“I tried once or twice,” said George. “One guy asked me who wrote my speech. Another of the interviewers wanted to know, was I thinking about running for office?” The flicker in George’s eyes this time was not a happy one. “I don’t talk that way to reporters anymore. Competitiveness, ruthless competitiveness, that they understand. But joy…?” He trailed off, shaking his head.
Catie made a wry face. “Trying to teach a pig to read,” she said, “wastes your time, and only annoys the pig.”
George burst out laughing, and Mike and Hal both looked at him.
“What was that punch line again?” Mike said. “I missed it.”
“Nothing,” George and Catie said, more or less in unison.
Catie was immensely relieved when Wendy arrived to ask who wanted dessert. Hal, as always, was game. Catie often wondered where he put all the calories he ingested in a day, and how he always failed to show any sign of them afterward. For herself, she passed, content to finish her soda, and George and Mike asked for coffee.
“What time’s the press conference?” said Mike, making the writing-on-a-notepad gesture to Wendy when she came with their coffees.
“Two-thirty,” George said. “We’ll all stand around in the lobby of their headquarters, trying to look like we really want to be there. They’ll have ‘real’ jerseys there for us to wear, to illustrate what the virtual ones are going to look like.” He gave Catie an amused look. “Whether they’ll fit anything like as well as the virtual ones is another question. And then there’ll be another grilling from the media people, under those hot lights…and then we’ll have to go virtual and do it again. A couple of hours’ worth of interviews, at least, when we should all be in the cubic, practicing. And then back on the plane and home again….”
“But can’t you just play the game from up here?” Hal said, surprised. “The sponsor must have Net facilities you can use!”
“They probably have a lot better ones than anything the team has,” George said, nabbing the bill from the newly returned Wendy before anyone else had a chance at it, “but I don’t care about that, and neither does the team. When we’re playing, we all prefer our own Net setups at home. It takes valuable time to get used to someone else’s rig, and you never feel quite comfortable…and what happens if something goes wrong with it in mid-game? If your own Net machine malfunctions, that’s one thing, and maybe you’ll know what to do about it. Get up and kick it, or jiggle the phone cable, or whatever. But play a tournament-level game in a strange building, using a strange new machine? No, thanks. I’ll admit the extra travel time is a nuisance, but if it gets us home before midnight, that’s going to be good enough for me and the rest of the team. We’ll manage.”
Catie thought she could see his point. George fished around in his pockets and came up with an ElectroWallet card, handed it to Wendy. “Please take ten,” he said, and she went away smiling even harder than she had been, which Catie would have thought impossible.
George looked over at Hal. “So have you got your ‘seats’ sorted out for the game tomorrow?” he said.
“Yup…took care of it yesterday.”
“Not a bad idea,” George said. “The reservations computers have been having trouble with last-minute bookings, the last game or so, they tell me. But do you want to swap your seats for positions in friends-and-family space, down close to the heart of things? We’ve got room.”
Hal was delighted. “Can we really?”
George glanced at Catie. “No problem. Suit you?”
“Suits me fine,” she said. “I always like a close look at a winning team.”
“Then it’s settled. When you’re online this evening, check the team server and give it your seat locations. It’ll make the swap. Look, I’m sorry we have to go, but the new sponsor would get pretty cranky if the captain was late for the big press push. And if I know these guys, they’re going to want some time privately with us before the public part of the proceedings.” George got up.
They all headed for the door, where George was handed his ElectroWallet by Wendy. There was a little crowd of the diner staff all waiting there with her by the door to shake George’s hand, and as they went out to the street, Hal muttered to Catie, “We ought to come back here later in the week and see if the service is still this good.”
She smiled slightly as Mike said his good-byes and headed for his car. He would be driving George to the press conference.
“Listen,” said George, shaking Hal’s hand, “it’s been good meeting you.” To Catie, as he shook her hand, he said, “I really enjoyed this. Stay in touch.”
“Sure.” She smiled politely enough, while at the same time thinking, I bet you say that to all the—
“I mean it,” George said, and once more there was something about the way he said it that brought Catie up short. It was not exactly urgency in his voice — but at the same time, she couldn’t get a handle on just what it was.
“Look, wait a second,” George was saying. He fumbled around in his pocket and came up with a business card, one of the kind with a Net-readable chip embedded in it: you dropped it onto your Net machine’s reading pad, if your machine had one, and it read the embedded address automatically. Or you could always simply read it into your machine off the card.
“Here’s my Net address,” George said. “It’s always nice to run into someone who likes the sport for itself, and isn’t blinded by the surrounding hype. If you have time, I wouldn’t mind chatting with you occasionally. Or alternately, having the occasional game of chess. I don’t have time for tournament play, heck, I don’t have time now for proper meals, most days…but move-by-move would be fun.”
Catie looked at his card, looked at him. “Sure,” she said. “Any time.”
George waved a little salute at them and headed off toward Mike’s car, got in. The two of them drove off. Catie and Hal walked in the other direction, toward the GWU tram station, and found the tram that would head toward home waiting there on layover. They climbed on, and Catie sat down, feeling strangely weary, and yet aware of something at the back of her mind that was poking her for attention, trying to find a way to explain itself and not yet succeeding.
Hal, though, was shaking his head, looking astonished. “Am I completely out of my mind,” he said as the tram started up, turning out of the layover loop and into traffic, “or was he making a dive at you?”
Catie reached into her pocket, took out George’s card again, glanced at it. “I don’t think so,” she said after a moment. “I think something else may be going on. He might just want someone to talk to who doesn’t automatically see him as a spatball player, or a media figure…”
“Or a serious hunk.”
“I don’t know,” Catie said.
What she did know, though, was that as soon as she finished up whatever else her mom wanted her to take care of around the house, she was going to go have a talk with Mark Gridley.
4
Why, when you needed to talk to somebody, was it always so hard to find him? Mark was online so much of the time Catie sometimes wondered how he got enough sleep and sufficient calories for fuel. But when Catie got online that evening and sent a call to Mark’s space, all she got was an image of Mark standing by himself, spotlit in the darkness, saying, “I’m either not online right now, or I can’t talk…so leave me a message, okay?”
And so she did. But the other thing she found, around noon on Sunday — for she got involved in a long debrief with some of her soccer buddies over the game they had played on Saturday afternoon, after the “celebrity lunch”—was in her workspace, in the middle of Catie’s mock-up of the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, when she went in to tidy things up before going off to watch the South Florida — Chicago — Moscow Spartak game. It was a simple text message in a window, just hanging there and glowing in the early afternoon light, and it read: