Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  The commissioner’s brows knit. “Why, about the accusations Mr. Bragg has leveled against you. About the fact that you—and other ballplayers, as well—have artificially enhanced your bodies and thereby gained an unfair advantage over the other players who have not partaken of such enhancements.”

  “Oh, that,” said Vic.

  Guffaws burst out from the crowd.

  “Yes, that,” the commissioner said, glaring the audience into silence. “Tell us what you’ve done and why you did it.”

  Vic squirmed on the chair. He looked as if he’d rather be a thousand miles away or maybe roasting over hot coals. But then he sucked in a deep breath and started talking.

  * * *

  It all started with my left knee—he said. On my thirtieth birthday, at that. The big three-oh.

  I’d been catching for the A’s for four years, hitting good enough to always be fifth or sixth in the batting order, but the knee was slowing me up so bad the Skipper was shaking his head every time he looked my way.

  We were playing an interleague game against the Phillies. You know what roughnecks they are. In the sixth inning they got men on first and third, and their batter pops a fly to short right field. Runner on third tags up, I block the plate. When he slammed into me I felt the knee pop. Hurt like hell—I mean heck—but I didn’t say anything. The runner was out, the inning was over, so I walked back to the dugout, trying not to limp.

  Well, anyway, we lost the game 4–3. I was in the whirlpool soaking the knee when the Skipper sticks his ugly little face out of his office door and calls, “Hoss, get yourself in here, will you?”

  The other guys in the locker room were already looking pretty glum. Now they all stared at me for a second, then they all turned the other way. None of them wanted to catch my eye. They all knew what was coming. Me, too.

  So I wrap a towel around my gut and walk to the Skipper’s office, leaving wet footprints on the carpeting.

  “I’m gonna hafta rest you for a while,” the Skipper says, even before I can sit down in the chair in front of his desk. The hot seat, we always called it.

  “I don’t need a rest.”

  “Your damned knee does. Look at it: it’s swollen like a watermelon.” The Skipper is a little guy, kind of shriveled up like a prune. Never played a day of big-league ball in his life but he’s managed us into the playoffs three straight seasons.

  “My knee’s OK. The swelling’s going down already.”

  “It’s affecting your throwing.”

  I started to say something, but nothing came out of my mouth. In the fifth inning I couldn’t quite reach a foul pop-up, and on the next pitch the guy homers. Then, in the eighth I was slow getting up and throwing to second. The stolen base put a guy in scoring position and a bloop single scored him and that’s how the Phillies beat us.

  “It’s a tough position, Hoss,” says the Boss, not looking me in the eye. “Catching beats hell outta the knees.”

  “I can play, for chrissakes,” I said. “It don’t hurt that much.”

  “You’re gonna sit out a few games. And see an orthopedics doc.”

  So I go to the team’s doctor, who sends me to an orthopedics guy, who makes me get MRI scans and X-rays and whatnot, then tells me I need surgery.

  “You mean I’ll be out for the rest of the year?”

  “The season’s almost over,” he says, like the last twenty games of the year don’t mean anything.

  I try to tough it out, but the knee keeps swelling so bad I can hardly walk, let alone play ball. I mean, I never was a speed demon, but now the shortstop and third baseman are playing me on the outfield grass, for crying out loud.

  By the time the season finally ends I’m on crutches and I can imagine what my next salary negotiation is going to be like. It’s my option year, too. My agent wouldn’t even look me in the eye.

  * * *

  “Mr. Caruso,” interrupted the commissioner. “Could you concentrate on the medical enhancements you obtained and skip the small talk, please?”

  * * *

  Oh, sure—Vic said. I went to the surgeon that they picked out for me and he told me I needed a total knee replacement.

  “An artificial knee?” I asked the guy.

  He seemed happy about it. With a big smile he tells me by the time spring training starts, I’ll be walking as good as new.

  Walking and playing ball are two different things, I say to myself. But I go through with the surgery, and the rehab, and sure enough, by the time spring training starts I’m doing OK.

  But OK isn’t good enough. Like I said, catching beats the hell out of your knees, and I’m slower than I should be. I complain to the surgeon and he tells me I ought to see this specialist, a stem cell doctor.

  I don’t know stem cells from artichokes, but Dr. Trurow turns out to be a really good-looking blonde from Sweden and she explains that stem cells can help my knee to recover from the surgery.

  “They’re your own cells,” she explains. “We simply encourage them to get your knee to work better.”

  I start the regular season as the designated hitter. Danny Daniels is behind the plate, and boy is he happy about it. But during our first home stand I go to Doc Trurow, let her stick a needle in me and draw out some cells, then a week later she sticks them back in me.

  And my knee starts to feel a lot better. Not all at once; it took a couple of weeks. But one night game against the Orioles, with their infielders playing so deep it’s like they got seven outfielders on the grass, I drop a bunt down the third baseline and beat it out easy.

  The crowd loves it. The score’s tied at 2–2, I’m on first with nobody out, so I take off for second. The Orioles’ catcher, he’s a rookie and he’s so surprised he double clutches before throwing the ball to second. I make it easy.

  By Memorial Day I’m behind the plate again, the team’s number-one catcher. Daniels is moping in the dugout, but hey, you know, that’s baseball. The Skipper’s even moved me up to the three slot in the batting order, I’m so fast on my feet.

  One day in the clubhouse, though, Daniels comes up to me and says, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “You’re Danny Daniels, you’re hitting two-eighty-two, seven homers, thirty-one ribbies,” I tell him.

  “That’s not what I mean.” Danny’s a decent kid, good prospect. He thought he had the catching slot nailed until my stem cells started working.

  “So whattaya mean?” I ask him.

  “You talked at my high school when I was a fat little kid,” Danny said. “All the other kids bullied me, but you told me to stand up to ’em and make the best of myself.”

  Suddenly it clicks in my mind. “You were that fat little kid with the bad acne?”

  He laughs. He’s so good-looking now the girls mob him after the game.

  “Yeah. That was me. I started playing baseball after you talked to me. I wanted to be just like you.”

  I never thought of myself as a role model. I get kind of embarrassed. All I can think of to say is, “Well, you did great. You made the Bigs.”

  “Yeah,” he says, kind of funny. “I’m a second-string catcher.”

  * * *

  Bragg interrupts, “I don’t see what all this twaddle has to do with the issue at hand.”

  The commissioner, who looked interested in Vic’s story, makes a grumbly face, but he sighs and says, “Mr. Caruso, while we appreciate your description of the human aspects of the case, please stick to the facts and eschew the human story.”

  Vic makes a puzzled frown over that word “eschew,” but he nods and picks up his thread again.

  * * *

  OK—Vic says. I’m doing great until my other knee starts aching. I’m going on thirty-two and the aches and pains are what you get. But I figure, if the stem cell treatments helped my one knee so much, how about trying them on my other knee?

  Besides, that Swedish doctor was really good-looking and it was an excuse to see her again.

  So I got th
e other knee treated and before the season’s over I’ve got twelve stolen bases and third basemen are playing me inside the bag to protect against bunts. Makes it easier for me to slam the ball past them. I was leading the league in batting average and women were hanging around the clubhouse entrance after games just to see me!

  But then I got beaned.

  It wasn’t really a beaning, not like I got hit on the head. McGilmore was pitching and I had a single and a triple in two at-bats and he was pretty sore about it. He always was a mean bas—a mean sonofagun. So he whips a sidearm fast ball at me, hard as he can throw. It’s inside and I try to spin away from it but it catches me in my ribs. I never felt such pain. Broke two of my ribs and one of ’em punctured my left lung. I was coughing up blood when they carried me off the field.

  So I spent my thirty-second birthday in the hospital, feeling miserable. But the second or third day there, Doc Trurow comes to visit me, and it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. She’s really pretty, and her smile lit up the whole damned hospital.

  Stem cells again. This time they helped my ribs heal and even repaired the rip in my lung. I got back to the team before the end of the season and ran off a four-fifty average on our last home stand. Better yet, Doc Trurow was at every game, sitting right behind our dugout.

  So on the last day of the season, I worked up the nerve to ask her out for dinner. And she says yes! Her first name is Olga and we had a great evening together, even though the team finished only in third place.

  * * *

  “Mr. Caruso,” the commissioner intoned. “Kindly stick to the facts of your physical enhancements.”

  Vic looked kind of sheepish and he nodded his head and mumbled, “Yessir.”

  * * *

  Instead of going back to Michigan for the off season, I stayed in Oakland and dated Olga a lot. I even started thinking about marriage, but I didn’t have the nerve to pop the question—

  * * *

  “Mr. Caruso!”

  Well, it’s important—Vic said to the commissioner. Olga told me how stem cell treatments could improve my eyesight and make my reflexes sharper. There wasn’t anything in the rules against it, and it was my own cells, not some drug or steroids or anything like that. So I let her jab me here and there and damned if I didn’t feel better. Besides, I worried that if I said no to her she’d stop dating me and I didn’t want to stop seeing her.

  So this goes on for a couple seasons and all of a sudden I’m coming up on my thirty-fifth birthday and I can see the big four-oh heading down the road for me. I started to worry about my career ending, even though I was hitting three-twenty-something and doing OK behind the plate. News guys started calling me Iron Man, no kidding.

  Danny Daniels looks piss … uh, unhappy, but he doesn’t say anything and I figure, what the hell, so he has to sit on the bench for another season or two. But the front office trades him to the Yankees, so it’s OK. I don’t have to see his sour puss in the clubhouse anymore.

  Meanwhile we’re in the playoffs again and we’ve got a good chance to take the pennant.

  Then I got hurt again. Dancing. No kidding, Olga and I were dancing and I guess I was feeling pretty damned frisky and I tried a fancy move I’d seen in an old Fred Astaire movie and I slipped and went down on my face. Never been so embarrassed in my whole life.

  * * *

  I turned from Vic to take a peek at the commissioner’s face. Instead of interrupting the big lug, the commissioner was listening hard, his eyes focused on Vic, totally intent on the story that was unfolding.

  * * *

  Something in my hip went blooey—Vic went on. I got to my feet OK, but the hip felt stiff. And the stiffness didn’t go away. It got worse. When I told Olga about it she toted me over to the medical center for a whole lot of tests.

  It was nothing serious, the docs decided. The hip would be all right in a couple of months. Just needed rest. And time.

  But spring training was due to start in a few weeks and I needed to be able to get around OK, not stiff like Frankenstein’s monster.

  “It’s just a factor of your age,” says the therapist Olga sent me to.

  “I’m only thirty-six,” I said.

  “Maybe so,” says the doc, “but your body’s taken a beating over the years. It’s catching up with you. You’re going to be old before your time, physically.”

  I felt pretty low. But when I tell Olga about what the doc said, she says, “Telomerase.”

  “Telo-what?” I ask her.

  She tells me this telomerase stuff can reverse aging. In mice, at least. They inject the stuff in old, creaky, diabetic lab mice and the little buggers get young and frisky again and their diabetes goes away.

  I don’t have diabetes, but I figure if the stuff makes me feel younger then why not try it? Olga tells me that some movie stars and politicians have used it, in secret, and it helped them stay young. A couple of TV news people, too.

  So I start taking telomerase injections and by the time I hit the big four-oh I’m still hitting over three hundred and catching more than a hundred games a year. And other guys are starting to use stem cells and telomerase and everything else they can get their hands on. Even Danny Daniels is using, from what I heard.

  * * *

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you!” Bragg yells, jumping up from his seat on the front row of benches. “They’re making a travesty of the game!”

  The commissioner frowns at him and Bragg sits back down. Vic Caruso stares at him, looking puzzled.

  “Look,” Vic says, “I didn’t do anything that’s prohibited by the rules.”

  Bragg seems staggered that Vic can pronounce “prohibited” correctly.

  The commissioner says, “The point of this hearing is to decide if the rules should be amended.”

  “You make stem cells and telomerase and such illegal,” Vic says, “and half the players in the league’ll have to quit baseball.”

  “But is it fair to the players who don’t use such treatments for you to be so … so … extraordinary?” asks the commissioner.

  Vic shakes his head. “I’m not extraordinary. I’m not a superman. I’m just young. I’m not better than I was when I was twenty, but I’m just about as good. What’s wrong with that?”

  The commissioner doesn’t answer. He just shakes his head and glances at the two league presidents, sitting beside him. Neither of them has an answer, either.

  But Bragg does. “Do you realize what this means?” he yells at the commissioner. Pointing at Vic again, he says, “This man will be playing until he’s fifty! Maybe longer! How are we going to bring young players into the league if the veterans are using these treatments to keep themselves young? We’ll have whole teams made up of seventy-year-olds, for god’s sake!”

  “Seventy-year-olds who play like twenty-year-olds,” the commissioner mutters.

  “Seventy-year-olds who’ll demand salary increases every year,” Bragg snaps back at him.

  And suddenly it all becomes clear. Bragg’s not worrying about the purity of the game. The revelations in the news haven’t hurt box office receipts: attendance has been booming. But veteran players demand a lot more money than rookies—and get it. Bragg’s bitching about his pocketbook!

  The commissioner looks at the two league presidents again, but they still have nothing to say. They avoid looking at Bragg, though.

  To Vic, the commissioner says, in a kindly, almost grandfatherly way, “Mr. Caruso, thank you for your frank and honest testimony. You’ve given us a lot to think about. You may step down now.”

  Vic gets up from the chair like a mountain rising. As he heads for the front bench, though, the commissioner says, “By the way, just to satisfy my personal curiosity, did you and Dr. Trurow get married?”

  “We’re gonna do that on Christmas day,” says Vic. “In Stockholm, that’s her hometown and her family and all her friends’ll be there.”

  The commissioner smiles. “Congratulations.”
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  “We’ll send you an invitation,” Vic says, smiling back.

  Glancing at Bragg, the commissioner says, “I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to attend your wedding, Mr. Caruso. But I wish you and your bride much happiness.”

  * * *

  So that’s how it happened. The commissioner and the league presidents and all the owners—including Bragg—put their heads together and came up with the Big Change.

  Major League Baseball imposed an age limit on players. Fifty. Nobody over fifty would be allowed to play on a major league team. This made room for the youngsters like Danny Daniels to get into the game—although Daniels was thirty-eight when he finally became the Yankees’ starting catcher.

  The guys over fifty were put into a new league, a special league for old timers. This allowed baseball to expand again, for the first time in the twenty-first century. Sixteen new teams in sixteen new cities, mostly in the Sun Belt, like Tucson, Mobile, New Orleans, and Orlando.

  And the best part is that the old timers get a shot at the World Series winner. At the end of October, right around Halloween, the pennant winner from the Old Timer’s League plays the winner of the World Series.

  Some wags wrote columns about Halloween being the time when dead ballplayers rise from their graves, but nobody pays much attention to that kind of drivel. The Halloween series draws big crowds—and big TV receipts. Even Bragg admits he likes it, a little.

  Last Halloween Vic’s Tucson Tarantulas whipped the New York Yankees in seven games. In the deciding game, Danny Daniels hit a home run for the Yanks, but Vic socked two dingers for Tucson to ice it. He said it was to celebrate the birth of his first son.

  Yankee haters all over the country rejoiced.

  Asked when he planned to retire, Vic said, “I don’t know. Maybe when my kid gets old enough to play in the Bigs.”

  Or maybe not.

  THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

  Jean-Louis Trudel

  * * *

  Like it or not, we—the human race—are in the midst of a global climate change. You can argue about the cause of the change, or how severe it will be, but one thing is certain: this planet’s climate is heading for a tipping point. Arguments abound over how soon and how dangerous the climate warming will be, but the fact is that the warming is already well underway.