“She wants a favor, I can tell.”
Catie was so amused that she didn’t much care what her workspace said. “Open a gateway to the friends-and-family space on the ISF server,” she said. “And run the usual leave-a-message message if anyone calls for me. I won’t be back for a few hours.”
“The Great Programmer be praised,” said her workspace, “I can finally get some reading done.” A doorway opened in the air of her space, and through it, faintly, Catie could hear the roar of the crowd. She stepped through and waved the doorway closed behind her.
Two hours later she could hardly breathe. The roar, which had been like the distant sea earlier, had hardly stopped for the whole time she’d been in here, even between the halves. Now the clock was running down toward the end of the third half, there was nothing but a tangle of bodies showing in the middle of the volume, and amid shrieks of excitement and outrage from the crowd, the goal hexes had just shifted again, for the third time in no more than five minutes. It was a standard increased-rotation simulation, for such things had happened often enough during the “classic” games played in real microgravity, when the needs of some experiment in the outer ring for increased gravity had caused the whole sphere to be rotated faster. Nominally the computer had charge of such events, inflicting them randomly on the players. But at times like this, when there were three teams at full strength in the cubic, all trying to get control of the ball, they produced the maximum possible confusion. The ball wouldn’t go where the players wanted it to. None of them seemed to be able to get that vital, instinctive “extra jump ahead” of the program—
The volume was a mob scene, a whirl of three sets of colors — the yellow and black of South Florida, the red of Chicago, the blue, red, and white of Spartak Moscow. Spartak had possession, its forwards passing the ball down a great-circle curve around the perimeter of the other teams’ people; but the crowded center-volume configuration of the last few seconds was already breaking, Melendez and Dawson for South Florida arrowing along toward the live goal that was nearest the end of the great-circle pass corridor that Moscow was using. Spartak had given up on subtlety and was trying for speed, but the belated decision was doing it no good. Chicago, one goal behind South Florida at the moment, was at the same time not beyond simply making sure that it not only scored against South Florida, but kept Spartak from scoring against anybody else under any circumstances — a three-way draw would mean a decrease in its overall “points” total for the tournament, and regardless of the number of games won or drawn, even one point too few could make the difference between winning or losing the tournament if the final games were still tied at the end of penalty or injury time. An extra point in another team’s plus column could mean that your own team won on goals but lost on points…and at the end of the day, it was the points that would matter. Chicago might get no more points itself today, but it was going to make sure at all costs that Spartak didn’t, either.
The goals now precessed one hex along, and everything changed, the previous scrum dissolving into a new one, oriented in a slightly different direction, as the teams reacted to the shift. As usual there were a few seconds during which none of the teams reacted as a whole, but only fragmentarily, shouting orders and suggestions at each other that were nearly lost in the clamor of the crowd. Darien for Chicago nabbed possession of the ball as it was being passed between two Spartak forwards, worked herself out of the tangle of bodies and passed to her fellow forward, Daystrom, who caught the ball in the crook of an elbow and spun in place, in roll axis, looking for the teammate to take the next pass. Most of the other Chicago players were still tangled up on the far side of the scrum, and Daystrom shouted himself hoarse at them to detach themselves and put some air between themselves and the “traffic jam” in the middle of the volume. One or two of them heard and pushed free, but the rest were trying to block either Spartak or South Florida players, and took a moment to respond to Daystrom. Daystrom glimpsed a face that looked ready, Ferguson’s, and flung the ball at him—
A leg thrust out of the scrum and kneed around the ball, capturing it. A moment later the body belonging to the ball worked its way out of the scrum and folded itself up double to spin. It was Spartak’s Yashenko. A great howl of delight went up from the Moscow fans and the scrum abruptly disintegrated, players scattering in all directions, looking to see where the ball was, locating it, targeting Yashenko and pushing off the volume walls or each other to get at him, to block or tackle.
The movement in the volume became frantic. Yashenko kept spinning, and one of his teammates, Talievna, was the first to reach him of the multiple “launches” that were heading his way. Within a meter of him she curled up to offer him inertial mass, and Yashenko pushed off against her and was halfway across the spat volume by the time the people who had been coming at him to tackle or block had arrived at his former position.
In an instant it became apparent that he was lining up for an attack on the Chicago goal, at right angles to the Spartak goal directly ahead of him. But there were too many of the Chi players on the wrong side of the volume to defend properly, now, and even the Chi goalie Bonner had been caught away from his post and was now trying to get at the wall for a push in the right direction. The crowd went up in a great howl of excitement as people reacted to the fragmentation among the teams and the prospect of the score, as Yashenko got ready to pass. But there was one place where confusion did not reign quite supreme. Among the bodies now swarming toward the Chicago goal, George Brickner curled himself down into cannonball — possibly inevitable in the confusion, but at least one player was ready for it — then Brickner pushed sideways off Chicago’s Daystrom and thus opened up a space between them with the equal-and-opposite reaction. There were shouts of confusion, some from his team-mates, but he had seen what they hadn’t, and Melendez had seen his glance. As Yashenko headered the ball at Galitsin for the goal, Melendez braced himself off Galitsin and pushed — and the ball flew with terrible speed past Galitsin, who reached for it but couldn’t stop it, and smacked squarely into the goal outlined in red, white, and blue before it could precess.
There was a roar of rage and disappointment from the Spartak fans as the computer held the ball in place and did a retrace of recent motions to see who picked up the point. But the referee had seen that perfectly well. “Own goal, Moscow,” the referee said over the roar, “credit to South Florida—!”
Another roar, but this time of joy, from the South Florida fans. The rest of the audience was waiting in breathless hope or anguish for the computer to finish the traceback and agree or disagree with the ref, but the digits on the scoreboard hexes embedded in the transparent walls of the spat volume burned briefly bright…and then changed from 2–1–1 to 2–2–1.
Play resumed, and if it had been fast before, it was furious now. Twenty-one men and women, angry or wildly excited or both, jostled for control of the ball as it was fired back into the volume. It vanished into a flying scrum of bodies wearing yellow and red about half and half, while the ones in red, white, and blue changed tactics, as was possibly understandable, and simply tried to keep either of the others from scoring. This was one of those situations in which spatball started to more closely resemble a particularly spiteful playground game of keep-away than anything else. Somehow, though, Chicago managed to get hold of the ball again, and another hand-around began as Hanrahan emerged from the scrum with the ball gripped desperately behind one bent knee. He did a 180-degree somersault in the pitch axis and flung the ball away again, revealing (to Moscow if no one else) that the pass he had been setting up was a feint, and that three of his teammates were lining up in great-circle on South Florida’s goal. But it was too late. The crowd was already counting down, and there was no injury time, and even as Jarvik took the pass from Hanrahan and fired it at Torrance, who in turn fired it at the goal, the South Florida goalie was there, out of nowhere, wrapping herself around the ball like an oyster around somebody’s escaped pearl.