Death Match

hands and said, “Look, I’m starving, I missed my breakfast, and I couldn’t eat what they were serving on the plane. It looked like a byproduct of a biowar attack. Would it seem incredibly rude to you if we just sat right down and ordered something?”

“No problem at all,” Hal said. “But where’s Mike?”

“Late, probably,” George said. “He’s been late for everything ever since I’ve known him. He’ll probably be late for his own funeral, if I know Mike. Let’s just sit down. It’s crazy to stand here hoping he’ll turn up in the next few minutes. We’ll be chewing our own elbows off by the time he gets here, if we wait for him.”

The waitress came along and brought them to a booth by a window, nearly walking into things a couple of times as she tried to both go forward and at the same time talk to George while he followed her. Catie saw the heads of people seated on either side turn as the three of them passed, their eyes resting first on Brickner and then on her and Hal with an expression that seemed to read, “The first guy, we recognize. Are these two somebody important, too?” It was an odd sensation, and after the first twinge of amusement and excitement, she wasn’t sure she liked it.

The three of them sat down with their menus and exchanged a few words while they looked them over. Hal did most of the talking at this point, and Catie was glad to let him do so. Until she got a feeling for what Brickner was interested in talking about and could participate in the conversation intelligently, she didn’t want to sound like she was just along to see what he looked like…and that would be the immediate assumption, certainly of her brother, if not of George himself. For the moment, while they looked at the menus, Hal and George seemed content to tell each other stories about Mike being late for things; and after a few minutes of this, the waitress came around to take their orders. Catie asked for one of the smoked-meat sandwiches and a Coke. Hal ordered iced tea and eggs Benedict, and once again Catie wondered what on earth the dish had to do with his chemistry class.

“And for you, Mr. Brickner?” said the waitress, and positively fluttered her eyelashes at him.

Catie had a hard time keeping herself from simply laughing out loud.

“A BLT, please,” George said, “and an iced tea.”

“Right,” the waitress said. “Thanks. Oh, and we’re all big fans of yours here….”

“Thanks, miss, uh”—he peered at her nametag—“thanks, Wendy. It’s always good to know people are rooting for the team.”

The waitress smiled and hurried off. “Looks like the service’s gonna be good,” Hal said, sounding dry, as she went away.

George waggled his eyebrows in a resigned way. “It’s good everywhere,” he said. “I just wish I knew when it was really because of the team, instead of that dratted feature in People.”

This had been somewhat on Catie’s mind as well, for now, sitting across from the man, she was coming to the conclusion that the People virtzine feature might actually have had a point about George’s looks. He really was a fabulous-looking guy, close up. Yet it wasn’t something that sprang out at you when you saw him play. What was it about putting this man into a uniform, Catie thought, that so completely changed him? In street clothes he could pass for a model. But it was strange how that quality of sheer male beauty somehow didn’t come through while watching him playing spat. It was as if the energy spent on being handsome — if one could actually be considered to “spend” personal energy on such a thing — was completely channeled into the game while George was playing, leaving him merely good-looking in a cool and uninvolved kind of way. Once he was out of the cubic, that energy seemed to be released for other purposes. Catie could now understand the annoyance of some of George’s fans that he was eligible but seemingly uninterested in dating right now. For her own part, she simply amused herself with enjoying George’s handsomeness as if he were some kind of walking art installation, and tried as hard as she could to remind herself that she didn’t intend to get seriously involved with men at all until after she graduated from college. Unfortunately it was at times like this that the resolve seemed dumbest.

Catie blinked and came back to the moment as their drinks arrived. Whoa, she thought, not like you to phase out just because of a pretty face, kid. Sharpen up!

“Wasn’t there going to be someone else here with you?” Hal was saying.

“Oh, yeah, my team cocaptain, Rick Menendez. But he’s off seeing his sister in Rockville. She had a baby last week, her first, and it’s his first chance to see his nephew in the flesh, instead of in a virtmail. Hilarious…the grimmest guy you ever saw, most of the time. He’s gone all gooey.” George grinned, and the flash of it made Catie smile, too, just at the sight of it. “But the whole team is up here at the moment…those who’re going to be playing tomorrow, anyway. We’re short a couple of bodies. Two nights ago we lost one of our second-string players to an invigilation call-up, would you believe? And another one has a dual qualification as an umpire, and has to go umpire a Western Division game at the same time we’ll be playing Chicago and Moscow Spartak tomorrow — there’s a shortage of officials right now.” He shrugged. “Bad luck, I guess, but we’ll cope.”

“I don’t think you must be very happy about having to travel the day before a game,” Catie said. “Especially one this important for the team.”

“Yes, well,” George said, making a slightly sour face, “this is also the time at which we’re running ‘hottest’ in terms of publicity…and therefore this is the time to go strike the sponsorship deal we’ve been waiting for. We have to go up to AirDyne’s corporate headquarters in Bethesda this afternoon and do a big press conference performance…. It’ll be all over the evening news. This kind of thing makes the ISF happy, even if it isn’t our favorite thing. It’ll push the ‘gate’ up for the game tomorrow. But we’re going to be up late practicing tonight….”

“I thought you didn’t want a sponsorship deal,” Hal said. “You’ve been turning them all down.”

“Well,” George said, “we do actually start to need sponsorship, to play at this level. The team is pretty much agreed on this. But we’ve also agreed that we don’t want any sponsorship agreement to be exclusive…at least, not by the sponsor’s choice. At our level, it probably will be, because we don’t need that much sponsorship. One big company is plenty. And besides, there are teams that really go overboard in that regard. They get the idea that if a little money is a good idea, then more is better…and as a result, some of their team jerseys are so cluttered with logos you can hardly make out a color underneath them.” George took a pull on his iced tea. “But more to the point, none of us on the team likes the implication — the companies don’t come right out and say it, of course, though it’s there — that the sponsor starts to own you, somehow, that it’s okay for them to start dictating to you about tactics and play, once you’ve signed on the dotted line.”

George sighed then. “So finally we found a sponsor that wouldn’t insist on exclusivity, and which agreed to stay out of our way on managerial issues, which was terrific. It’s not like the team can’t use the money. Our yearly contribution to the ISF isn’t peanuts, by any means. But the Federation has to keep the Net servers where we play our games up and running somehow, and that takes hardware hosting and software maintenance and a hundred other things that all cost money. The only alternative, play in reality, is beyond any of us at the moment, even the biggest and best funded of the professional teams. Real cubic in space is just too limited and too expensive right now. It’s kind of sad. It would be nice if there was at least someplace where the sport could be played as it was originally conceived, in genuine microgravity. But without that option, virtual’s as close as we can get…and it’s going to be that way for a long while, until the cost of nonindustrial volume in space comes down. Maybe when the L5-1 gets built, there’ll be spat cubic in there. It would seem to make sense, since even in a rotating L5 there’s going to be plenty of micrograv volume, especially for the big manufacturers. But that option’s twenty years away, easily, and right now we have right-now problems to solve….”

“Like Chicago,” Hal muttered.

“Chicago,” said George, “we’ll solve the old-fashioned way. We’ll beat them. They have tactical weaknesses that we can exploit, and besides, O’Mahony got herself her third yellow card in that last game. Careless of her. Bad coaching, as much as anything else. Her coach lets her lose her temper and get away with it. One more foul like that, and we won’t have her to worry about anymore….”

Their food arrived. Catie found herself looking with faint dismay at one of the biggest sandwiches she had ever seen in her life. The thing was nearly nine inches tall, and she had never seen such a forlorn and pitiful statement as the single toothpick pushed into the top of it, pretending to hold it all together. There was easily what looked like half a cow’s worth of smoked meat in there. She sighed, picked up half of it, pushed out some of the meat, reassembled it, then squashed it into some thickness she hoped she could at least get a bite out of and went to work.

George’s sandwich was cast in much the same mold, and for a few minutes quiet mostly prevailed as he and Catie jointly tried to get their lunches under control, while Hal tucked into his eggs Benedict. “You’re mostly a new