Death Match

they—”

“You’re damned right it isn’t going to last,” said Darjan, going suddenly grim. “Accidents are going to start happening. Their luck’s run out.”

Heming looked more nervous still. “Listen,” he said. “There are ways…You wouldn’t want to ruin everything by getting too…you know…overt. If someone should suspect—”

“Suspicion we can live with,” said Darjan, pushing the martini glass away from him in disgust. “Losing one point five billion dollars or so, that we can’t live with for a second…and no one else is going to be allowed to live with it, either.”

“One point five…”

“That was the last estimate.” Darjan looked up from under those thick dark brows at Heming. “What the hell are those people doing playing at this level? They’re a local team, for God’s sake. They’re a bunch of housewives and appliance repairmen; they’re the damned Kiwanis!”

“They’re good,” said Heming, rather helplessly.

“They’re too good,” Darjan said, frowning. “And some-thing’s gonna be done about it, one way or another. Too much rides on things going the way they were planned to go at the beginning of the season. The spreads, even the casual betting spreads, are going to be disturbed. We can’t have it, Heming. The investors are going to turn their backs on us, and some of them we spent too much time and money getting hold of in the first place to lose now. So you better tell me what you have in mind…otherwise ‘overt’ is going to be the order of the day, whether you like it or not.”

Heming shook his head. “You wouldn’t want to—”

“Don’t tell me what I want. Instead tell me how you’re going to fix it. Nonovertly.”

Heming thought for a moment. “Well, some of it would be an outgrowth of how we would keep things running normally outside of the playoffs.”

Darjan considered this for a moment. “You’re going to have to ‘oil’ different people,” he said. “Higher up. The kind who’d be more likely to blow the whistle.”

“Not if the incentives are correctly applied,” said Heming, “and if they’re big enough. Everybody has their price. Just a matter of seeing how high you have to go…. And after that, because of the increased price…they’re that much more eager to keep quiet. Because if word ever gets out…” He smiled. “Scandal. Bad publicity. Lawsuits, public prosecutions, jail terms…All very messy.”

“And you can hold that over them, of course.”

“Of course. The leaks would seem to come from somewhere else, somewhere ‘respectable,’ when they came.”

The first man nodded slowly. “All right. We can try it your way first. Do you have some targets in mind?”

“Several.”

“Get on it, then. Do what you have to. But hurry up! This was the last of the preliminary bouts. The serious betting always starts at the eighth-final level. It’s started already. The whole structure of the ‘pools’ betting will start to be affected soon, if you don’t get them out of the running.”

Heming looked thoughtful for a moment. “Obviously we won’t get results until the first eighth-final game,” he said.

“That’s Monday,” Darjan said. “South Florida versus Chicago versus Toronto, if I remember correctly. Chicago was scheduled to win, when the third was going to be New Orleans.” His face set grim, and he glanced up. “Certain people,” he said, “were—are—very committed to Chicago. Believe me, you wouldn’t like to have to explain to them how their team got knocked out at the eighth-final stage by a bunch of landscape gardeners and sanitation engineers. Amateurs—”

“It won’t happen,” said Heming.

“Pray that it doesn’t,” said Darjan. “Get on it. Get in touch with me tomorrow and tell me what progress you’ve made.”

Heming went out hurriedly through the open French doors to the square, where the afternoon light was beginning to tarnish. Darjan looked after him, once more reaching around to the martini glass and beginning to turn it around and around on the white marble. Then his hand clenched slowly around the stem. A moment later there was a sharp crack as the stem of the Dartington crystal, tough as it was, gave way. This being virtual experience, there was no blood.

Elsewhere, however, Darjan thought, in reality, unless Heming gets busy, things will be very different….

2

The monthly regional Net Force Explorers meetings could turn into a real mob scene sometimes, so Catie liked to get to them early when she could. But that evening she was almost foiled in this intention by her mother, who, just as Catie was heading back down to the family room, came edging in through the kicked-open front door with her arms full of shopping bags, and also with several canvas bags full of books hanging from her, so that she looked like some very overworked beast of burden. “Oh, honey, help!” her mom said. “The groceries—!”

Catie hurried down the front hall to her and did her best to relieve her mom of the two heaviest bags, which were just about to fall out of her mother’s arms. “Mom, why can’t you leave stuff in the car and just make another trip?”

“I thought I could manage it,” her mother gasped as they staggered together into the kitchen and dumped everything on the table. Catie shook her head as they straightened up and dusted themselves off. “Supermom,” Catie said in a chiding tone.

“Oh, sweetie, I just hate making two trips, you know how it is….”

“Inefficient,” they said in unison. Catie smiled a slightly rueful smile. Her mother worked at the Library of Congress as an acquisitions librarian, and had spent the first two years of her employment trying to work a reorganization of the basic stacks system through the library’s monolithic bureaucracy. Now, six years later, having been promoted to senior acquisitions librarian in charge of classical literature, she was still at it — for while efficiency was not precisely one of Colleen Murray’s gods, it was at least a minor idol before which she bowed at regular intervals, in the name of making the world in general work better. This being the case, Catie knew she was something of a cross for her mother to bear, for Catie felt in her soul that it was wrong to have a house, or a life, look from minute to minute as if you were expecting to have Architectural Digest come in to do a photo shoot. A little randomness around the edges, a little easygoing clutter here and there, in Catie’s opinion, made things look less artificial, more natural and human. And since they get that way anyhow, in the normal course of things, your nerves don’t get shredded trying to prevent the unavoidable….

Now the table looked more than random enough even for Catie. Books and foodstuffs shared it about evenly, and Catie started divvying them up, paying more attention to the books, with an eye to keeping them safely away from the food. The first few volumes she picked up seemed to be printed in Greek, and another was in a lettering she didn’t recognize. “What’s this?” she said. Its title seemed to say RhOIQEA AFOI– ITUW, except that some of the letters looked wrong: the L was backward, the F had an extra stroke underneath the short one, and the h was hitched up between the P and O like some kind of punctuation mark with delusions of letterhood.

Catie’s mother was loading a couple of gallons of milk into the fridge. She paused to peer around the door. “Oh. That’s the King James Bible translated into Tataviam.”

Catie gave her a look. “Didn’t know you were into science fiction, Mom. Which series are the Tataviam from? Galactic Patrol?”

Her mother laughed as she shut the refrigerator door. “It’s not a created language, honey. It’s native to the Los Angeles area. The Native Americans there had about a hundred languages and dialects. Highest density of languages per square mile in the world, supposedly.”

Catie shook her head and put the book down. She had been about to ask her mother why she’d brought this