Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

case old Jeremy here messes up the details.”
    He brought out three beers, one for each of us.
    “It was 421 years ago,” began Jeremy the beggar. “Nobody’s ever heard of Plutarch—”
    “He means the planet, not the man,” put in the bartender.
    “He knows that,” said Jeremy irritably. “Anyway, we were just a little backwater world with nothing special to our name.”
    “Except Damika,” said the bartender.
    “I’m coming to that,” said Jeremy. “We just had one thing out of the ordinary, one thing that made Plutarch special. We had a young man named Damika.” He paused wistfully. “They say he could fly, that he moved so fast the human eye couldn’t follow him.”
    “They say a lot of things,” added the bartender. “He was just a man.”
    “He had to be more than that,” said Jeremy doggedly. “Anyway, we entered a team in the Sector basketball tournament. There were forty-eight teams entered, only nineteen of them human. Bookmakers were giving fifty-to-one against us in any game, and three-thousand-to-one against our winning the whole thing.”
    “But you won,” I said.
    He nodded. “Damika averaged 63 points and 22 rebounds a game. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Even legends from the Earthbound days like Milt the Stilt and Johnny Magic never performed at that level. Suddenly people knew who we were. We had tourists coming to watch us practice before the Quinellus Cluster championships, and even better, we had investors. All because of the basketball team.”
    “All because of one young man, actually,” said the bartender.
    “He must have been something to see, this Damika,” I said.
    “They say he jumped so high and stayed in the air so long that textbooks had to rewrite the law of gravity.”
    “It’s a nice bedtime story,” said the bartender. “He was the best. There’s no sense trying to making him into anything more than that.”
    “Anyway,” continued Jeremy, “we were huge underdogs, but we won the Quinellus tournament—and then we went up against the Canphor VI team for the championship of the Democracy. They say more people watched that game than any sporting event in history. Think of it! For one night, two hundred billion people knew where Plutarch was! Hell, if Damika had said he wanted to be king, he’d have gotten it by acclamation.”
    “But he was supposed to be a modest, decent young man,” said the bartender. “All he wanted was to bring some reflected glory to the planet.”
    “We were big underdogs again,” said Jeremy. “We were giving up seven or eight inches and maybe fifty pounds of muscle per player. But you can see it for yourself if you buy the holo. The Canphorites got off to a big lead, because they double- and triple-teamed Damika. We were playing on McCallister II, which was supposed to be a neutral world, but its gravity was about a hundred and ten percent Standard, and it wore on our lighter players more than on the Canphorites. They were winning 52-38 at the half, and everyone thought it was over.”
    “Damned near was,” agreed the bartender.
    “But then Damika just took over the game,” said Jeremy, his emaciated face lighting up with excitement and pride some four centuries after the fact. “He did things no one had ever seen before, things no one has seen since, and he single-handedly brought us back from the abyss.”
    “He scored 45 points in the second half,” added the bartender. “No one had seen anything like that, not then, not ever. The people who’d spent their savings flying in from Plutarch were screaming and cheering him on, and he didn’t let them down.”
    “He tied it with a basket at the final buzzer,” continued Jeremy, “and then the game went into overtime. We were down one point with ten seconds to go, but we got the ball into Damika’s hands, and we knew that he wouldn’t let us down.”
    “You sound like you were there,” I commented.
    “I wish I’d been,” replied Jeremy. “Ten