by Ben Bova
The curved metal arm cranked again. The ball came whizzing to the plate. Strike two. “Ole!” Louder this time. Castro leaned back on the dugout bench and clasped his hands behind his head. His grin was as wide as a superhighway.
But on the third pitch Harry managed to get his bat around and cracked a solid single, over their shortstop’s head. The first real hit of the day for us.
The crowd went absolutely silent.
Castro looked up and down his bench, then made a big shrug. He wasn’t worried.
I was. It was my turn at bat. All I had to show for three previous trips to the plate was a strikeout and two pop flies.
Automatically, I looked down to our third-base coach. He was staring into the dugout. Nixon scratched his nose, tugged at the bill of his cap, and ran a hand across the letters on the front of his shirt. The coach’s eyes goggled. But he scratched his nose, tugged at his cap, and ran his hand across the letters.
Hit and run.
Damn! I’m supposed to poke the first pitch into right field while Harry breaks for second as soon as the pitcher starts his—its—delivery. Terrific strategy, when the chances are the damned ball will be in the catcher’s mitt before I can get the bat off my shoulder. Nixon’s trying to be a genius. Well, at least when they throw Harry out at second, the game’ll be over and I won’t have to make the final out.
The mechanical monster starts its windup, Harry breaks from first, and wham! the ball’s past me. I wave my bat kind of feebly, just to make the catcher’s job a little bit tougher.
But his throw is late. Raoul’s windup took so much time that Harry made it to second easy.
I look down to the third-base coach again.
Same sign. Hit and run. Sweet Jesus! Now he wants Harry to head for third. I grit my teeth and pound the bat on the plate. Stealing second is a lot easier than stealing third.
Raoul swings his mechanical arm around, Harry breaks for third, and the ball comes whizzing at me. I swing at it but it’s already in the catcher’s mitt and he’s throwing to third. Harry dives in headfirst and the umpire calls him safe. By a fingernail.
The crowd is muttering now, rumbling like a dark thundercloud. The tying run’s on third.
And I’ve got two strikes on me.
Nixon slumps deeper on the bench in the dugout, his face lost in shadow. Both Harry and our third-base coach are staring in at him. He twitches and fidgets. The coach turns to me and rubs his jaw.
Hit away. I’m on my own.
No, my whole life didn’t flash before my eyes, but it might as well have. Old Raoul out there on the mound hadn’t thrown anything but strikes since the fourth inning. One more strike and I’m out and the game’s over and we’ve lost. The only time I got any wood on the ball I produced a feeble pop fly. There was only one thing I could think of that had any chance.
You can throw, you goddamned Commie tin can, I said silently to the robot. But can you field?
Raoul cranked up his metal arm again, and I squared away and slid my hand halfway up the bat. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see the Cuban infielders suddenly reacting to the idea that I was going to bunt. The first and third basemen started rushing in toward me. But too late. The pitch was already on its way.
Harry saw it, too, and started galloping for home.
I just stuck my bat in front of the ball, holding it limply to deaden the impact. I had always been a good bunter, and this one had to be perfect.
It damned near was. I nudged the ball right back toward the mound. It trickled along the grass as I lit out for first, thinking, “Let’s see you handle that, Raoul.”
Sonofabitch if the mechanical monster didn’t roll itself down off the mound and scoop up the ball as neatly as a vacuum cleaner picking up a fuzzball. I was less than halfway to first and I knew that I had goofed. I was dead meat.
Raoul the Robot sucked up the ball, spun itself around to face first base, and fired the baseball like a bullet to the guy covering the bag. It got there ten strides ahead of me, tore the glove off the fielder’s hand, and kept on going deep into right field, past the foul line.
My heart bounced from my throat to my stomach and then back again. Raoul had only three pitches: fast, faster, and fastest. The poor sucker covering first base had never been shot at so hard. He never had a chance to hold on to the ball.
Harry scored, of course, and I must have broken the world record for going from first to third. I slid into the bag in a storm of dust and dirt, an eyelash ahead of the throw.
The game was tied. The winning run—me!—was on third base, ninety feet away from home.
And the stadium was dead quiet again. Castro came out to the mound and they didn’t even applaud him. The catcher and the whole infield clustered around him and the robot. Castro, taller than all his players, turned and pointed at somebody in the dugout.
“He’s bringin’ in a relief pitcher!” our third-base coach said.
No such luck. A stumpy little guy who was built kind of like the robot himself, thick and solid, like a fireplug, came trudging out of the dugout with something like a tool kit in one hand. He was wearing a mechanic’s coveralls, not a baseball uniform.
They tinkered with Raoul for about ten minutes, while the crowd got restless and Nixon shambled out of our dugout to tell the umpires that the Cubans should be penalized for delaying the game.
“This ain’t football, Mr. President,” said the chief umpire.
Nixon grumbled and mumbled and went back inside the dugout.
Finally, the repair job at the mound was finished. The infielders dispersed and the repairman trotted off the field. Castro stayed at the mound while Raoul made a few practice pitches.
Kee-rist! Now he didn’t wind up at all. He just swung the arm around once and fired the ball to the catcher. Faster than ever.
And our batter, Pedro Valencia, had struck out three straight times. Never even managed to tick the ball foul. Not once. Nine pitches, nine strikes, three strikeouts.
I looked at the coach, a couple of feet away from me. No sign. No strategy,. I was on my own.
Pedro stepped into the batter’s box. Raoul stood up on the mound. His mechanical arm swung around and something that looked like an aspirin tablet whizzed into the catcher’s mitt. “Ole!” Strike one.
I took a good-sized lead off third base. Home plate was only a dozen strides away. The shortstop took the catcher’s toss and popped the ball into the robot’s slot.
If I stole home, we would win. If I got thrown out, we would lose for sure. Raoul could keep pitching like that all day, all night, all week. Sooner or later we’d tire out and they’d beat us. We’d never get another runner to third base. It was up to me. Now.
I didn’t wait for the damned robot to start his pitch. He had the ball, he was on the mound, nobody had called time out. I broke for the plate.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I could see the surprised expression on Pedro’s face. But he was a pro; he hung in there and swung at the pitch. Missed it. The catcher had the ball in his mitt and I was still three strides up the line. I started a slide away from him, toward the pitcher’s side of the plate. He lunged at me, the ball in his bare hand.
I felt him tag my leg. And I heard the umpire yell, “Out … no, safe!”
I was sitting on the ground. The catcher was on top of me, grabbing for the ball as it rolled away from us both. He had dropped it.
Before I could recover from the shock, he whispered from behind his mask, “You ween. Now we have to play another series. In the States, no?”
I spit dust from my mouth. He got to his feet. “See you in Peetsborgh, no?”
He had dropped the damned ball on purpose. He wanted to come to the States and play for my team, the Pirates.
By now the whole USA team was grabbing me and hiking me up on their shoulders. Nixon was already riding along, his arms upraised in his old familiar victory gesture. The fans were giving us a grudging round of applause. We had won—even i
f it took a deliberate error by a would-be defector.
In the locker room, news correspondents from all the Latin American nations descended on us. Fortunately, my Spanish was up to the task. They crowded around me, and I told them what it was like to live in Miami and get the chance to play big-league baseball. I told them about my father, and how he had fled from Cuba with nothing but his wife and infant son—me—twenty-three years ago. I knew we had won on a fluke, but I still felt damned good about winning.
Finally the reporters and photographers were cleared out of the locker room, and Nixon stood on one of the benches, a telegram in his hand, tears in his eyes.
“Men,” he said, “I have good news and bad news.”
We clustered around him.
“The good news is that the President of the United States,” his voice quavered a little, “has invited all of us to the White House. You’re all going to receive medals from the President himself.”
Smiles all around.
“And now the bad news,” he went on. “The President has agreed to a series against a Japanese team —the Mitsubishi Marvels. They’re all robots. Each and every one of them.”
The Jefferson Orbit
In 1975 my beautiful wife, Barbara, and I traveled to Melbourne for the World Science Fiction Convention. While in Australia we met many, many wonderful people. The Aussies are fine and hospitable hosts. We didn’t draw a sober breath for two weeks.
Back then, if you had more than a single beer with an Aussie, he would fix you with a beady stare and mutter, “By heaven, Yank, if the America’s Cup races were sailed here, we’d win!” To which I would always reply, “Well, maybe. But first you’ve got to go to Newport and win the Cup.” Which they have since done, and more credit to them.
But at one particular cocktail party, one of the top lawyers in Australia was crying in his beer (literally!) because he was having enormous difficulties getting a fair trial for a group of prison convicts he was representing. The convicts had staged a sit-down strike or some such, if memory serves me, and the prison guards had thoroughly and methodically beaten them with billy clubs. Our lawyer friend was trying to get the convicts’ case heard in court. No go. The courts refused to hear it.
“And the newspapers won’t even print the story,” he complained bitterly.
I was shocked. “What do you mean they won’t print the story?” I’m a former newspaper reporter, and my blood was up. (Heavily fortified with alcohol.)
“They can’t. Government won’t let them.”
“That’s impossible!” I cried. “We’ve got freedom of the press!”
“No, Yank,” he said sadly. “You’ve got freedom of the press. We have a government censor.”
That is when it hit me. Every nation in the world has a government censor. Except one.
“The Jefferson Orbit” looks at how our ideas of freedom of expression are faring in the world of communications satellites. To summarize, it’s Jefferson 1, Censorship 102.
It’s called the Clarke Orbit, that lovely band in space 22,300 miles above Earth’s equator, where a satellite’s revolution around the planet exactly matches the Earth’s own rotation, so that the satellite hangs over the same spot on the equator all the time.
It’s the ideal location for communications satellites, as Arthur C. Clarke figured out in 1945: hence the orbit is named for him.
But it is also the site for a quietly intense struggle between those who believe in Jeffersonian freedom and those who don’t—which is why this “far frontier” of human technology might also be dubbed the Jefferson Orbit.
Futurists (i.e., science fiction writers who are dull) are fond of predicting that our rapidly advancing communications technology will soon create a “global village,” where ancient differences and animosities among people and nations will be washed away by a new wave of electronic information and understanding.
Perhaps so. But most of the governments of the world are fighting their hardest to prevent this bright new vision from becoming reality. They do not want to become members of a “global village.” They would rather keep the walls around their borders high and tight.
If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, then we had better look to the skies, and especially to the Clarke Orbit. For the nations of the world are arguing over who may use that orbit, and how. In that battle the United States is a lonely and outnumbered champion of the Jeffersonian ideal of freedom of information. Practically every other nation in the world is lined up against us, in favor of censorship.
The direct broadcast satellite is what the battle is all about: a bitter lesson in how politics can sidetrack the futurists’ dreams of better living through technology.
We tend to take communications satellites for granted, like weather satellites and interplanetary probes and space shuttles. Last week I picked up my telephone and chatted for half an hour with Arthur Clarke. He was at his home in Sri Lanka, I in my home in Connecticut. Except for a barely noticeable lag caused by the travel time of the microwave signals over a nearly 50,000-mile distance up to the commsat and back, the conversation was as normal as a call to the folks next door.
A few days later I conversed with a group of students and teachers at the University of Honolulu over a closed-circuit slow-scan television link. We sent pictures back and forth in much the same way that Voyager spacecraft have sent pictures from Jupiter and Saturn. Again, our communications link was relayed by a geostationary communications satellite.
Satellites are revolutionizing our communications systems, and the revolution has just barely begun. NASA and General Electric have developed a portable communications system that fits into two suitcases; it can send messages, relayed by satellite, to almost anyplace in the western hemisphere. Technology available today can produce wrist communicators that are telephones, television sets, and computers, all in one compact package. Professor Gerard O’Neill, father of the L5 space-colony concept, is marketing a hand-sized navigational aid that will pinpoint your location to within a couple of feet, anywhere on Earth, once the proper satellites have been hung in the geostationary orbit.
But the biggest change to affect the communications industry, and the change that will show its effects the soonest, is the direct broadcast satellite (DBS). This change began in 1974, when the United States orbited its ATS-6 satellite over the Indian Ocean; for more than a year this satellite beamed farming, hygiene, and safety information to more than four thousand villages in India. Thanks in large part to Clarke, the villages received from the Indian government inexpensive antenna “dishes” that could pick up the signal broadcast across the entire subcontinent by ATS-6. This was the first practical test of DBS.
The basic idea of DBS is elegantly simple: transmit television broadcasts directly from an orbiting satellite to individual homes. No need for television broadcasting or cable stations on the ground; a single satellite can beam its signal to almost half the world at once. Already today, the Japanese Broadcast Company, NHK of Tokyo, sells a two-foot-wide “dish” antenna to receive DBS signals for less than $350.
Today, you can see larger antenna dishes sitting on the parking lots behind motels, on the roofs of office buildings, even alongside private homes. These dishes are aimed at existing geostationary satellites, and they take in the television signals broadcast by those satellites—directly, without going through an intermediary broadcasting or cable station.
For less than the price of an automobile, you can buy one of those satellite dishes and tune in directly to the television signals broadcast your way. But you will not be tuning in to direct broadcast satellites. Instead, you will be eavesdropping on signals intended for the receiving antennas of commercial broadcasting stations or cable stations.
However, satellites that do broadcast directly to individual rooftop or parking lot dishes are now going into orbit. And the new technology of DBS has caused a furor in the international political arena.
For although the United States, with its Jeff
ersonian tradition of freedom of expression, is wholeheartedly in favor of DBS, most of the other nations of the world are much more cautious about opening the skies to direct satellite-to-home broadcasting.
The basic idea behind DBS is simple enough. Space technology has reached the point where satellites of considerable size and sophistication can be orbited rather routinely. Telstar I, launched in 1962, weighed 170 pounds and could handle twelve phone circuits or one television channel. Intelsat V, launched in 1980, weighs 2,200 pounds and carries twelve thousand voice circuits plus two television channels.
With the advent of the space shuttle, it is now possible to build much larger and more complex satellites in space, even linking modules together in low Earth orbit and then, after checking out the assembled satellite, sending it on to an assigned position in geostationary orbit.
The more powerful and sophisticated the satellite, the simpler and cheaper can be the ground antennas that receive the satellite’s signals. Thus the DBS idea is to put most of the complexity and expense into the satellite, so that the cost of the ground antennas will be so low that millions of customers can afford to buy them.
Jerry Nelson, chairman of the board of Antenna Technology Corporation of Orlando, Florida, has watched the market for satellite antennas explode over the past few years. Antenna Technology sells mainly to the commercial market: business offices, hotels, and the like. Sales are climbing steeply, he says, and the market for home antennas will reach the multimillions when DBS comes on the domestic scene.
But it may still be too soon to rush out and buy a dish, because powerful forces within the international political community are working hard to prevent DBS from becoming a reality.
These forces are led by the so-called Group of 77, a bloc of Third World nations that now numbers more than 120 countries. The basic goal of the Group of 77 is to create a “new international economic order” based on the rationale that “fundamental justice requires that those who receive the raw materials and natural resources that fuel and feed industrialized economies must be required to pay a significant share of their economic wealth in exchange for access to those resources.” (Italics added.)
