Future Games

by John Shirley

  The Kosg-Anjehn wore tight-fitting black uniforms, with odd-looking elongated silver helmets to cover their bullet-shaped heads. They looked like no football team Hill had ever seen. Only a handful of them stood over five feet, but they were all as squat and broad as a tackle for the Packers. Their arms and legs were thick and stumpy, but rippled with muscles that bulged in the wrong places. The helmeted heads, however, gave an impression of frailty, like eggshells ready to shatter at the slightest impact.

  Two of the Brish’diri detached themselves from the group and walked over to De Angelis. Evidently they felt they didn’t need a warm-up, and wanted to start immediately. De Angelis talked to them for an instant, then turned and beckoned to the captain of the human team.

  “How do you think it’ll go?”

  Hill turned. It was Tomkins. The E. T. agent had struggled through the crowd to his side.

  “Hard to say,” the director replied. “The Brish’diri have never really played football before, so the odds are they’ll lose. Being from a heavy-gravity planet, they’ll be stronger than the humans, so that might give them an edge. But they’re also a lot slower, from what I hear.”

  “I’ll have to root them home,” Tomkins said with a smile. “Bolster the cause of interstellar relations and all that.”

  Hill scowled. “You root them home if you like. I’m pulling for the humans. Thanks to you, I’m in enough trouble already. If they catch me rooting for the Brish’diri they’ll tear me to shreds.”

  He turned his attention back to the field. The Computermen had won the toss, and elected to receive. One of the taller Brish’diri was going back to kick off.

  “Tuhgayh-dei,” Tomkins provided helpfully. “The son of the mission’s chief linguist.” Hill nodded.

  Tuhgayh-dei ran forward with a ponderous, lumbering gallop, nearly stopped when he finally reached the football, and slammed his foot into it awkwardly but hard. The ball landed in the upper tier of the stands, and a murmur went through the crowd.

  “Pretty good,” Tomkins said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Too good,” replied Hill. He did not elaborate.

  The humans took the ball on their twenty. The Computermen went into a huddle, broke it with a loud clap, and ran to their positions. A ragged cheer went up from the stands.

  The humans went down into the three-point stance. Their Brish’diri opponents did not. The alien linemen just stood there, hands dangling at their sides, crouching a little.

  “They don’t know much about football,” Hill said. “But after that kickoff, I wonder if they have to.”

  The ball was snapped, and the quarterback for Ken’s Computer Repair, a rangy ex-high-school star named Sullivan, faded back to pass. The Brish’diri rushed forward in a crude blitz, and crashed into the human linemen.

  An instant later, Sullivan was lying face down in the grass, buried under three Brish’diri. The aliens had blown through the offensive line as if it didn’t exist.

  That made it second-and-fifteen. The humans huddled again, came out to another cheer, not quite so loud as the first one. The ball was snapped. Sullivan handed off to a beefy fullback, who crashed straight ahead.

  One of the Brish’diri brought him down before he went half a yard. It was a clumsy tackle, around the shoulders. But the force of the contact knocked the fullback several yards in the wrong direction.

  When the humans broke from their huddle for the third time the cheer could scarcely be heard. Again Sullivan tried to pass. Again the Brish’diri blasted through the line en masse. Again Sullivan went down for a loss.

  Hill groaned. “This looks worse every minute,” he said.

  Tomkins didn’t agree. “I don’t think so. They’re doing fine. What difference does it make who wins?”

  Hill didn’t bother to answer that.

  There was no cheering when the humans came out in punt formation. Once more the Brish’diri put on a strong rush, but the punter got the ball away before they reached him.

  It was a good, deep kick. The Kosg-Anjehn took over on their own twenty-five yard line. Marhdain-nei, Remjhard’s son, was the Brish’diri quarterback. On the first play from scrimmage, he handed off to a halfback, a runt built like a tank.

  The Brish’diri blockers flattened their human opponents almost effortlessly, and the runt plowed through the gaping hole, ran over two would-be tacklers, and burst into the clear. He was horribly slow, however, and the defenders finally brought him down from behind after a modest thirty-yard gain. But it took three people to stop him.

  On the next play, Marhdain tried to pass. He got excellent protection, but his receivers, trudging along at top speed, had defensemen all over them. And the ball, when thrown, went sizzling over the heads of Brish’diri and humans alike.

  Marhdain returned to the ground again after that, and handed off to a runt halfback once more. This time he tried to sweep around end, but was hauled to the ground after a gain of only five yards by a quartet of human tacklers.

  That made it third-and-five. Marhdain kept to the ground. He gave the ball to his other halfback, and the brawny Brish’dir smashed up the middle. He was a little bit faster than the runt. When he got in the clear, only one man managed to catch him from behind. And one wasn’t enough. The alien shrugged off the tackle and lumbered on across the goal line.

  The extra point try went under the crossbar instead of over it. But it still nearly killed the poor guy in the stands who tried to catch the ball.

  Tomkins was grinning. Hill shook his head in disgust. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go,” he said. “They’ll kill us if the Brish’diri win.”

  The kickoff went out of the stadium entirely this time. On the first play from the twenty, a Brish’diri lineman roared through the line and hit Sullivan just as he was handing off. Sullivan fumbled.

  Another Brish’dir picked up the loose ball and carried it into the end zone while most of the humans were still lying on the ground.

  “My God,” said Hill, feeling a bit numb. “They’re too strong. They’re too damn strong. The humans can’t cope with their strength. Can’t stop them.”

  “Cheer up,” said Tomkins. “It can’t get much worse for your side.”

  But it did. It got a lot worse.

  On offense, the Brish’diri were well-nigh unstoppable. Their runners were all short on speed, but made up for it with muscle. On play after play, they smashed straight up the middle behind a wall of blockers, flicking tacklers aside like bothersome insects.

  And then Marhdain began to hit on his passes. Short passes, of course. The Brish’diri lacked the speed to cover much ground. But they could outjump any human, and they snared pass after pass in the air. There was no need to worry about interceptions. The humans simply couldn’t hang on to Marhdain’s smoking pitches.

  On defense, things were every bit as bad. The Computermen couldn’t run against the Brish’diri line. And Sullivan seldom had time to complete a pass, for the alien rushers were unstoppable. The few passes he did hit on went for touchdowns; no Brish’diri could catch a human from behind. But those were few and far between.

  When Hill fled the stadium in despair at the half, the score was Kosg-Anjehn 37, Ken’s Computer Repair 7.

  The final score was 57 to 14. The Brish’diri had emptied their bench in the second half.

  Hill didn’t have the courage to attend the next Brish’diri game later in the week. But nearly everyone else in the city showed up to see if the Kosg-Anjehn could do it again.

  They did. In fact, they did even better. They beat Anderson’s Drugs by a lopsided 61 to 9 score.

  After the Brish’diri won their third contest, 43 to 17, the huge crowds began tapering off. The Starport Municipal Stadium was only three-quarters full when the Kosg-Anjehn rolled over the Stardusters, 38 to 0, and a mere handful showed up on a rainy Thursday afternoon to see the aliens punish the United Veterans Association 51 to 6. And no one came after that.

  For Hill, the Brish’diri win o
ver the UVA-sponsored team was the final straw. The local paper made a heyday out of that, going on and on about the “ironic injustice” of having the UVA slaughtered by the Brish’diri in a stadium dedicated to the dead veterans of the Brish’diri ‘War. And Hill, of course, was the main villain in the piece.

  The phone calls had finally let up by that point. But the mail had been flowing into his office steadily, and most of it was not very comforting. The harassed Rec director got a few letters of commendation and support, but the bulk of the flood speculated crudely about his ancestry or threatened his life and property.

  Two more city councilmen had come out publicly in favor of Hill’s dismissal after the Brish’diri defeated UVA. Several others on the council were wavering, while Hill’s supporters, who backed him strongly in private, were afraid to say anything for the record. The municipal elections were simply too close, and none were willing to risk their political skins.

  And of course the assistant director of recreation, next in line for Hill’s job, had wasted no time in saying he would certainly never have done such an unpatriotic thing.

  With disaster piling upon disaster, it was only natural that Hill reacted with something less than enthusiasm when he walked into his office a few days after the fifth Kosg-Anjehn victory and found Tomkins sitting at his desk waiting for him.

  “And what in the hell do you want now?” Hill roared at the E. T. Relations man.

  Tomkins looked slightly abashed, and got up from the director’s chair. He had been watching the latest free-fall football results on the desk console while waiting for Hill to arrive.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” Tomkins said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “We’ve got lots of problems,” Hill replied. He strode angrily to his desk, sat down, flicked off the console, and pulled a sheaf of papers from a drawer.

  “This is the latest of them,” he continued, waving the papers at Tomkins. “One of the kids broke his leg in the Starduster game. It happens all the time. Football’s a rough game. You can’t do anything to prevent it. On a normal case, the department would send a letter of apology to the parents, our insurance would pay for it, and everything would be forgotten.

  “But not in this case. Oh, no. This injury was inflicted while the kid was playing against the Brish’diri. So his parents are charging negligence on our part and suing the city. So our insurance company refuses to pay up. It claims the policy doesn’t cover damage by inhuman, superstrong, alien monsters. Bah! How’s that for a problem, Mr. Tomkins? Plenty more where that came from.”

  Tomkins frowned. “Very unfortunate. But my problem is a lot more serious than that.” Hill started to interrupt, but the E. T. Relations man waved him down. “No, please, hear me out. This is very important.”

  He looked around for a seat, grabbed the nearest chair, and pulled it up to the desk. “Our plans have backfired badly,” he began. “There has been a serious miscalculation—our fault entirely, I’m afraid. E. T. Relations failed to consider all the ramifications of this Brish’diri football team.”

  Hill fixed him with an iron stare. “What’s wrong now?”

  “Well,” Tomkins said awkwardly, “we knew that refusal to admit the Kosg-Anjehn into your league would be a sign of human weakness and fear to the Brish’diri war faction. But once you admitted them, we thought the problem was solved.

  “It wasn’t. We went wrong when we assumed that winning or losing would make no difference to the Brish’diri. To us, it was just a game. Didn’t matter who won. After all, Brish’diri and Terrans would be getting to know each other, competing harmlessly on even terms. Nothing but good could come from it, we felt.”

  “So?” Hill interrupted. “Get to the point.”

  Tomkins shook his head sadly. “The point is, we didn’t know the Brish’diri would win so big. And so regularly.” He paused. “We—uh—we got a transmission late last night from one of our men on Brishun. It seems the Brish’diri war faction is using the one-sided football scores as propaganda to prove the racial inferiority of humans. They seem to be getting a lot of mileage out of it.”

  Hill winced. “So it was all for nothing. So I’ve subjected myself to all this abuse and endangered my career for absolutely nothing. Great! That was all I needed, I tell you.”

  “We still might be able to salvage something,” Tomkins said. “That’s why I came to see you. If you can arrange it for the Brish’diri to lose, it would knock holes in that superiority yarn and make the war faction look like fools. It would discredit them for quite a while.”

  “And just how am I supposed to arrange for them to lose, as you so nicely put it? What do you think I’m running here anyway, professional wrestling?”

  Tomkins just shrugged lamely. “I was hoping you’d have some ideas,” he said.

  Hill leaned forward, and flicked on his intercom. “Is Jack out there?” he asked. “Good. Send him in.”

  The lanky sports official appeared less than a minute later. “You’re on top of this City football mess,” Hill said. “What’s the chances the Kosg-Anjehn will lose?”

  De Angelis looked puzzled. “Not all that good, offhand,” he replied. “They’ve got a damn fine team.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a notebook. “Let me check their schedule,” he continued, thumbing through the pages. He stopped when he found the place.

  “Well, the league’s got a round-robin schedule, as you know. Every team plays every other team once, best record is champion. Now the Brish’diri are currently five to zero, and they’ve beaten a few of the better teams. We’ve got ten teams left in the league, so they’ve got four games left to play. Only, two of those are with the weakest teams in the league, and the third opponent is only mediocre.”

  “And the fourth?” Hill said hopefully.

  “That’s your only chance. An outfit sponsored by a local tavern, the Blastoff Inn. Good team. Fast, strong. Plenty of talent. They’re also five to zero, and should give the Brish’diri some trouble.” De Angelis frowned. “But, to be frank, I’ve seen both teams, and I’d still pick the Brish’diri. That ground game of theirs is just too much.” He snapped the notebook shut and pocketed it again.

  “Would a close game be good enough?” Hill said, turning to Tomkins again.

  The E. T. Relations man shook his head. “No. They have to be beaten. If they lose, the whole season’s meaningless. Proves nothing but that the two races can compete on roughly equal terms. But if they win, it looks like they’re invincible, and our stature in Brish’diri eyes takes a nose dive.”

  “Then they’ll have to lose, I guess,” Hill said. His gaze shifted back to De Angelis. “Jack, you and me are going to have to do some hard thinking about how the Kosg-Anjehn can be beaten. And then we’re going to call up the manager of the Blastoff Inn team and give him a few tips. You have any ideas?”

  De Angelis scratched his head thoughtfully. “Well—” he began. “Maybe we—”

  During the weeks that followed, De Angelis met with the Blastoff Inn coach regularly to discuss plans and strategy, and supervised a few practice sessions. Hill, meanwhile, was fighting desperately to keep his job, and jotting down ideas on how to beat the Brish’diri during every spare moment

  Untouched by the furor, the Kosg-Anjehn won its sixth game handily, 40 to 7, and then rolled to devastating victories over the circuit’s two cellar-dwellers. The margins were 73 to 0 and 62 to 7. That gave them an unblemished 8 to 0 ledger, with one game left to play.

  But the Blastoff Inn team was also winning regularly, although never as decisively. It too would enter the last game of the season undefeated.

  The local news heralded the showdown with a sports-section streamer on the day before the game. The lead opened, “The stakes will be high for the entire human race tomorrow at Municipal Stadium, when Blastoff Inn meets the Brish’diri Baldy Eagles for the championship of the Department of Recreation City Football League.”

  The reporter who wrote th
e story never dreamed how close to the truth he actually was.

  The crowds returned to the stadium for the championship game, although they fell far short of a packed house. The local reporter was there too. But the 3-V networks and the newsfax wires were long gone. The novelty of the story had worn off quickly.

  Hill arrived late, just before game time, and joined Tomkins on the fifty-yard line. The E. T. agent seemed to have cheered up somewhat. “Our guys looked pretty good during the warm-up,” he told the director. “I think we’ve got a chance.”

  His enthusiasm was not catching, however. “Blastoff Inn might have a chance, but I sure don’t,” Hill said glumly. “The city council is meeting tonight to consider a motion for calling for my dismissal. I have a strong suspicion that it’s going to pass, no matter who wins this afternoon.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Tomkins, for want of anything better to say. “Just ignore the old fools. Look, the game’s starting.”

  Hill muttered something under his breath and turned his attention back to the field. The Brish’diri had lost the toss once more, and the kickoff had once again soared out of the stadium. It was first-and-ten for Blastoff Inn on its own twenty.

  And at that point the script suddenly changed.

  The humans lined up for their first play of the game but with a difference. Instead of playing immediately in back of the center, the Blastoff quarterback was several yards deep, in a shotgun formation.

  The idea, Hill recalled, was to take maximum advantage of human speed, and mount a strong passing offense. Running against the Brish’diri was all but impossible, he and De Angelis had concluded after careful consideration. That meant an aerial attack, and the only way to provide that was to give the Blastoff quarterback time to pass. Ergo, the shotgun formation.

  The hike from center was dead on target and the Blastoff receivers shot off downfield, easily outpacing the ponderous Brish’diri defensemen. As usual, the Kosg-Anjehn crashed through the line en masse, but they had covered only half the distance to the quarterback before he got off the pass.

  It was a long bomb, a psychological gambit to shake up the Brish’diri by scoring on the first play of the game. Unfortunately, the pass was slightly overthrown.