by John Shirley
Zajac stood and stretched. The others hurried to complete their dressing. He took his gauntlets and boots and helmet and walked in his stockinged feet across the carpet of the locker room to the corridor leading to the shuttlecraft. Inside the shuttle he took his place on the long padded seat. He was all alone. There was a loud humming in the shuttle; it annoyed him and he tried to block it out. He busied himself. He went to the rack of hockey sticks against the aft bulkhead and found one of his. He used a low lie Victoriaville, a number four. He carried it back to his seat and rubbed the blades of his skates against the stick, dulling them a little. You had to do this for every game; if the skates were too sharp, they tended to stick to the ice, rather than cutting and gliding. You’d have a restricted stride and a little trouble turning. On ice, on water ice back on Earth, this would be inconvenient and might cost a player and his team eventually in the final score. On Niflhel, where the ice was made of complex hydrocarbons frozen harder than steel by the fearful coldness of space, that kind of inconvenience could develop into a perilous situation. One of the secrets of the game—not much of a secret, really, because every player in the league understood it well enough—was that you had to keep moving. The weight of the person pressed the skates into the surface, the pressure melted a molecular layer of the hydrocarbon ice under the blade, just enough to allow the skate to slide along. If the skate stood there a millisecond too long, though, it froze in place and Niflhel had itself a brand new surface feature. The skates could be loosed from the boots, being held there by the same dileucithane tape that closed the uniform gauntlets and boots. But that meant the player, skateless, would have to run and slide over the ice, on the broad boot bottoms, and it was unlikely that anyone could travel that way more than three steps without falling. The layer of melted hydrocarbon ice under a human foot made virtually a frictionless surface. And a fall in that situation could prove fatal.
So the players kept moving. Even the goalies, who wouldn’t see action nearby sometimes for the greater part of the game, even they skated back and forth, around and around their domains, rather than become brittle, frozen statues on the face of the little green world.
After a few minutes five other Condors filed into the shuttle. They took seats and waited. The coach didn’t come with them; there wasn’t a single thing he could do for the team down on the surface of Niflhel. From the station two hundred fifty miles above he could monitor the game and make decisions. The rest of the team, the substitutes, stayed behind with the coach, ready to be ferried down when they were needed. The starting six players looked at each other, just a little nervously. Zajac felt a little tension, a little tightening of his shoulders, a little tingling in his head and hands. It would have distressed a rookie, but it was vaguely pleasant to Zajac. He welcomed it. He had learned long ago to use every bit of his pregame agitation, to channel and focus it all.
“Well, Jackie, what do you think?” Zajac turned to face Gill, Number 16, the starting center. Zajac had no close friends, but he had played alongside Gill for more than five years and they had a kind of wordless communication on the ice, a coordinated effort that derived from intelligence and long experience. Conviviality counted for little on the glacial plain.
“No problem,” said Zajac. His face was expressionless.
“Right,” said Gill, “no problem.” He seemed a little uncomfortable, as though, despite knowing Zajac’s mood and manner, he wanted to make a deeper, more personal contact. “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” said Zajac. “I feel good. You?”
Gill was quiet for a moment. He knew that he was being outmaneuvered. Whatever he said, Zajac would reply with just the right words to kill the conversation. Even when Zajac asked about Gill’s condition, he did it in a way that demanded a meaningless answer. “Great,” said Gill sadly, “really great. I got to tape.” He busied himself taping his stick, winding the pearl gray dileucithane tape around the flat part of the stick’s blade, just where he would want to keep the puck as he moved it down the ice toward the Stingers’ goal.
The trip down took almost thirty minutes. Zajac used the time to finish checking out his suit. He put on the boots and skates, tucking the ends of the suit’s legs into the high tops of the boots, then winding gray tape tightly around the ankles of the boots. Dileucithane tape had the molecules of its sticky stuff polarized on one side. When the tape was stretched tight and wrapped over itself, no man alive was strong enough to pull it apart. A weak electric current, however, applied from within the suit, released the hold and the tape became just a dull-colored length of rough cloth. There was no way to pull the boots off without first removing the tape; Zajac’s foot would pull off first.
Next he checked the neoprene laces of the boots and the tape that held the skates themselves tight. In the first year of the association, players used skates brought from Earth made for use under Earthlike conditions. The rawhide thongs held moisture, froze as solid as a rope of glass, and shattered under the first application of stress. Men suffered because of that small unforeseen aspect of the eternal winter. It didn’t take long, though, to find replacement materials that wouldn’t be affected by the temperatures near absolute zero. Dynaprene, neoprene, and dileucithane performed perfectly. Or, at least, well enough so that no one had perished on the pale ice fields since their introduction.
Zajac nested his helmet into the locking rings around the neck of his uniform suit. He heard the buzz and click of the helmet’s circuits cutting in. He saw the projection of the playing field at the top of the faceplate, a rectangular map laying on its long side with two vertical slashes for the goals and a vertical stripe for the center line. The map represented the whole field of play, which was huge, immense compared to the hockey rinks on Earth. The rectangle marked out on the surface of Niflhel measured one mile by three.
Zajac touched on the receiver and switched from one channel to another. On the first channel he heard two of his teammates talking to each other, telling grotesque stories in two languages. On the second channel there was only static; later he would be able to hear the communications of the Stingers’ players, scrambled so that none of the Condors could intercept their strategy. On the third channel there was gentle music, instrumental versions of show tunes from faraway stage successes and popular entertainers. During the game on the fourth channel he would be able to hear the coach’s directions; now there was only the sound of slow, regular breathing, a kind of irritating whistling, and the coach’s unconscious humming. Zajac switched to the fifth channel and listened to the internal communications of the orbiting station.
A red warning light flickered on his faceplate, indicating that his suit’s integrity was breached. Of course that was true, since he hadn’t put on his gauntlets and closed the sleeves of the uniform. He did that, winding the dileucithane tape around his forearms. He was now sealed into the suit, and he made a quick check of the life support circuits. Every gauge showed green, healthy, fine, perfect, ready to go. Zajac clutched his stick and waited for landfall.
The shuttle set down in a great silent explosion of clouds of methane and formaldehyde liberated from the craggy face of Niflhel. The hydrocarbons sublimed instantly, invisibly, from ice to gas, leaving ringed depressions of melted frost which solidified immediately into pocked craters. Václav Zajac climbed out of the shuttle and skated away in long, lazy curves. The shuttle shook and flared and lifted back into the black sky, but he didn’t watch it go. The men from the Niflhel station were delivered one by one to their starting positions on the ice. When they left the shuttle they skated around in circles, getting the feel of the hard ice again, enjoying the freedom and the peace, welcoming the change from their devastatingly dull jobs in orbit. They waited for the arrival of the Rome IV Stingers. They didn’t care how long that would take.
“Here they come,” said a voice over Zajac’s receiver. He looked up and saw another shuttle—or maybe the same one, he couldn’t tell.
“Okay, boys, line up,” said Gi
ll, who was the team’s captain. “Niflhel Station, this is Gill. Plug in the position markers, please.”
“Right, Maxie,” said a voice from the station. Zajac’s faceplate lit up with seven colored dots, laid over the rectangular map of the playing field. Five of the dots were green, and represented the positions of Zajac’s teammates. One dot was orange, resting on the center stripe, and marked the puck. One dot was fiery red, and showed Zajac’s own relative position. When the Stingers hit the ice, they would show up as blue dots. The system was necessary because for extended stretches of play some of the players would be out of sight of each other.
Even with the suit lamps and the photo amplifiers in the helmets, the upper limit of visibility was slightly under twelve hours. The game lasted fourteen hours by the clock on the orbiting station. A skater’s endurance was figured at about eight hours; after that his judgment and precision began to suffer, to deteriorate so rapidly that very shortly he had difficulty merely keeping himself upright. It was the coach’s job to keep track of his players’ condition by monitoring their vital signs and analyzing their performance during the game. Substitutions were made carefully, protecting the players and preventing the other team from seizing an advantage. The coach’s role was vital. The game was more than a battle to wrestle a neoprene puck into the other team’s cage; it was a deft balance of strength and conditioning, of skill and shrewd guesswork and decision.
Václav Zajac skated in the twilight at his wing position. He was stationed at a point one mile from his team’s goal, where Moro patrolled the six-foot-wide net, and a half mile from the center line. He was at one wing, a quarter mile from Gill at center, a half mile from Pete Soniat at the other wing. A half mile behind him were the two defensemen, Seidl and Brickman. He saw their green dots on his faceplate, wavering about as they skated around waiting for the game to begin. The orange puck still rested at center ice. There would be no face-off as such; referees were of little value on a playing field of three square miles. They couldn’t hope to follow all of the action and catch all of the penalties. The game would begin when a signal bell sounded in their helmets, triggered by an association observer and impartial umpire aboard the orbiting station. As for fouls—there weren’t any. The play sometimes got a little testy and just a little physical, but real fights were infrequent because the suits were so well padded and insulated that a punch did little damage.
The bell rang. Gill shot off his mark toward the stationary puck. His opposite number on the Rome IV team raced toward him. Zajac and Soniat angled toward the center, skating easily. There was no chatter on the first channel; Zajac switched to channel four, to hear the coach. “All right, boys,” said the coach, “let’s go, let’s go.” The coach didn’t have anything terribly cogent to suggest yet; it was all cheerleading until somebody got hold of the puck. That wouldn’t be for a few minutes, because Gill had a half mile to skate before he could begin to locate it.
“They’re fanning out, Jackie,” said the coach. When he had something. important to say, he could broadcast on both channels one and four.
“Right, I hear you, coach,” said Zajac. He saw on his faceplate the rapid movement of the Stinger wings heading out from their starting position. They were going to flank the Condors’ front line, gambling, banking that their center would come up with the puck and then they’d be past the Condors’ first line of defense without a struggle. Of course, if Gill reached the puck first the Stingers would be in bad shape. “Pete,” called Zajac to his other wing, “what do you want to do?”
“What’s it look like, Maxie?” asked Soniat.
“Too soon,” said Gill, huffing a little as he sprinted toward the center line.
“Maxie has it,” said the coach calmly. “The projection is that he’ll reach the puck forty-four seconds before their boy.”
“We’ll be through them,” said Soniat.
“Sixteen strong side,” said the coach, calling the play.
“Okay,” said Soniat.
“Right,” said Gill.
“Did you hear that?” asked Zajac. The two defensemen behind him answered that they did.
“That’s assuming Maxie doesn’t fall on his face getting there,” said Moro from his lonely goalie post.
“Uh,” snorted Gill.
The two wingers, Zajac and Soniat, were converging on center ice. When the three Condor players got sufficiently close together, they would appear as one large blue blur on the faceplates of the Stingers. The puck would be a muted glow submerged beneath them. One of the Condors would carry the puck toward the Stinger goal and the others would swing away, but it would be a moment before the dots on the faceplate maps would separate enough for the Stingers’ defensemen to know who had the puck and in what direction he was going. Those seconds would mean a considerable head start. Under normal circumstances it would be almost impossible for the Stingers to chase down the puck carrier. Only superb play and a good deal of luck would save them. The Condors would converge again in the area of the goal, so the Stinger goalie would not have advance warning of where the puck was coming from. He would see three streaking Condor skaters, and have no notion which man would be the attacker. They would come at him from straight on and from oblique angles to the right and left, and he would be helpless until the final instant of the approach. Then everyone watching the game would learn what the poor man’s reactions were like.
Soniat would take the puck off to the left, crossing the routes of Gill and Zajac. The three would weave their way down the ice, skating apart as far as an eighth of a mile and then returning, passing the puck to each other whenever one of the Stinger defensemen seemed to analyze the pattern too well.
The play was a good one. The trouble was that it just never got off the ground.
“Damn it to hell,” muttered Gill in Zajac’s ear.
“What’s wrong?” asked the coach.
“The damn puck isn’t here.”
“Oh boy,” murmured Seidl, “he missed it.”
“I was off by less than a hundred yards,” said Gill. “Get moving, Maxie!”
“Too late, he’s got it,” said Gill. “Look out, here he comes.”
“We see him,” said Zajac. Because he and Soniat had been closing in, they weren’t far from the Stinger center’s path. Gill hooked around in vain pursuit, but Zajac closed in on an angle that would intercept the puck carrier before either of the Rome IV wingers could arrive to help out.
“Take it away, take it away,” called Moro. Calling out encouragement was about all he had to do at this stage of the game.
“I’ll get the son of a buck,” said Gill. He was still trailing Zajac, who was shortening the distance between himself and the puck carrier. After a minute he announced that he had visual contact with the Stinger center.
“Crease the bastard!” cried the coach. The game transformed him from a pleasant, amiable technician into a half-crazy commander who lusted to get out on the ice himself.
“Exactly what I’m going to do,” said Zajac. Some players would have skated alongside the opposing player, trying to fish the puck away with swipes of the stick. Zajac’s technique was a little more direct, and accounted for his intimidating reputation. The two men skated directly at each other; for a while it seemed that the Stinger center didn’t know Zajac was coming. Then he must have been warned, because he looked up and jerked as if startled. He began skating away from Zajac, but Zajac was faster. He closed the gap between them, coming in from the Stinger’s side. He let himself glide past the man a few feet, planted one skate, and swung around. Zajac took off after the puck carrier and caught up to him in five or six powerful strides. They skated silently together, matched stroke for stroke. The Stinger protected the puck by changing his stick to his other hand, keeping the puck out of range of a slashing reach by Zajac, but that wasn’t Zajac’s plan. He, too, transferred his stick to his outside hand. He raised his left arm to shoulder height, then brought it down and back, catching the Stinger skater in the
chest with his elbow. The man leaned backward, arms flailing, off balance. Zajac gave him a slight push, and the nameless man toppled over on the ice. Zajac slapped the puck away a few feet, skated after it, then changed direction and began cutting smoothly back toward Maxie Gill, the center line, and—one-and-a-half miles beyond—the Stinger goal.
“You got it?” asked the coach.
“Sure,” said Zajac, not even breathing hard, “no problem.”
“No problem,” said Gill.
“Way to go, Jackie,” said Brickman.
“Sixteen strong side?” asked Soniat.
“As before,” said the coach. “Nice playing, Jackie.” Zajac aimed for his rendezvous with Gill and Soniat.
The play developed exactly as it had so many times on the coach’s animated board. Zajac brought the puck up, fed it to Gill. Zajac crossed over to the left wing, Gill continued up the middle, then passed the puck to Soniat. Soniat drove toward the goal, and Gill slipped into the right wing. Soniat crossed left, abandoned the puck to Zajac, and Zajac skated toward Gill. The puck leapt from blade to blade, and the puck carrier swooped and changed. The three men wove a braided pattern in the ancient chill of Niflhel. Soon the Stingers were faced with a problem. Only two defensemen, and then the goalie, stood between the three Condors and the first score of the game. The Stingers would have to make a choice, and a speculative one at that. It would be a poor decision for both defensemen to gang up on a single charging Condor lineman, so each picked one of the three and intercepted. One of the Rome IV skaters went after Gill, and the other decided upon Soniat. At that precise moment, however, Zajac had the puck on the right wing, and undeterred he sped through the last of the Condor defense, unhindered now toward the goal.
“Nothing to it now, Jackie,” said Gill, a little short of breath.
“Breakaway, breakaway!” chanted the coach. He had offered a minimum of thoughtful guidance, but so far this game hadn’t needed any.
