Only it didn’t do anything for me, as it had at halftime and as it usually did in competition. No lift at all. My mind remained sluggish and the muscles in my arms and wrists wouldn’t relax. The only effect it had was to make my head pound and my stomach feel queasy.
With a minute of the time-out left I loaded my pipe, put a match to the tobacco. The smoke tasted foul and made my head throb all the more painfully. I laid the pipe down and did some slow deep-breathing. On his side of the Line Gulp was lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of an old one. He looked shrunken now, at least ten years older than his age of 57 — not formidable at all.
You don’t awe me anymore, I told him mentally, trying to psych myself up. I can beat you because I’m as good as you are, I’m better than you are. Better, old man, you hear me?
He didn’t look at me. He hadn’t looked at me once during the entire Face-Off.
The Head Editor’s red flag went up. I poised my hands at the ready, shaking my head in an effort to clear away some of the fuzziness. The screaming voices of the fans seemed almost hysterical, full of anticipation and a kind of hunger, like animals waiting for the kill.
All right, I thought, this is it.
The red flag dropped and the claxon blared.
ALL RIGHT, SLEDGE THOUGHT, THIS IS IT. HE
And my mind went blank.
My hands started to tremble; body fluid streamed down my cheeks. Think of a sentence, for God’s sake! But it was as if my brain had contracted, squeezed up into a tiny clotted mass that blocked off all subconscious connection.
The Cranker’s machine was making thunder again.
HE
Nothing.
“Come on, Sackett! Hack it, hack it!”
HE
HE
Block. I was blocked.
Panic surged through me. I hadn’t had a block since my first year in the semi-pro Gothic Romance League; I’d never believed it could happen to me in the Bigs. All the symptoms came rushing in on the heels of the panic: feeling of suffocation, pain in my chest, irregular breathing, nausea, strange sounds coming unbidden from my throat that were the beginnings, not the endings of words.
A volley of boos thudded against my eardrums, like rocks of sound stinging, hurting. I could feel myself whimpering; I had the terrible sensation of imminent collapse across my typewriter.
The stuttering roar of Gulp’s machine ceased for two or three seconds as he pulled out a completed page and inserted new paper, then began again with a vengeance.
A fragment of memory disgorged itself from the clotted mass inside my head: Mort’s voice saying to me a long time ago, “To break a block, you begin at the beginning. Subject. Object. Noun. Verb. Preposition. Participle. Take one word at a time, build a sentence, and pretty soon the rest will come.”
Subject.
Noun. Pronoun.
HE
Verb. Verb.
WENT
HE WENT
Preposition.
TO
HE WENT TO
Object.
THE DOOR AND THREW IT OPEN AND THE FAT MAN WAS THERE, CROUCHED AT THE EDGE OF THE STAIRCASE, A GUN HELD IN HIS FAT FIST. SLEDGE FELT THE RAGE EXPLODE INSIDE HIM. HE DODGED OUT INTO THE HALLWAY, RAISING HIS FORTY-FIVE. THE BIG MAN WOULD FEEL SLEDGE’S FIRE IN HIS FAT PRETTY SOON NOW.
“Sackett, Sackett, Sackett!”
It had all come back in a single wrenching flood; the feeling of mind-shrinkage was gone, and along with it the suffocation, the chest pain, the nausea. But the panic was still there. I had broken the momentary block, I was firing again at full speed but how much time had I lost? How many more words had I fallen behind?
I was afraid to look up at the board. And yet I had to know the score, I had to know if I still had any kind of chance. Fearfully I lifted my eyes, blinking away sweat.
CULP 8015, SACKETT 7369.
The panic dulled and gave way to despair. 650 words down, with less than 2000 to go and The Cranker showing no signs of weakening. Hopeless — it was hopeless.
I was going to lose.
Most of the fans were standing, urging Gulp on with great booming cries of his name; they sounded even hungrier now. It struck me then that they wanted to see him humiliate me, pour it on and crush me by a thousand words or more. Well, I wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction. I wouldn’t be disgraced in front of Mort and my girl and family and thirty million TriDim viewers. I wouldn’t quit.
In a frenzy I pounded out the last few lines on page thirty, ripped it free and replaced it. Action, action — draw the scene out for at least three more pages. Adjectives, adverbs, similes. Words. Words.
SLEDGE KICKED THE FAT MAN IN THE GROIN AND SENT HIM TUMBLING DOWN THE STAIRS LIKE A BROKEN SCREAMING DOLL, SCREAMING OUT THE WORDS OF HIS PAIN.
Agony in my head, in my leg, in my wounded forefinger. Roaring in my ears that had nothing to do with the crowd.
GULP 8566, SACKETT 7930.
Gain of 20 — twenty words! I wanted to laugh, locked the sound in my throat instead, and made myself glance across at Gulp. His body was curved into a humpbacked C, fingers hooked into claws, an expression of torment on his wet face: the strain was starting to tell on him too. But up on the board, his prose still poured out in letters as bright as golden blood.
SHE WAS SO TIRED AS SHE TRUDGED ACROSS THE DUSTY SANDS OF DENEB, SO VERY TIRED. BUT SHE HAD TO GO ON, SHE HAD TO FIND THE GREEN. THE BRIGHT GREEN, THE BEAUTIFUL GREEN, IT SEEMED AS IF THERE HAD NEVER BEEN ANYTHING IN HER LIFE EXCEPT THE SEARCH AND THE NEED FOR THE GREEN.
I imagined again the urgent cries from Sally, from Mom and Dad: “Don’t give up, Rex! There’s still hope, there’s still a chance.” Then they faded, and everything else seemed to fade too. I was losing all track of time and place; I felt as if I were being closed into a kind of vacuum. I couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything but the words, always the words appearing like great and meaningless symbols on the paper and in the sky. It was just The Cranker and me now, alone together in the stadium. Winning and losing didn’t even matter anymore. All that mattered was the two of us and the job we were compelled to do.
Finished page out, new page in.
THE FAT MAN SAT BLEEDING AGAINST THE WALL WHERE SLEDGE’S SLUGS HAD HURLED HIM. HE WAS STILL ALIVE BUT NOT FOR LONG. “ALL RIGHT, SHAMUS,” HE CROAKED, “I’M FINISHED, IT’S BIG CASINO FOR ME. BUT YOU’LL NEVER GET THE DIAMOND. I’LL TAKE IT TO HELL WITH ME FIRST.”
Carriage return, tab key.
The board:
CULP 8916, SACKETT 8341.
And The Cranker’s prose still coming, still running:
THE BEAST LOOMED BEFORE HER IN THE THICKET AND SHE FELT HER HEART SKIP A BEAT. SHE FELT DIZZY, AS IF SHE WOULD FAINT AT ANY SECOND. I CAN’T GO THROUGH WITH THIS, SHE THOUGHT. HOW CAN I GO ON LIKE THIS? I NEED
Culp’s machine stopped chattering then, as if he had come to the end of a page. I was barely aware of its silence at first, but when five or six seconds had passed an awareness penetrated that it hadn’t started up again. The noise from the stands seemed to have shifted cadence, to have taken on a different tenor; that penetrated too. I brought my head up and squinted across the Line.
The Cranker was sitting sideways in his chair, waving frantically at the sidelines. And as I watched, one of his Seconds came racing out with a container of Fuel. The Head Editor began waving his blue-and-yellow flag.
Fuel penalty. Culp was taking a 20-second Fuel penalty.