dark heart and reach for the sunlight. He created the
ujamaa
villages, based on the Israeli
kibbutzim
, and issued the Arusha Declaration, and channeled more than half his country’s aid money into the schools. His people’s bellies might not be filled, their bodies might not be covered, but they could read, and everything would follow from that.

But what followed was drought, and famine, and disease, and more drought, and more famine, and more disease. He went abroad and described his vision and pleaded for money; what he got were ten thousand students who arrived overflowing with idealism but devoid of funds. They meant well and they worked hard, but they had to be fed, and housed, and medicated, and when they could not mold the country into his utopia in the space of a year or two, they departed.

And then came the madman, the final nail in Tanzania’s financial coffin. Nyerere labeled him for what he was, and found himself conspicuously alone on the continent. African leaders simply didn’t criticize one another, and suddenly it was the Mwalimu who was the pariah, not the bloodthirsty butcher of Uganda. The East African Union, a fragile thing at best, fell apart, and while Nyerere was trying to save it, Kenyatta, the true capitalist, appropriated all three countries’ funds and began printing his own money. Tanzania, already near bankruptcy, was left with money that was not honored anywhere beyond its borders.

Still, he struggled to meet the challenge. If that was the way the
Mzee
wanted to play the game, that was fine with him. He closed the border to Kenya. If tourists wanted to see his game parks, they would have to stay in
his
country; there would be no more round trips from Nairobi. If Amin wanted to slaughter his people, so be it; he would cut off all diplomatic relations, and to hell with what his neighbors thought. Perhaps it was better this way; now, with no outside influences, he could concentrate entirely on creating his utopia. It would be a little more difficult, it would take a little longer, but in the end, the accomplishment would be that much more satisfying.