Even so, I could hardly ignore the excitement as the day for the return game drew nearer. For one thing, it interfered with business. I’d go to a conference, arranged with great difficulty and expense at a safe hotel or in the house of some reliable sympathiser, and half the time everyone would be talking about football. It was maddening, and I began to wonder if the Perivians took their politics as seriously as their sports. ‘Gentlemen!’ I’d protest. ‘Our next consignment of rotary drills is being unloaded tomorrow, and unless we get that permit from the Minister of Agriculture, someone may open the cases and then…’
‘Don’t worry, my boy,’ General Sierra or Colonel Pedro would answer airily, ‘that’s already taken care of. Leave it to the Army.’
I knew better than to retort ‘Which army?’, and for the next ten minutes I’d have to listen while an argument raged about football tactics and the best way of dealing with recalcitrant referees. I never dreamed—and I’m sure that no one else did—that this topic was intimately bound up with our particular problem.
Since then, I’ve had the leisure to work out what really happened, though it was very confusing at the time. The central figure in the whole improbable drama was undoubtedly Don Hernando Dias—millionaire playboy, football fan, scientific dilettante, and, I am sure, future president of Perivia. Owing to his fondness for racing cars and Hollywood beauties, which has made him one of his country’s best-known exports, most people assume that the ‘playboy’ label describes Don Hernando completely. Nothing, but nothing, could be farther from the truth.
I knew that Don Hernando was one of us, but at the same time he was a considerable favourite of President Ruiz, which placed him in a powerful yet delicate position. Naturally, I’d never met him; he had to be very particular about his friends, and there were few people who cared to meet me, unless they had to. His interest in science I didn’t discover until much later; it seems that he has a private observatory which is in frequent use on clear nights, though rumour has it that its functions are not entirely astronomical.
It must have taken all Don Hernando’s charm and powers of persuasion to talk the President into it; if the old boy hadn’t been a football fan too, and smarting under last year’s defeat like every other patriotic Perivian, he would never have agreed. But the sheer originality of the scheme must have appealed to him even though he may not have been too happy about having half his troops out of action for the best part of an afternoon. Still, as Don Hernando undoubtedly reminded him, what better way of ensuring the loyalty of the Army than by giving it fifty thousand seats for the game of the year?
I knew nothing about all this when I took my place in the stadium on that memorable day. If you think I had no wish to be there, you are quite correct. But Colonel Pedro had given me a ticket, and it was unhealthy to hurt his feelings by not using it. So there I was, under the sweltering sun, fanning myself with the programme and listening to the commentary over my portable radio while we waited for the game to begin.
The stadium was packed, its great oval bowl a solid sea of faces. There had been a slight delay in admitting the spectators; the police had done their best, but it takes time to search a hundred thousand people for concealed firearms. The visiting team had insisted on this, to the great indignation of the locals. The protests faded swiftly enough, however, as the artillery accumulated at the check points.
It was easy to tell the exact moment the referee drove up in his armour-plated Cadillac; you could follow his progress by the booing of the crowd. ‘Surely,’ I said to my neighbour—a young lieutenant so junior that it was safe for him to be seen out with me—‘you could change the ref if you feel that way about him?’
He shrugged resignedly. ‘The visitors have the right to choose. There’s nothing we can do about it.’
‘Then at least you ought to win the games you play in Panagura.’
‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But last time we were overconfident. We played so badly that even our ref couldn’t save us.’
I found it hard to feel much sympathy for either side, and settled down to a couple of hours of noisy boredom. Seldom have I been more mistaken.
Admittedly, the game took some time to get started. First a sweating band played the two national anthems, then the teams were presented to El Presidente and his lady, then the Cardinal blessed everybody, then there was a pause while the two captains had some obscure argument over the size or shape of the ball. I spent the waiting period reading my programme, an expensive and beautifully produced affair that had been given to me by the lieutenant. It was tabloid size, printed on art paper, lavishly illustrated, and looked as if it had been bound in silver. It seemed unlikely that the publishers would get their money back, but this was obviously a matter of prestige rather than economics. In any event there was an impressive list of subscribers, headed by the President, to this ‘Special Victory Souvenir Issue’. Most of my friends were on it, and I noted with amusement that the bill for presenting fifty thousand free copies to our gallant fighting men had been met by Don Hernando. It seemed a somewhat naïve bid for popularity, and I doubted if the good will was worth the considerable cost. The ‘Victory’ also struck me as a trifle premature, not to say tactless.
These reflections were interrupted by the roar of the enormous crowd as play started. The ball slammed into action, but had barely zigzagged halfway down the field when a blue-jerseyed Perivian tripped a black-striped Panaguran. They don’t waste much time, I told myself; what’s the ref going to do? To my surprise, he did nothing, and I wondered if this match we’d got him to accept COD terms.
‘Wasn’t that a foul, or whatever you call it?’ I said to my companion.
‘Pfui!’ he answered, not taking his eyes off the game. ‘Nobody bothers about that sort of thing. Besides, the coyote never saw it.’
That was true. The referee was a long way down the field, and seemed to be finding it hard to keep up with the game. His movements were distinctly laboured, and that puzzled me until I guessed the reason. Have you ever seen a man trying to run in a bulletproof vest? Poor devil. I thought, with the detached sympathy of one crook for another; you’re earning your bribe. I was finding it hot enough merely sitting still.
For the first ten minutes, it was a pretty open game, and I don’t think there were more than three fights. The Perivians just missed one goal; the ball was headed out so neatly that the frantic applause from the Panaguran supporters (who had a special police guard and a fortified section of the stadium all to themselves) went quite unbooed. I began to feel disappointed. Why, if you changed the shape of the ball this might be a good-natured game back home.
Indeed, there was no real work for the Red Cross until nearly half time, when three Perivians and two Panagurans (or it may have been the other way around) fused together in a magnificent melee from which only one survivor emerged under his own power. The casualties were carted off the field of battle amid much pandemonium, and there was a short break while replacements were brought up. This started the first major incident: the Perivians complained that the other side’s wounded were shamming so that fresh reserves could be poured in. But the ref was adamant, the new men came on, and the background noise dropped to just below the threshold of pain as the game resumed.
The Panagurans promptly scored, and though none of my neighbours actually committed suicide, several seemed close to it. The transfusion of new blood had apparently pepped up the visitors, and things looked bad for the home team. Their opponents were passing the ball with such skill that the Perivian defences were as porous as a sieve. At this rate, I told myself, the ref can afford to be honest; his side will win anyway. And to give him his due, I’d seen no sign of any obvious bias so far.
I didn’t have long to wait. A last-minute rally by the home team blocked a threatened attack on their goal, and a mighty kick by one of the defenders sent the ball rocketing toward the other end of the field. Before it had reached the apex of its flight, the piercing shriek of the referee’s whistle
brought the game to a halt. There was a brief consultation between ref and captains, which almost at once broke up in disorder. Down there on the field everyone was gesticulating violently, and the crowd was roaring its disapproval. ‘What’s happening now?’ I asked plaintively.
‘The ref says our man was off side.’
‘But how can he be? He’s on top of his own goal!’
‘Shush!’ said the lieutenant, unwilling to waste time enlightening my ignorance. I don’t shush easily, but this time I let it go, and tried to work things out for myself. It seemed that the ref had awarded the Panagurans a free kick at our goal, and I could understand the way everybody felt about it.
The ball soared through the air in a beautiful parabola, nicked the post—and cannoned in despite a flying leap by the goalie. A mighty roar of anguish rose from the crowd, then died abruptly to a silence that was even more impressive. It was as if a great animal had been wounded—and was biding the time for its revenge. Despite the heat pouring down from the not-far-from-vertical sun, I felt a sudden chill, as if a cold wind had swept past me. Not for all the wealth of the Incas would I have changed places with the man sweating out there on the field in his bulletproof vest.
We were two down, but there was still hope—it was not yet half time and a lot could happen before the end of the game. The Perivians were on their mettle now, playing with almost demonic intensity, like men who had accepted a challenge and were going to show that they could meet it.
The new spirit paid off promptly. The home team scored one impeccable goal within a couple of minutes, and the crowd went wild with joy. By this time I was shouting like everyone else, and telling that referee things I didn’t know I could say in Spanish. One to two now, and a hundred thousand people praying and cursing for the goal that would bring us level again.
It came just before half time. In a matter that had such grave consequences, I want to be perfectly fair. The ball had been passed to one of our forwards, he ran about fifty feet with it, evaded a couple of the defenders with some neat footwork, and kicked it cleanly into the goal. It had scarcely dropped down from the net when that whistle went again.
Now what? I wondered. He can’t disallow that.
But he did. The ball, it seemed, had been handled. I’ve got pretty good eyes, and I never saw it. So I cannot honestly say that I blame the Perivians for what happened next.
The police managed to keep the crowd off the field, though it was touch and go for a minute. The two teams drew apart, leaving the centre of the field bare except for the stubbornly defiant figure of the referee. He was probably wondering how he could make his escape from the stadium, and was consoling himself with the thought that when this game was over he could retire for good.
The thin, high bugle call took everyone completely by surprise—everyone, that is, except the fifty thousand well-trained men who had been waiting for it with mounting impatience. The whole arena became instantly silent, so silent that I could hear the noise of the traffic outside the stadium. A second time that bugle sounded—and all the vast acreage of faces opposite me vanished in a blinding sea of fire.
I cried out and covered my eyes; for one horrified moment I thought of atomic bombs and braced myself uselessly for the blast. But there was no concussion—only that flickering veil of flame that beat even through my closed eyelids for long seconds, then vanished as swiftly as it had come when the bugle blared out for the third and last time.
Everything was just as it had been before, except for one minor item. Where the referee had been standing there was a small, smouldering heap, from which a thin column of smoke curled up into the still air.
What in heaven’s name had happened? I turned to my companion, who was as shaken as I was. ‘Madre de Dios,’ I heard him mutter. ‘I never knew it would do that.’ He was staring, not at the small funeral pyre down there on the field, but at the handsome souvenir programme spread across his knees. And then, in a flash of incredulous comprehension, I understood.
Yet even now, when it’s all been explained to me, I still find it hard to credit what I saw with my own eyes. It was so simple, so logical—so unbelievable.
Have you ever annoyed anyone by flicking a pocket mirror across his eyes? I guess every kid has: I remember doing it to a teacher once, and getting duly paddled. But I’d never imagined what would happen if fifty thousand well-trained men did the same trick, each using a tin-foil reflector a couple of feet square.
A mathematically minded friend of mine has worked it out—not that I needed any further proof, but I always like to get to the bottom of things. I never knew, until then, just how much energy there is in sunlight; it’s well over a horsepower on every square yard facing the sun. Most of the heat falling on one side of that enormous stadium had been diverted into the single small area occupied by the late ref. Even allowing for all the programmes that weren’t aimed in the right direction, he must have intercepted at least a thousand horsepower of raw heat. He couldn’t have felt much; it was as if he had been dropped into a blast furnace.
I’m sure that no one except Don Hernando realised what was likely to happen; his well-drilled fans had been told that the ref would merely be blinded and put out of action for the rest of the game. But I’m also equally sure that no one had any regrets. They play football for keeps in Perivia.
Likewise politics. While the game was continuing to its now predictable end, beneath the benign gaze of a new and understandably docile referee, my friends were hard at work. When our victorious team had marched off the field (the final score was fourteen to two), everything had been settled. There had been practically no shooting, and as the President emerged from the stadium he was politely informed that a seat had been reserved for him on the morning flight to Mexico City.
As General Sierra remarked to me when I boarded the same plane as his late chief, ‘We let the Army win the football match, and while it was busy we won the country. So everybody’s happy.’
Though I was too polite to voice any doubts, I could not help thinking that this was a rather shortsighted attitude. Several million Panagurans were very unhappy indeed, and sooner or later there would be a day of reckoning.
I suspect that it’s not far away. Last week a friend of mine, who is one of the world’s top experts in his specialised field but prefers to work on a freelance basis under an assumed name, indiscreetly blurted out one of his problems to me.
‘Joe,’ he said, ‘why the devil should anyone want me to build a guided rocket that can fit inside a football?’
Who’s There?
First published in New Worlds, November 1958
Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds
When Satellite Control called me, I was writing up the day’s progress report in the Observation Bubble—the glass-domed office that juts out from the axis of the Space Station like the hubcap of a wheel. It was not really a good place to work, for the view was too overwhelming. Only a few yards away I could see the construction teams performing their slow-motion ballet as they put the station together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And beyond them, twenty thousand miles below, was the blue-green glory of the full Earth, floating against the ravelled star clouds of the Milky Way.
‘Station Supervisor here,’ I answered. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘Our radar’s showing a small echo two miles away, almost stationary, about five degrees west of Sirius. Can you give us a visual report on it?’
Anything matching our orbit so precisely could hardly be a meteor; it would have to be something we’d dropped—perhaps an inadequately secured piece of equipment that had drifted away from the station. So I assumed: but when I pulled out my binoculars and searched the sky around Orion, I soon found my mistake. Though this space traveller was manmade, it had nothing to do with us.
‘I’ve found it,’ I told Control. ‘It’s someone’s test satellite—cone-shaped, four antennas, and what looks like a lens system in its base. Probably US Air Force, early nineteen-sixties, judgin
g by the design. I know they lost track of several when their transmitters failed. There were quite a few attempts to hit this orbit before they finally made it.’
After a brief search through the files, Control was able to confirm my guess. It took a little longer to find out that Washington wasn’t in the least bit interested in our discovery of a twenty-year-old stray satellite, and would be just as happy if we lost it again.
‘Well, we can’t do that,’ said Control. ‘Even if nobody wants it, the thing’s a menace to navigation. Someone had better go out and haul it aboard.’
That someone, I realised, would have to be me. I dared not detach a man from the closely knit construction teams, for we were already behind schedule—and a single day’s delay on this job cost a million dollars. All the radio and TV networks on Earth were waiting impatiently for the moment when they could route their programmes through us, and thus provide the first truly global service, spanning the world from Pole to Pole.
‘I’ll go out and get it,’ I answered, snapping an elastic band over my papers so that the air currents from the ventilators wouldn’t set them wandering around the room. Though I tried to sound as if I was doing everyone a great favour, I was secretly not at all displeased. It had been at least two weeks since I’d been outside; I was getting a little tired of stores schedules, maintenance reports, and all the glamorous ingredients of a Space Station Supervisor’s life.
The only member of the staff I passed on my way to the air lock was Tommy, our recently acquired cat. Pets mean a great deal to men thousands of miles from Earth, but there are not many animals that can adapt themselves to a weightless environment. Tommy mewed plaintively at me as I clambered into my spacesuit, but I was in too much of a hurry to play with him.