“But I. …”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” declared Gus. “You’re just pretending you don’t know anything about polo, that’s all. Maybe you’re a fugitive from justice. Maybe that’s why you’re so anxious to make a getaway. Only reason you stopped at all was because your ship got stoved up.”
“I’m no fugitive,” declared Meek, drawing himself up. “I’m just a bookkeeper out to see the system.”
“Forget it,” said Gus. “Forget it. Nobody around here’s going to give you away. If they even so much as peep, I’ll plain paralyze them. So you’re a bookkeeper. That’s good enough for me. Just let anyone say you ain’t a bookkeeper and see what happens to him.”
Meek opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. What was the use? Here he was, stuck again. Just like back on Juno when that preacher had thought he was a gunman and talked him into taking over the job of cleaning up the town. Only this time it was a space polo game and he knew even less about space polo than he did about being a lawman.
Gus rose and limped slowly across the room. Ponderously, he hauled a red bandana out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the one uncrowded space on the mantel shelf, between the alarm clock and the tarnished silver model of a rocket ship.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “she’ll look right pretty there.”
He backed away and stared at the place on the shelf.
“I can almost see her now,” he said. “Glinting in the lamplight. Something to keep me company. Something to look at when I get lonesome.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Meek.
“That there cup the radio was talking about,” said Gus. “The one for the most valuable team member.”
Meek stammered. “But … but. …”
“I’m going to win her,” Gus declared.
IV
Saturn Inn bulged. Every room was crowded, with half a dozen to the cubicle, sleeping in relays. Those who couldn’t find anywhere else to sleep spread blankets in the narrow corridors or dozed off in chairs or slept on the barroom floor. A few of them got stepped on.
Titan City’s Junior Chamber of Commerce had done what it could to help the situation out, but the notice had been short. A half-dozen nearby rocks which had been hastily leveled off for parking space, now were jammed with hundreds of space vehicles, ranging from the nifty two man job owned by Billy Jones, sports editor of the Daily Rocket, to the huge excursion liners sent out by the three big transport companies. A few hastily-erected shelters helped out to some extent, but none of these shelters had a bar and were mostly untenanted.
Moe, the bartender at the Inn, harried with too many customers, droopy with lack of sleep, saw Oliver Meek bobbing around in the crowd that surged against the bar, much after the manner of a cork caught in a raging whirlpool. He reached out a hand and dragged Meek against the bar.
“Can’t you do something to stop it?”
Meek blinked at him. “Stop what?”
“This game,” said Moe. “It’s awful, Mr. Meek. Honestly. The crowd has got the fellers so worked up, it’s apt to be mass murder.”
“I know it,” Meek agreed, “but you can’t stop it now. The Junior Chamber of Commerce would take the hide off anyone who even said he would like to see it stopped. It’s more publicity than Saturn has gotten since the first expeditions were lost here.”
“I don’t like it,” declared Moe, stolidly.
“I don’t like it either,” Meek confessed. “Gus and those other fellows on his team think I’m an expert. I told them what I knew about space polo, but it wasn’t much. Trouble is they think it’s everything there is to know. They figure they’re a cinch to win and they got their shirts bet on the game. If they lose, they’ll more than likely spacewalk me.”
Fingers tapped Meek’s shoulders and he twisted around. A red face loomed above him, a cigarette drooping from the corner of its lips.
“Hear you say you was coaching the Twenty-three bunch?”
Meek gulped.
“Billy Jones, that’s me,” said the lips with the cigarette. “Best damn sports writer ever pounded keys. Been trying to find out who you was. Nobody else knows. Treat you right.”
“You must be wrong,” said Meek.
“Never wrong,” insisted Jones. “Nose for news. Smell it out. Like this. Sniff. Sniff.”
His nose crinkled in imitation of a bloodhound, but his face didn’t change otherwise. The cigarette still dangled, pouring smoke into a watery left eye.
“Heard the guy call you Meek,” said Jones. “Name sounds familiar. Something about Juno, wasn’t it? Rounded up a bunch of crooks. Found a space monster of some sort.”
Another hand gripped Meek by the shoulder and literally jerked him around.
“So you’re the guy!” yelped the owner of the hand. “I been looking for you. I’ve a good notion to smack you in the puss.”
“Now, Bud,” yelled Moe, in mounting fear, “you leave him alone. He ain’t done a thing.”
Meek gaped at the angry face of the hulking man, who still had his shoulder in the grip of a monstrous paw.
Bud Craney! The ring-rat that had stolen Gus’ injector! The captain of the Thirty-seven team.
“If there was room,” Craney grated, “I’d wipe up the floor with you. But since there ain’t, I’m just plain going to hammer you down about halfway into it.”
“But he ain’t done nothing!” shrilled Moe.
“He’s an outsider, ain’t he?” demanded Craney. “What business he got coming in here and messing around with things?”
“I’m not messing around with things, Mr. Craney,” Meek declared, trying to be dignified about it. But it was hard to be dignified with someone lifting one by the shoulder so one’s toes just barely touched the floor.
“All that’s the matter with you,” insisted the dangling Meek, “is that you know Gus and his men will give you a whipping. They’d done it, anyhow. I haven’t helped them much.
