The White team started to lose it after that. Some of them were already foundering in their own anger or astonishment, literally forgetting what to do with themselves. In spatball, reflexes are everything, and once a player is distracted, it can take time to get them back, but time was what there was less and less of, now, as the unforgiving minute became the unforgiving half-minute, as the truth sank in that there was no way to catch up, no way at all. And all their captain’s shouting at them could only reinforce what was happening, what should have been impossible and was happening anyway. They were going to lose—
“Nineteen!” Catie shouted, in time with a lot of the people in the “stands” around her, though her brother kept still and quiet, and just watched and watched, his attention absolutely riveted on the in-sphere volume. “Eighteen! Seventeen! Sixteen!” The crowd was roaring now, those of them who were in “empathy” with Brickner, seeing what he saw, feeling the abrupt adrenalin flush as he did, a physical thing, a sudden wave of fire in the lower back, the body echoing the mind’s realization, This is it!! The White team was coming at him all at once, a desperation move, crude at best, though possibly effective enough if it reached him in time, before he had time to act.
The half-forward threw herself into a spin, shot the ball at him like an arrow from a crossbow. And a second later Brickner felt the other push in his back, one of his team-mates impacting him at exactly the right moment, offering him for that split second before they “bounced” an opposing force to push against. Brickner rolled backward hard against his buddy’s back, kneed the ball as it came to him. It flew again at the White goal—
One of the White players rocketed toward the ball in stretched-out, linear configuration, trying to get there in time, but he didn’t have enough inertia to reach it, not having been able to push off soon enough, and his progress slowed, slowed more, he was going to come up short—
The orange ball slammed into the white-lit hex, and the score froze it, half-illuminated, in the very act of precessing.
The roars were making it impossible to hear anything, and when the ball impacted just inside the goal hex, there was no hearing even the usual earsplitting hoot of the scoring alert. It seemed only a few seconds more before the injury-time clock expired, and there was another howl of alarm meant to signify the end of the game, but it was completely lost in the collective howl of the crowd, frustration on two sides, absolute triumph in the third. Suddenly the volume was occupied by a scrum of another kind, one in which George Brickner was completely buried, and deafened by his own hollers of delight and those of his teammates. The world dissolved in yellow.
Catie took a deep breath and brought the menu back, selecting GENERAL and ANNOUNCER. The familiar dulcet voice of the Flyers’ home-game announcer was saying, “…astonishing comeback from three hexes down, just one more in a series of hairsbreadth saves for South Florida Spat, but a sad moment for San Diego fans, and also for the Seattle High Flyers, after a season that began with such promise but seemed to go rapidly downhill due to injuries and player-contract issues. Again the score, the San Diego Pumas three, the Seattle High Flyers three, and the new interregional title six champions, the South Florida Spatball Association, the ‘Banana Slugs,’ five—”
Catie blinked to kill her implant. Everything went white, but before she was allowed to shut the feed down completely, a sweet female voice said, “The preceeding expericast is copyright 2025 by the World Spatball Federation. All rights reserved. Any reexperience, pipelining, or other use of this material is restricted to personal use only by international law, and unauthorized transfer of content is strictly prohibited. This is the WSF Net.”
The whiteness went away, leaving Catie looking at the far wall of the family room — the bookshelves, her dad’s easy chair, the Net computer in its low case, and the place over to one side of the last bookshelf to the right, near the corner of the room, where a crack running down from the ceiling had become apparent in the plaster last week. Her mom had been complaining about the increase in heavy traffic down the street that ran parallel to theirs. It seemed there might be something in what she’d been saying.
“Time?” she said to the clock on the wall.
“Eight fourteen P.M.”
“Oh, good,” Catie said, glancing out the window at the backyard. The sun was nearly down behind the fruit trees that mostly hid the back wall. Dimming yellow light danced and glittered through their leaves. It had been a nice day, but she hadn’t done what she’d first been tempted to, go out and have a few goals with her “casual” soccer team. Instead she had elected to stay home and get the homework done, so that she would have tomorrow and Sunday free. And then Hal had shanghaied her into watching “The Game” with him. The best-laid plans…Oh, well.
She got out of the implant chair and stretched, and was grateful she didn’t have the muscle strain right now that poor Brickner did. If he was smart, his team trainer was putting him into a hot whirlpool bath right about now. Catie stretched again, trying to get rid of a crick in her back that wasn’t really there, and glanced around. She had promised her mom that she’d clean up a little in here this evening, but Hal had sidetracked her into watching this game, and now the serious cleaning was going to have to wait until considerably later. For which I will probably catch a certain amount of grief. Oh, well…
Catie sighed and spent a minute or so moving around the family room, making a desultory attempt to pick up some of the books and magazines and dataflips that had been left lying around. When her little brother caught an interest, he caught it completely. He ate and slept and breathed it…until something more interesting came along. Right now it was spatball, and his enthusiasm had been sufficiently contagious, today, to pull her in, too.
For her own part, Catie had to admit that there was something there worth being interested in. Her own acquaintance with the game had been strictly theoretical until the last couple of weeks. Now she knew more about it than she had ever really intended to. And yet at the same time, there was no pretending that the sport wasn’t intriguing. Hybrid descendant of soccer in a spacesuit it might be, but—
“Wow, huh?”
The non sequitur had come from Hal, who was standing there now in the doorway of the family room. He apparently hadn’t bothered with the postgame show. He was breathing hard, too, which hardly came as a surprise to Catie.
“Wow, yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think they were going to make it.”
“Yeah, it was intense. But the Slugs are go for the eighth-finals!”
Catie chuckled as she watched him wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Were you ‘being’ George Brickner, too?”
“Who else?”
“There were five other people. That cute brunette you were blathering about last week, for example.”
“Oh, her.” The tone of voice was dismissive. “Day-strom. She’s okay, but she’s not as sharp as Brickner is….”
Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “A captain can’t be a team all by himself,” she said. “Isn’t that what you were saying the other day?” She grinned at him as she slipped past him, dropping into his hands some of the books and flips she had been picking up, the ones that were his. “I think it’s just a case of hero worship.”