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took him two or three shots to get on the green, but once there, his putts were fantastic. He sank putts of twenty, even thirty meters. It was as if the ball was being pulled to the cup by some invisible force.
    Mai was doing well, also. Her drives were accurate, even though nowhere near long enough to reach the greens. But she always landed cleanly on the fairway and chipped beautifully. She putted almost as well as Sam and kept pace with the leaders.
    Both Mai and Sam seemed able to swing much more freely in their nanosuits. Where the other golfers were stiff with their drives and chips, Mai and Sam looked loose and agile. If they’d been bigger, and able to drive the ball farther, they would have led the pack easily.
    But my course was really tough on all of them. By the time they reached the last tee, only three of the golfers had broken par. Sam had birdied the last three holes, all par fives, but he was still one above par. The skinny little Indian, Ramjanmyan, was leading at three below.
    And Mai was right behind him, at two below.
    The eighteenth was the toughest hole on the course, a par six, where the cup was nearly a full kilometer from the tee and hidden behind a slight rise of solid gray rock slanting across the green-painted ground.
    Mai stood at the tee, looking toward the lighted pole poking up above the crest of the rocky ridge, her driver in her gloved hands. She took a couple of practice swings, loose and easy, then hit the drive of her life. The ball went straight down the fairway, bounced a couple of dozen meters short of the green, hopped over the ridge, and rolled to a stop a bare ten centimeters from the cup.
    â€œWow!” yelled the comm techs, rising to their feet. I could even hear the roar of the crowd all the way over in Dante’s lobby.
    Sam was next. His drive was long enough to reach the green, all right, but he sliced it badly and the ball thunked down in the deep sand off the edge of the green, almost at the red-painted hazard line.
    Groans of disappointment.
    â€œThat’s it for the boss,” said one of the techs.
    Somehow I found myself thinking, Don’t be so sure about that.
    Ramjanmyan’s drive almost cleared the ridge. But only almost. It hit the edge of the rock and bounced high, then fell in that dreamlike lunar slow motion and rolled back almost to the tee. Even in his exoskeleton suit, the Indian seemed to slump like a defeated man.
    He was still one stroke ahead of Mai, though, and two strokes in front of his next closest competitor, a lantern-jawed Australian named MacTavish.
    But MacTavish overdrove his ball, trying to clear that ridge, and it rolled past the cup to a stop at the edge of the deep sand.
    Mai putted carefully, but her ball hit a minuscule pebble at the last instant and veered a bare few centimeters from the cup. She tapped it in, and came away with a double eagle. She now was leading at five below par.
    Sam had trudged out to the sand, where his ball lay. He needed to chip it onto the green and then putt it into the hole. Barely bothering to line up his shot, he whacked it out of the sand. The ball bounced onto the green and then rolled and rolled, curving this way and that like a scurrying ant looking for a breadcrumb, until it rolled to the lip of the cup and dropped in.
    Pandemonium. All of us in the comm center sprang to our feet, hands raised high, and bellowed joyfully. The crowd in Dante’s lobby roared so hard it registered on the seismograph over in Selene.
    Sam was now three below par and so happy about it that he was hopping up and down, dancing across the green, swinging his club over his head gleefully.
    Ramjanmyan wasn’t finished, though. He lofted his ball high over the ridge. It seemed to sail up there among the stars for an hour before it plopped onto the middle of the green and rolled to the very lip of the cup. There it stopped. We all groaned in sympathy for him.
    But the Indian plodded in his exoskeleton suit