They rode back to the Administration Building in silence for most of the way, while Jaffa Doane digested some of the most ill-tasting realizations of his career.
As the building came into sight, he shook himself and sat up.
“All right,” he said humbly, “I’ll start all over. Make believe I landed this morning. Where do I start?”
Rosenman smiled and leaned over to pat his shoulder.
“You’ll do,” he promised. “Where you start is in the clinic. You’ll find about fifty Martians with some degree of shock, needing the healing touch of a sound mind like yours. It won’t be too bad. You’ll have a headache afterward, but you can take a minor discomfort like that, can’t you?”
“Gladly!” Doane said. “That’s the least I can do. I want to apologize to both of you. You, too, Ruth-Ann.
I’ve been about as big a self-centered, wrong-headed”
She cut him off. “Oh, don’t get all wound up. You’re a bit of a phony, heaven knows” she ignored the strangled noise he made”but there are worse. Deep down inside, you’re quite a guy. You wouldn’t be as much of a man as you are if you didn’t have a little ham in you, and a touch of pig-headedness, too. I’ve given the matter a lot of thought, you see.”
Rosenman grinned at Doane’s expression. “She’s right,”
he agreed. “Between us, we’ll get you straightened out, so don’t worry about it. Two more years here ought to do it.
Basically, your ideas are right the Martians ought to learn to get by on their own feet. You can start finding out how they can do it. It’ll be good for you. When the two years of your term are up, you’ll go home with a better, more human understanding of what’s what, ready to settle down to a normal, productive existence on Earth with your wife and family.”
Doane yelped, “Hold on there! I haven’t got a. wife, much less a family!”
Ruth-Ann patted his arm reassuringly. “You’re not home yet,” she said.
The Celebrated No-Hit Inning
This is A TRUE STORY, you have to remember. You have to keep that firmly in mind because, frankly, in some places it may not sound like a true story. Besides, it’s a true story about baseball players, and maybe the only one there is. So you have to treat it with respect.
You know Boley, no doubt. It’s pretty hard not to know Boley, if you know anything at all about the National Game. He’s the one, for instance, who raised such a scream when the sportsvmters voted him Rookie of the Year. “I never was a rookie,” he bellowed into three million television screens at the dinner. He’s the one who ripped up his contract when his manager called him, “The hittin’est pitcher I ever see.” Boley wouldn’t stand for that. “Four-eighteen against the best pitchers in the league,” he yelled, as the pieces of the contract went out the window. “Fogarty, I am the hittin’est hitler you ever see!”
He’s the one they all said reminded them so much of Dizzy Dean at first. But did Diz win thirty-one games in his first year? Boley did; he’ll tell you so himself. But politely, and without bellowing… .
Somebody explained to Boley that even a truly great Hall-of-Fame pitcher really ought to show up for spring training. So, in his second year, he did. But he wasn’t convinced that he needed the training, so he didn’t bother much about appearing on the field.
Manager Fogarty did some extensive swearing about that, but he did all of his swearing to his pitching coaches and not to Mr. Boleslaw. There had been six ripped-up contracts already that year, when Boley’s feelings got hurt about something, and the front office were very insistent that there shouldn’t be any more.
There wasn’t much the poor pitching coaches could do, of course. They tried pleading with Boley. All he did was grin and ruffle their hair and say, “Don’t get all in an uproar.” He could ruffle their hair pretty easily, since he stood six inches taller than the tallest of them.
“Boley,” said Pitching Coach Magill to him desperately, “you are going to get me into trouble with the manager. I need this job. We just had another little boy at our house, and they cost money to feed. Won’t you please do me a favor and come down to the field, just for a little while?”
Boley had a kind of a soft heart. “Why, if that will make so much difference to you. Coach, I’ll do it. But I don’t feel much like pitching. We have got twelve exhibition games lined up with the Orioles on the way north, and if I pitch six of those that ought to be all the warm-up I need.”
“Three innings?” Magill haggled. “You know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. The thing is, the owner’s uncle is watching today.”
Boley pursed his lips. He shrugged. “One inning.”
“Bless you, Boley!” cried the coach. “One inning it is!”
Andy Andalusia was catching for the regulars when Boley turned up on the field. He turned white as a sheet.
“Not the fast ball, Boley! Please, Boley,” he begged. “I only been catching a week and I have not hardened up yet.”
Boleslaw turned the rosin bag around in his hands and looked around the field. There was action going on at all six diamonds, but the spectators, including the owner’s uncle, were watching the regulars.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” said Boley thoughtfully. “Let’s see. For the first man, I pitch only curves. For the second man, the screwball. And for the third manlet’s see. Yes.
For the third man, I pitch the sinker.”
“Fine!” cried the catcher gratefully, and trotted back to home plate.
“He’s a very spirited player,” the owner’s uncle commented to Manager Fogarty.
“That he is,” said Fogarty, remembering how the pieces of the fifth contract had felt as they hit him on the side of the head.
“He must be a morale problem for you, though. Doesn’t he upset the discipline of the rest of the team?”
Fogarty looked at him, but he only said.) “He win thirty-one games for us last year. If he had lost thirty-one he would have upset us a lot more.”
The owner’s uncle nodded, but there was a look in his eye all the same. He watched without saying anything more, while Boley struck out the first man with three sizzling curves, right on schedule, and then turned around and yelled something at the outfield.
“That crazy By heaven,” shouted the manager, “he’s chasing them back into the dugout. I told that”
The owner’s uncle clutched at Manager Fogarty as he was getting up to head for the field. “Wait a minute.
What’s Boleslaw doing?”
“Don’t you see? He’s chasing the outfield off the field.
He wants to face the next two men without any outfield!
That’s Satchell Paige’s old trick, only he never did it except in exhibitions where who cares? But that Boley”
“This is only an exhibition, isn’t it?” remarked the owner’s uncle mildly.
Fogarty looked longingly at the field, looked back at the owner’s uncle, and shrugged.
“All right.” He sat down, remembering that it was the owner’s uncle whose sprawling factories had made the family money that bought the owner his team. “Go ahead!” he bawled at the right fielder, who was hesitating halfway to the dugout.
Boley nodded from the mound. When the outfielders were all out of the way he set himself and went into his windup. Boleslaw’s windup was a beautiful thing to all who chanced to behold it unless they happened to root for another team. The pitch was more beautiful still.
“I got it, I got it!” Andalusia cried from behind the plate, waving the ball in his mitt. He returned it to the pitcher triumphantly, as though he could hardly believe he had caught the Boleslaw screwball after only the first week of spring training.
He caught the second pitch, too. But the third was unpredictably low and outside. Andalusia dived for it in vain.
“Ball one!” cried the umpire. The catcher scrambled up, ready to argue.
“He is right,” Boley called graciously from the mound.
“I am sorry, but my foot slipped. It was a ball.”
“Thank you,” said the umpire. T”P_ next screwball was a strike, though, and so were the three sinkers to the third man though one of those caught a little piece of the bat and turned into an into-the-dirt foul.