seemed to me, though, that if Thumper had found them hiding, they could have made up some excuse and gotten out of there. Moreover, they were wired and skilled enough to have taken Thumper down without killing him. The only reason they had for killing him was if he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see. Though he might have been killed accidently, they should have vacated the area the moment he went down, not hung around.
Still, the security force and I looked around and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. I didn't like it, but the accidental death theory seemed to be the easiest one to explain all that was happening. Normally that's enough for me, but I was pretty sure there were some dots that weren't getting connected and that if I could find them, I'd be able to figure out what was really going on.
My general feeling of uneasiness had been heightened by a bit of distance between Jimmy and me. He definitely was putting his game face on during practice, concentrating a great deal. He told me that he'd just wanted to help that night, and had come looking for me when I'd not been in the locker room after his media conference. He'd headed for the Scoreboard area because that's where he thought Thumper would be. He literally ran into the woman as she fled, swatted her back into the battlefield, and then wanted to help me.
As he told me this I could hear the hurt in his voice that I had asked him to leave. I really wanted to tell himwhy I'd asked him to go, but letting someone know you've gone feral and are likely to tear his throat out is really not the way to seal a friendship. I explained to him that with bodies and the like, I was trying to protect him from scandal or anything that would hurt the team. Thatwas my job there, after all.
He seemed to accept that explanation, which isn't to say he believed it. After that we drifted apart-able to share jokes and all, but it wasn't the same as before. Given all the other pressures on him, I didn't see any reason to make an issue out of it. And explaining things would have required me telling him my secret. While I knew I could trust him with it, learning it was something that had already killed too many of Raven's aides in the past. With Thumper's death to show that folks were playing for keeps on this one, putting that burden on Jimmy wasn't something I was going to do.
I spent most of my time with the pitchers. I played a lot of catch and receivedadvanced instruction in the proper methods of spitting. Chewing tobacco and compost have a lot in common, and you only swallow tobacco juiceonce, which is ample inducement to learn how to spit it as far away from you as you possibly can. Very quickly I switched to chewing gum and got to spitting with a degree of accuracy that I figured would impress even Kid Stealth9.
In this kind of story about baseball, I'm supposed to note that the day of the big game dawned bright and sunny, full of promise and hope, but you wouldn't believe that. This is Seattle, after all, where they print pictures of the sun on soyamilk cartons just to remind folks what it looks like. And our game was in the Dome, at night, which means the most cogent comment on atmospherics is that the roof wasn't leaking in any inconvenient places.
The same could not be said of the team. We were leaking and leaking badly; but we were leaking numbers. San Diego did have an elf with Tom Seaver riding him. He was using the 1971 stats, during which Seaver had a 1.76 ERA and 289 strike-outs. He kept blowing the ball by our guys, or messing them up with off-speed pitches. Those few guys who did make contact all grounded out. Going into the later innings, we were all
9Never did show him how well I spit, however. I kept thinking he might get his tongue swapped out for some cyberthing that would allow him to spit venom like a cobra, if he ever thought of it. (If he hasn't already done it!) aware that Seaver had pitched four shut-outs in '71, but had only thrown three so far this year.
The mood in the dugout began to sour, despite guys turning their caps inside out and wearing them backward-anything to start a rally! I felt frustrated in the extreme because there was nothing I could do in the dugout or on the field to help the team. The Old One snarled at me to convince Bobby to put me in.
/have seen enough of this game, Longtooth. I can make you fast to catch the rabbit-ball, and I can let you club it to death as well.
The image of my trying to take a bite out of a pitch coming in high and tight made me wince.Sorry, Old One, not your game. There was no way I could explain to him that if any of the etheric sensors here caught magic being employed by me we'd forfeit the game. Being on the roster had given me the access I needed to get my job done, but it also placed a limitation on me.
I dropped down on the end of the bench as we went out into the field at the top of the eighth. I started running over things in my mind, looking at them anew, trying to see if there was anything I'd missed. We all knew tampering was going on somehow, but the software was being verified by the league before each game, so it was clean. And it wasn't like the players were picking up a virus on the field…
Or was it?What I knew about computers and the way they functioned could be put on a chip and still leave terabytes open, but I did know some of those great, ancient, hoary, old statements that had gone from being glib to trite. The eldest among them: Garbage in, garbage out. Based on what Jimmy had told me when he convinced me to hit, I knew players actually did get data fed into them during the game. It allowed them to track the ball when pitched. Pumping other data into hitters would be a simple way to knock their performance off the statistical curve.
But what's the input device?I glanced from the hitter out to centerfield.The Scoreboard, with that single, burned-out bulb!
It hit me like a hammer. Ken Wilson should have gone down at the plate, but he got up to bat with his eyes closed. It was only when he was taking bows that he saw the Scoreboard and the signals put him down. And Thumper had been out there changing a burned-out bulb, which wasn't burned out at all, but set up to flash instructions in the ultraviolet light range. Even if folks in the stands or other players noticed it, if it wasn't flashing a code that did something to their stat-soft, they'd be unaffected and would have no reason to remember it.
I blew a bubble with my gum and jumped a bit as it popped. The two catters hadn't been waiting for a chance to rob luxury suites, they'd been making sure the proper bulb was in the proper socket on the score-board. Thumper surprised them and they killed him.Which means that bulb is what's keeping us down.
I got up and started running into the clubhouse. This is not easy to do in spikes. I crunch-clacked my way down corridors, then skidded around corners and scrambled like a cartoon character to get up speed for my next dash. I heard the muffled roar of the crowd as we got San Diego out and started to come to bat.Now or never.
I bounced off the corridor wall leading to the score-board area and dashed into it. I saw Palmer Clark waiting by the entrance and realized he'd heard me coming, which gave him time to set up for my arrival. His right hand fell fast and the muzzle of his gun hit me solidly on the neck. I went down hard and would have been unconscious but for my aborted attempt to stop running when I saw him. My cleats had slipped out from under me, already dropping me to the ground, so the blow didn't hit as hard as it could have. Still, I bounced once and rolled up into a ball against the wall where I'd lurked in the shadows two nights earlier.
From my position there I could see several things, the first and foremost being the Ares Predator in Clark's right hand. The muzzle looked like the south end of the Alaska oil pipeline and I really had no desire to be catching what it would be pitching. Up beyond him, just past the edge of the Megatron, I saw one of the smaller video display units set high above the seats on the third base side. It showed Jimmy warming up and stepping toward the plate.
Clark smiled. 'Just as well you're here. I'd planned on framing you in the tampering scandal once I heard you were working with the team. You engineer this point-shaving deal, you get caught and get dead.'
'That's what I get for slotting Shoeless Joe Jackson, right?'
'You should be so lucky.' As Jimmy stepped into the batter's box, Clark pointed a rectangular remote control sort of device at the Scoreboard. I saw no receiver for it, but from where he stood he angled things down past the fireworks tubes, so I assumed it was hidden from my view. 'There, that should do it.'
On the screen I saw Seaver rear back and throw. Jimmy took a wicked cut at the ball, but missed it cleanly. He twisted around and hit the ground. He stayed down for a second, then shook his head and stood again. The umpire called for time while Jimmy backed off and brushed dirt from his clothes.
I smiled at Clark. 'He's tougher than Ken.'
Clark shrugged. 'What happened to Ken was not very subtle, but was necessary as a show of what can be done. This evening, the effects have been more gentle.'
Use me, Longtooth. We will get the gun away from him and stop him.
I shook my head and rubbed at the back of my neck. I still hurt from the clubbing and wasn't certain I could concentrate enough to summon the Old One's help. Moreover, I still knew that if I did so, the game would be lost,
