The Nail and the Oracle (20 page)

“What I
don’t
und’stan’,” said Bil Ferry at length, “is, everything stay still, yes? First base here, third base here, foul line here, home run here, poz?”

“Home plate. Yes.”

“Thass dead, classmate. You want everything movin. Well, alive is movin, you find me? Now, what you should do, you should get those bases movin around a circle. You get your pitcher to turn and turn to follow. He got a special throw to lead the target, hey?”

“That wouldn’t be baseball!” cried Mr. Ourser.

“And hey,” said the flack eagerly, “why you want one team up, th’other team up? It take all day. What you want, you got two diamonds, one on top the other, you find me? You put your pitchers out there back to back an the whole thing goin round and round. Now it
moves
, classmate, hey? Alive?”

“You keep your obscenities to yourself!”

“Kay,” said Bil Ferry, uninsulted. “So I don’t und’stan’ baseball, and I don’t und’stan’ you Primmies either. P’centage points, magic numbers to win or lose, battin’ averages, and they tell me you live computerless.”

“Our cornerstone,” acknowledged Mr. Ourser. “Then y’r all unsane,” said Bill Ferry amiably. “Y’r all like this baseball thing. Fella stand on a place, uses knowledge skill and ergs to get himself where? Right back where he started only he’s tired. Gimme a Q any day. We’re here.”

What “here” turned out to be was an exit ramp, one like a dozen others they had passed. The flack turned into it by touching the right-hand one of two wartlike lumps on the dash. It began to flash lime-green, and the hovercraft edged off the center line onto the buff roadway and then the blue margin and began to decelerate. Mr. Ourser fixed his companion with an apprehensive gaze, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and started to tremble. The hovercraft, still decelerating, followed the ramp across a bewildering web of crossroads and cloverleafs and rushed by a lake and two thousand-foot cylindrical housing units encrusted with balconies and standing on stilts. Ahead was the chiaroscuro of one of the nation’s few remaining cities—and it was less a city than the monstrous clutter caused by the crossing of five major highways and their strip-villages. The skyline showed a heavy preponderance of “inverted structure”—the architectural gimmickry of the period which, by
using superstrength materials below and ultralight ones above, created buildings like upside-down pyramids and impossibly leaning and curving towers.

Mr. Ourser, past the point of tact and even reason, suddenly screamed, “The wheel! For the love of God, you forgot your wheel!” At that moment the lime-green light gonged softly and went out. The flack reached behind him (he still sat with his back to the windshield) and touched the wart again; it resumed its flashing and the machine whirled off again to the right, this time on a much narrower ramp which was now a ramp, now a tunnel, now an arrow-straight path through swampland and meadow. “The wheel, who needs it?” laughed the flack, as the car banked sharply around a turn like that of a bobsled run, braked silently almost to a halt and settled, with the descending whine of its throttled-out turbines, to rest on a moving belt.

Above and ahead, great shining letters hung in the sky, surrounded by a nutating ring of blue light. The letters read Q
UOIT
T
ODAY
and then F
LORIO
and then A
DAM
T
HE
G
REAT
, and then again Q
UOIT
T
ODAY
. The hovercraft was borne down perhaps a hundred feet, then turned broadside and decanted into a niche between two other cars, part of a row, a rank, a serried myriad of distance-dwindled shining cars. The flack touched the doorplate, and the side of the car snicked out of existence. “Out, classmate. We’re here.”

Mr. Ourser, still trembling, dismounted and reached back in for his burden, at which the flack raised the ridges from which his eyebrows had been shaved, but made no comment. The flack led the way and assisted his unwilling guest onto the first and second bands of a slideway on which they were whisked, standing, to the gateway. Mr. Ourser flicked self-conscious glances at the people around him and their impossible clothes. There was a preponderance of a substance that was colored like skin and clung like skin to areas of skin and showed no margin where the substance stopped and skin began. This made possible such effects as braided earlobes and skintight torso coverings, which to all intents and purposes did not cover. There were also bald girls and men with shoes that looked like bare feet with no toes. Mr. Ourser and the flack were grateful, each in his
way, for the tradition that made clothing style the privilege of each individual, and derogatory comments inexpressible. “Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty,” a wise man once said, and he said it before entire populations lived in an air-conditioned environment.

Bil Ferry flashed a medallion, swung from a chain around his neck, at the gate-keeping machine, and they were admitted and swept by another slideway under the stadium and through to daylight on their aisle. Their box was perhaps seven rows back from the edge of the playing field but, once in it, Mr. Ourser had the feeling it was suspended in space over the action. Before he could determine how this was done he was diverted by the flack’s demonstration of the box’s conveniences: heat control, cold control, refreshments, the scoreboard (a blank bulkhead at the moment) and the Options.

“What are Options?”

Bil Ferry pointed to the two nubs on the scoreboard section of the bulkhead. “Each quarter, the quoiters run up provisional score, shows here. Now we decide if it adds zero-sum or nonzero-sum.”

“I do not,” said the Primitive, “know what you are talking about.”

“Oh,” said the flack, and thought for a moment. “Look. You got something out wildernessville called ‘games theory’?”

“I’ve heard of it. A kind of high-grade math, or logic.”

“Right-eo. Games theory derived from games, hey? Well, Quoit is first game derived from games theory.” He looked at Mr. Ourser’s expression and shrugged. “Skip, classmate. Y’ll und’stan’ better at the quarter when the scores come up.”

“I doubt it,” said the Primitive, and sat down (with all but an astonished yelp at the seat’s superb softness) and directed his attention to the field.

The field was oval, about two hundred feet long and a hundred wide, and covered with what seemed to be perfect greensward. Centered in the oval was a circle fifty feet in diameter. “Thass the Track,” said Bil Ferry, pointing to the circle. “There’s three things you got to know: the Track, the Quoit, the Spot. Track’s fifty feet across. Quoit rolls on it. Spot is where edge of Quoit touches Track.”

“I don’t see this Spot. Or the Quoit either.”

“You will. This is North,” said the flack, waving left, “and this is South. Object is for South to get his body, or part of it, into the Spot while Spot’s traveling in North’s side of the track. You trace me?”

“And to keep the North player out of the Spot when it’s in his own territory.”

“You listen real good, classmate,” the flack said approvingly.

“How fast does this Spot travel around the track?”

“Four times a minute. Once in fifteen seconds. Bout seven miles ’n hour.”

“And a player scores by getting into the Spot?”

“Any part of his body, for five seconds. He gets points ’pending on where Spot is at end of five seconds.”

“You mean he gets more or fewer points depending on where the Spot is.”

“Positiv-eo. From centerfield, into North, goes from zero to ninety and back to zero.”

“In degrees.”

“In points. Degrees is points, points is degrees.”

“I guess I understand it.”

“Simpler’n a Texas leaguer an’ a fielder’s choice. Here come the girls.”

As if by magic, from unmarked areas in the end zones, girls appeared briskly, perhaps two per second, springing and dancing off in all directions. In a matter of moments the field was a kaleidoscope of leaping, running, bending forms, each wearing—Mr. Ourser would have said “bearing”—the most exquisite arrays of trailing plumes and ribbons, cobwebby streamers of all the colors there are, all at once and ever-changing, some trailing real smoke from slim anklets and bracelets, green, purple, yellow, orange. Mr. Ourser could smell the smoke now—pine, heliotrope, sea breeze, vanilla, fresh bread. Music appeared from nowhere, everywhere, perhaps from the girls, who seemed a part of it. It heightened its tempo, and the girls began to form into patterns and lines, intermingle, cluster and whirl, then break into disorganized riots of color that instantly turned into avenues and orchards of beauty and motion.

Bil Ferry rose and crossed in front of Mr. Ourser. “Look down there,” he said. Mr. Ourser moved to the side rail and looked down into a square pit between their box and the next. He saw three uniformed men there, each bearing the insignia of the slanted, glowing blue Quoit with a scarlet thread through it. On the front, or field-side, wall were thirty or more monitor screens. In the center were four immense trideo tanks bearing closeup three-dimensional images of the pageantry on the field. “Broadcast monitors,” explained the flack. “The 2-d screens are for the ref’ree—him over there on the high chair. The other citizens ‘re techs, one for stadium management—sound, lights, force screens and all—an’ the other’s a Quoit tech. See that big red handle? Thass it, classmate. Thass the big one. Thass the Quoit.”

Mr. Ourser, intrigued by a movement in the trideo tanks, turned his attention back to the field. At a twinkling run the girls had formed themselves into two large Xs, one in each end zone, and raced into the mysterious spot from which they had come, the Xs swallowing themselves up in their own apexes.

“Where do they go to?”

“Down under. They got like a four-sided pyramid with gateways, on’y you can’t see it. Force field.”

“What are these force fields? How do they work?”

“How sh’d I know? Look, y’r belly can take y’r lunch an turn it into that big happy smile an bright eyes, poz? You know how that works? Does y’r belly know? If it works, who cares? If y’want technol’gy, classmate, ask one of those techs down there after the game, don’t ask a flack. Now watch the clown.”

The clown was tall and gangling and many-jointed, bobbing and staggering and falling over his feet. Bil Ferry pointed into the control tank, and Mr. Ourser saw the Quoit tech draw down the big red handle.

The stadium, even the most habituated fans in it, gasped; Mr. Ourser was thunderstruck. A mighty toroid, or doughnut shape, of transparent blue light, with a threadlike core of aching red, the Quoit was tilted at thirty degrees, with one edge contacting the ground just on the circular path of the Track. Where it touched, a circular patch
of brilliant light appeared, the Spot. About twelve feet across and exactly bisected by the Track, it was green on the infield side and orange on the outfield side, and it traveled the Track at a steady pace as the huge Quoit moved. The motion of the Quoit was that of a saucer spinning on its edge and slowing down, so that it rolls on its perimeter. The Quoit, however, did not slow down, but nutated at its steady four revolutions per minute, the bicolored Spot moving with it. “Watch clown.”

The gangling clown, jelly-legged, spaghetti-armed, did a boneless dance on the Track. The crowd shrieked at him as the Quoit approached. He stopped dancing and looked at the stands, cupping one ear. With the Quoit upon him, he turned and leaped in mock panic, and tried to lurch out of its way. The red thread at the heart of the Quoit sliced down through his bobbing bustle, severing it neatly. The crowd howled. The clown, hands clapped to his backside, scampered across the infield, making the stadium rock with bursts of shrill amplified laughter.

“Ol’ core cut anything—steel, bones, bottoms or rice puddin,” chuckled the flack. “Para-matter field.”

“How does it work?”

“I tol’ you, ask the techs. All I know is that red core cuts off hand, foot, anything. Line only a few molecules thick. Seals it, heals it and makes you laugh.”

“Who laughs?”

“I jingle you not, classmate—it’s some sort of shock. Cut off your behind, you laugh like hell.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“They say not. Not for a while anyhoo. Then the medicos stick it back on good as new.”

“Good as new?”

Bil Ferry shrugged. “Most times. Sometimes numb. Sometimes rots off.” He laughed suddenly and pointed at the clown, who had tripped over his feet and sprawled across the Track just as the Quoit arrived. To the horror of the Primitive, the deadly red thread cut through both the clown’s legs at the knees. The clown howled with merriment, flopped like a fish into the danger zone again, where the
line crossed his neck. The head rolled away and then exploded with a loud bang, for it had been some kind of balloon. Out of the headless torso stepped a diminutive and enchanting female, who rushed to the retreating Spot, caught up with it and did a roundoff, a handspring and a perfect layout back somersault over the scarlet core. She bowed charmingly and skipped to the North centerfield, where she disappeared.

“Now the quoiters,” said the flack, leaning forward expectantly. Mr. Ourser found himself doing the same; perhaps it was the music, which thundered and diminished and, with the unresolved chord, waited. “Here comes Florio.”

The local hero was greeted enthusiastically as he appeared in the South centerfield. His name floated above him in huge block letters as he bowed to the right, to the left and ahead. He was dark, compact, and extraordinarily muscled. “Mother-naked!” gasped the Primitive. Bil Ferry shook his head and thumbed down into the control pit. Mr. Ourser could see, in the immense magnification of the trideo tanks, the quoiter advancing down the field with little mincing steps, his arms out like a tightrope walker’s. And if one could see no garments, one could also see no details: he was, if naked, as smoothly streamlined as a teenage-boy doll. “He got his minibiki,” said Bil Ferry.

“Minibiki,” muttered Mr. Ourser, by some alchemy of inflection making the word sound like giggling from behind the barn, “Minibiki.”