Flesh (15 page)

When he left Trenton, he was once more on Columbia Pike, the ex-U.S. Route 1. After making the usual progress through the relatively large cities of Elizabeth, Newark, and Jersey City, he took a ferry to Manhattan Island. He made his most extended stay in the Greater New York area, because Manhattan held fifty thousand people and the surrounding cities were almost as large.

Moreover, this was the beginning of the Great Series.

Stagg not only had to throw the first baseball of the season, he had to attend every game. For the first time, he became aware of how much the game had changed. Now it was conducted in such a fashion that it was an unusual match in which both teams did not suffer numerous injuries and several fatalities.

The first part of the Great Series was taken up by games between the champions of the various state leagues. The final game for national championship was between the Manhattan Big Ones and the Washington Sentahs. The Big Ones won, but they lost so many men they were forced to use half of the Sentahs for their reserves in the international games that followed.

The international half of the Great Series was between the national champions of Deecee, Pants-Elf, Caseyland, the Iroquois League, the Karelian pirates, Florida, and Buffalo. The last-mentioned nation occupied a territory stretching out from the city of Buffalo to include a part of the coastal sections of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

The final game of the Great Series was a bloody struggle between the Deecee team and the Caseylanders. The Caseylanders wore red leggings as part of their uniform, but by the end of the game the players were red from head to foot. Feelings were very bitter, not only among the players but among the rooters. The Caseylanders had a section of the stadium reserved for them and enclosed from the other sections by a tall fence of barbed wire. Moreover, the Manhattan Police Force had men stationed nearby to protect them if feelings ran too high.

Unfortunately, the umpire—a Karelian who was supposed to be neutral because he hated both sides equally—made a decision disastrous in its effects.

It was the ninth inning, and the score was 7-7. The Big Ones were batting. One man was on third base and, though he had a gash in his neck, he was strong enough to run for home if he got a chance. Two men were out—literally. One, covered by a sheet, lay where he had been struck down between second and third. The other was sitting in the dugout and groaning, while a doctor glued up the cuts on his scalp.

The man at bat was the greatest hitter of Deecee, and he faced the greatest pitcher of Caseyland. He wore a uniform that had not changed much since the nineteenth century, and his cheek was swelled with a big quid of tobacco. He swung his bat back and forth. The sunlight glittered on its metal sides, for the upper half of the bat was covered with thin vertical strips of brass. He waited for the umpire to call
Play Ball!
and when he heard the cry, he did not step up to the plate at once.

Instead, he turned and waited until the mascot had run from the dugout to him.

She was a beautiful petite brunette who wore a baseball player’s uniform. The only departure from ancient tradition was the triangular opening in her shirt which exposed her small but firm breasts.

Big Bill Appletree, the batter, rubbed his knuckles against the black hair of the mascot, kissed her on the forehead, and then gave her fanny a playful slap as she ran back to the dugout. He stepped into the box, a square drawn with chalk on the ground, and assumed the ancient stance of the batter ready for the pitcher.

Lanky John Up-The-Hill-And-Over-The-River-Jordan Mighty Casey spat tobacco, then began to wind up. He held in his right hand a ball of regulation size. Four half-inch steel spikes projected from the ball, one from each pole of the sphere and two from the equator. John Casey had to hold the ball so he wouldn’t cut his fingers when he hurled it. This handicapped him somewhat from the view of an ancient pitcher. But he stood six meters closer to the batter, thus more than making up for the awkwardness of hurling the ball.

He waited until the Caseylander mascot had come to him to have her head knuckled. Then he wound up and let fly.

The spike-bearing ball whizzed by an inch from Big Bill Appletree’s face. Appletree blinked, but he did not flinch.

A roar went up from the crowd at this show of courage.

“Ball one!” cried the umpire.

The Caseyland rooters booed. From where they sat, it looked as if the ball, though coming close to Appletree’s face, had been exactly in line with the chalk mark of the box. Therefore, the throw should have been a strike.

Appletree struck at the next one and missed.

“Strike one!”

At the third pitch, Appletree swung and connected. The ball, however, soared to the left. It was obviously a foul.

“Strike two!”

The next pitch came sizzling in, directed at Appletree’s belly. He sucked it in and jumped back, just far enough to keep from being hit but not so far he stepped outside the box, which would constitute a strike.

The next pitch, Appletree swung and missed. The ball did not. Appletree fell to the ground, the spike of the ball sticking in his side.

The crowd screamed, and then became comparatively silent as the ump began counting.

Appletree had ten seconds to get up and bat or else have a strike called on him.

The Deecee mascot, a tall beautiful girl with exceptionally long legs and rich red hair that fell past her buttocks, round and hard as apples, ran out to him. She brought her knees up high in the prancing gait affected by mascots on such occasions. When she got to Appletree, she dropped to her knees and bent her head over him and threw her hair forward so he could stroke it. The strength of a virgin, of a mascot dedicated to the Great White Mother in her aspect as Unfekk, was supposed to flow from her to him. Apparently this was not enough. He said something to her, and she rose, unbuttoned a flap over her pubes, and then bent down to him again. The crowd roared, because this meant that Appletree was so badly hurt he needed a double dose of spiritual-physical power.

At the count of eight, Appletree rose to his feet. The crowd cheered. Even the Caseylander rooters gave him an ovation—all honored a man with guts.

Appletree pulled the spike from his side, took a bandage from the mascot, and placed it over the wound. The bandage clung without being taped, as its pseudoflesh at once put out a number of little claw-tipped tendrils that anchored it.

He nodded to the ump that he was ready.

“Play ball!”

Now it was Appletree’s turn to pitch. He was allowed one try to knock the pitcher down. If he did so, he could walk to first.

He wound up and hurled the ball. John Casey stood within the narrow square used for this occasion. If he stepped outside it, he would be in disgrace—the showers for him—and Appletree could walk all the way to second.

He stood his ground, but his knees were bent so he could sway his body either way.

The ball was a technical miss, though the edge of one of the rotating spikes did cut his right hip.

Then he picked up the ball and wound up.

The Deecee rooters prayed silently, their fingers crossed or their hands stroking the hair on the heads of any nearby mascots. The Caseylanders screamed themselves hoarse. The Pants-Elf, Iroquois, Floridians, and Buffaloes yelled insults at whichever team they hated most.

The Deecee man on third base edged out, ready to run for home if he got a chance. Casey eyed him but made no threatening move.

He threw one straight over the plate, preferring to make Appletree hit for a long one rather than dodge and perhaps get another ball called. Four balls, and Appletree could walk to first.

The big Deecee batter hit the ball square. But, as often happened, one of the spikes was also hit. The ball rose high over the path from home plate to first and then dropped toward a point halfway between home and first.

Appletree threw the bat at the pitcher, as was his right, and sprinted for first. Halfway to first, the ball hit him on the head. The first baseman, running to catch it, also rammed into him. Appletree hit the ground hard but bounced up like a rubber ball, ran several steps, and took a belly skid toward first.

However, the first baseman, while still on the ground, had picked up the ball and made a pass with it at Appletree. Immediately after, he jumped up and threw to home. The ball smacked into the huge and thick mitt of the catcher just before the man who had been on third slid into the plate.

The ump called the Deecee player out, and there was no argument there. But the first baseman walked up to the ump and submitted, in a loud voice, that he had touched Appletree as he ran away. Therefore, Appletree was also out.

Appletree denied that he had been touched.

The first baseman said that he could prove it. He had nicked the Deecee on the side of the right ankle with a spike on the ball. The ump made Appletree take off his stocking.

“You’ve a fresh wound there, still bleeding,” he said. “You’re out!”

“I am not!” roared Appletree, spraying tobacco juice into the ump’s face. “I’m bleeding from two cuts on my thigh, too, and that was done last inning! That father-god worshiper is a liar!” “How would he know to tell me to look at your right ankle unless he had nicked you?” roared the ump back at Appletree. “I’m the ump, and I say you’re out!”

He spelled it out in Deecee phonetics. “A-U-T! Out!”

The decision did not go over well with the Deecee rooters. They booed and screamed the traditional,
“Kill the ump!”

The Karelian turned pale, but he stood his ground. Unfortunately, his courage and integrity did him no good, as the mob spilled out of the stadium and hung him by the neck from a girder. The mob also began beating up the Caseylander team. These might have died under the savage blows, but the Manhattan police surrounded them and beat back the frenzied rooters with the flat of their swords. They also managed to cut down the Karelian before the noose had finished its work.

Meanwhile, the Caseylander rooters had attempted to come to the rescue of their team. Although they never reached the players, they did tangle with the Deecee fans.

Stagg watched the melee for a while. At first he thought of leaping into the mass of furiously struggling bodies and striking blows right and left with his great fists. His bloodlust was aroused. He rose to make the leap into the mob below, but at that moment a group of women, also aroused by the fight, but in a different sense, descended on him.

10

Churchill did not sleep well that night. He could not rid himself of the ecstatic expression on Robin’s face when she had said she hoped she would bear the Sunhero’s child.

First, he cursed himself for not having guessed that she would have been among the one hundred virgins selected to make their debut during the rites. She was too beautiful, and her father was too prominent, for her to have been rejected.

Then he excused himself on the grounds that he really knew little of Deecee’s culture. His own attitudes were too much those of his own time. He had treated her as if she were a girl of the early twenty-first century.

He cursed himself for having fallen in love with Robin. He was reacting more like a youth of twenty than a man of thirty-two—no, a man of eight hundred and thirty-two. A man who had traveled thousands of millions of miles and had made interstellar space his domain. Fallen for a girl of eighteen, who knew only a tiny section of Earth and a tiny section of time!

But Churchill was practical. A fact was a fact. And it was a fact that he wanted Robin Whitrow for his wife—or had, up to that moment last night when she had stunned him with her announcement.

For a while he hated Peter Stagg. He had always had a slight resentment against his captain, because Stagg was so tall and handsome and held a position which Churchill knew he was just as capable of holding. He liked and respected Stagg, but, being honest, he had admitted to himself that he was jealous.

It was almost unendurable to think that Stagg, as usual, had beaten him. Stagg was always first.

Almost
unendurable.

As the night crept on, and Churchill rose from bed to smoke a cigar and pace back and forth, he forced himself to be frank with himself.