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  Instead, he turned and waited until the mascot had run from the dugout to him.

  She was a beautiful petite brunette who wore a baseball player’s uniform. The only departure from ancient tradition was the triangular opening in her shirt which exposed her small but firm breasts.

  Big Bill Appletree, the batter, rubbed his knuckles against the black hair of the mascot, kissed her on the forehead, and then gave her fanny a playful slap as she ran back to the dugout. He stepped into the box, a square drawn with chalk on the ground, and assumed the ancient stance of the batter ready for the pitcher.

  Lanky John Up-The-Hill-And-Over-The-River-Jordan Mighty Casey spat tobacco, then began to wind up. He held in his right hand a ball of regulation size. Four half-inch steel spikes projected from the ball, one from each pole of the sphere and two from the equator. John Casey had to hold the ball so he wouldn’t cut his fingers when he hurled it. This handicapped him somewhat from the view of an ancient pitcher. But he stood six meters closer to the batter, thus more than making up for the awkwardness of hurling the ball.

  He waited until the Caseylander mascot had come to him to have her head knuckled. Then he wound up and let fly.

  The spike-bearing ball whizzed by an inch from Big Bill Appletree’s face. Appletree blinked, but he did not flinch.

  A roar went up from the crowd at this show of courage.

  “Ball one!” cried the umpire.

  The Caseyland rooters booed. From where they sat, it looked as if the ball, though coming close to Appletree’s face, had been exactly in line with the chalk mark of the box. Therefore, the throw should have been a strike.

  Appletree struck at the next one and missed.

  “Strike one!”

  At the third pitch, Appletree swung and connected. The ball, however, soared to the left. It was obviously a foul.

  “Strike two!”

  The next pitch came sizzling in, directed at Appletree’s belly. He sucked it in and jumped back, just far enough to keep from being hit but not so far he stepped outside the box, which would constitute a strike.

  The next pitch, Appletree swung and missed. The ball did not. Appletree fell to the ground, the spike of the ball sticking in his side.

  The crowd screamed, and then became comparatively silent as the ump began counting.

  Appletree had ten seconds to get up and bat or else have a strike called on him.

  The Deecee mascot, a tall beautiful girl with exceptionally long legs and rich red hair that fell past her buttocks, round and hard as apples, ran out to him. She brought her knees up high in the prancing gait affected by mascots on such occasions. When she got to Appletree, she dropped to her knees and bent her head over him and threw her hair forward so he could stroke it. The strength of a virgin, of a mascot dedicated to the Great White Mother in her aspect as Unfekk, was supposed to flow from her to him. Apparently this was not enough. He said something to her, and she rose, unbuttoned a flap over her pubes, and then bent down to him again. The crowd roared, because this meant that Appletree was so badly hurt he needed a double dose of spiritual-physical power.

  At the count of eight, Appletree rose to his feet. The crowd cheered. Even the Caseylander rooters gave him an ovation—all honored a man with guts.

  Appletree pulled the spike from his side, took a bandage from the mascot, and placed it over the wound. The bandage clung without being taped, as its pseudoflesh at once put out a number of little claw-tipped tendrils that anchored it.

  He nodded to the ump that he was ready.

  “Play ball!”

  Now it was Appletree’s turn to pitch. He was allowed one try to knock the pitcher down. If he did so, he could walk to first.

  He wound up and hurled the ball. John Casey stood within the narrow square used for this occasion. If he stepped outside it, he would be in disgrace—the showers for him—and Appletree could walk all the way to second.

  He stood his ground, but his knees were bent so he could sway his body either way.

  The ball was a technical miss, though the edge of one of the rotating spikes did cut his right hip.

  Then he picked up the ball and wound up.

  The Deecee rooters prayed silently, their fingers crossed or their hands stroking the hair on the heads of any nearby mascots. The Caseylanders screamed themselves hoarse. The Pants-Elf, Iroquois, Floridians, and Buffaloes yelled insults at whichever team they hated most.

  The Deecee man on third base edged out, ready to run for home if he got a chance. Casey eyed him but made no threatening move.

  He threw one straight over the plate, preferring to make Appletree hit for a long one rather than dodge and perhaps get another ball called. Four balls, and Appletree could walk to first.

  The big Deecee batter hit the ball square. But, as often happened, one of the spikes was also hit. The ball rose high over the path from home plate to first and then dropped toward a point halfway between home and first.

  Appletree threw the bat at the pitcher, as was his right, and sprinted for first. Halfway to first, the ball hit him on the head. The first baseman, running to catch it, also rammed into him. Appletree hit the ground hard but bounced up like a rubber ball, ran several steps, and took a belly skid toward first.

  However, the first baseman, while still on the ground, had picked up the ball and made a pass with it at Appletree. Immediately after, he jumped up and threw to home. The ball smacked into the huge and thick mitt of the catcher just before the man who had been on third slid into the plate.

  The ump called the Deecee player out, and there was no argument there. But the first baseman walked up to the ump and submitted, in a loud voice, that he had touched Appletree as he ran away. Therefore, Appletree was also out.

  Appletree denied that he had been touched.

  The first baseman said that he could prove it. He had nicked the Deecee on the side of the right ankle with a spike on the ball. The ump made Appletree take off his stocking.

  “You’ve a fresh wound there, still bleeding,” he said. “You’re out!”

  “I am not!” roared Appletree, spraying tobacco juice into the ump’s face. “I’m bleeding from two cuts on my thigh, too, and that was done last inning! That father-god worshiper is a liar!” “How would he know to tell me to look at your right ankle unless he had nicked you?” roared the ump back at Appletree. “I’m the ump, and I say you’re out!”

  He spelled it out in Deecee phonetics. “A-U-T! Out!”

  The decision did not go over well with the Deecee rooters. They booed and screamed the traditional, “Kill the ump!”

  The Karelian turned pale, but he stood his ground. Unfortunately, his courage and integrity did him no good, as the mob spilled out of the stadium and hung him by the neck from a girder. The mob also began beating up the Caseylander team. These might have died under the savage blows, but the Manhattan police surrounded them and beat back the frenzied rooters with the flat of their swords. They also managed to cut down the Karelian before the noose had finished its work.

  Meanwhile, the Caseylander rooters had attempted to come to the rescue of their team. Although they never reached the players, they did tangle with the Deecee fans.

  Stagg watched the melee for a while. At first he thought of leaping into the mass of furiously struggling bodies and striking blows right and left with his great fists. His bloodlust was aroused. He rose to make the leap into the mob below, but at that moment a group of women, also aroused by the fight, but in a different sense, descended on him.

  10

  Churchill did not sleep well that night. He could not rid himself of the ecstatic expression on Robin’s face when she had said she hoped she would bear the Sunhero’s child.

  First, he cursed himself for not having guessed that she would have been among the one hundred virgins selected to make their debut during the rites. She was too beautiful, and her father was too prominent, for her to have been rejected.

  Then he excused himself on the grounds t
hat he really knew little of Deecee’s culture. His own attitudes were too much those of his own time. He had treated her as if she were a girl of the early twenty-first century.

  He cursed himself for having fallen in love with Robin. He was reacting more like a youth of twenty than a man of thirty-two—no, a man of eight hundred and thirty-two. A man who had traveled thousands of millions of miles and had made interstellar space his domain. Fallen for a girl of eighteen, who knew only a tiny section of Earth and a tiny section of time!

  But Churchill was practical. A fact was a fact. And it was a fact that he wanted Robin Whitrow for his wife—or had, up to that moment last night when she had stunned him with her announcement.

  For a while he hated Peter Stagg. He had always had a slight resentment against his captain, because Stagg was so tall and handsome and held a position which Churchill knew he was just as capable of holding. He liked and respected Stagg, but, being honest, he had admitted to himself that he was jealous.

  It was almost unendurable to think that Stagg, as usual, had beaten him. Stagg was always first.

  Almost unendurable.

  As the night crept on, and Churchill rose from bed to smoke a cigar and pace back and forth, he forced himself to be frank with himself.

  It was neither Stagg’s fault nor Robin’s that this had happened. And Robin certainly was not in love with Stagg. Stagg, poor devil, was doomed to a short but ecstatic life.

  The immediate fact for Churchill to deal with was that he wanted to marry a woman who was going to bear another man’s child. That neither she nor the father could be blamed was beside the point. What mattered was whether he wanted to marry Robin and to raise the child as his own.

  Eventually, by lying still in bed and relaxing himself through yogoid techniques, he managed to go to sleep.

  He woke about an hour after dawn and left his bedroom. A servant informed him that Whitrow had gone to his offices downtown and that Robin and her mother had left for the temple. The women should be back in two hours, if not sooner.

  Churchill asked after Sarvant, but he had not as yet appeared.

  Churchill ate breakfast with some of the children. They asked him to tell them a story about his trip to the stars. He described the incident on Wolf when the crew, while crossing a swamp on a raft in their escape from the Lupines, had been attacked by a balloon-octopus. This was an enormous creature that floated through the air by means of a gas-filled sac and seized its prey with long dangling tendrils. The tendrils could deliver an electric shock that paralyzed or killed its victims, after which the balloon-octopus tore the corpse apart with sharp claws on the ends of its eight muscular tentacles.

  The children were wide-eyed and silent while he told the tale, and at the end they looked at him as if he were a demigod. He was in a bitter mood by the time he’d finished breakfast, especially when he remembered that it was Stagg who had saved his life by chopping off a tentacle that had seized him.

  When he rose from the table, the children begged him for other stories. Only by promising to relate others when he returned that day was he able to free himself.

  He gave orders to the servants that they should tell Sarvant to wait for him and tell Robin that he was going in search of his crewmates. The servants insisted on his taking a carriage and team. He did not like to be any more in debt to Whitrow than he was but decided that refusing the offer would probably insult him. He drove away at a fast clip down Conch Avenue, heading toward the stadium in which the Terra stood.

  Churchill had some difficulty in finding the proper authorities. Washington had not changed in some respects. A little money here and there got him the correct information, and presently he was in the office of the man in charge of the Terra.

  “I would also like to know where the crew is,” he said.

  The official excused himself. He was gone for fifteen minutes, during which time he must have been checking on the whereabouts of the Terra’s ex-personnel. Returning, he told Churchill that all but one were at the House of Lost Souls. This, he explained, was a rooming and eating house for foreigners and traveling men who could not find a hostelry run for their particular frats.

  “If you were the Sunhero and in a city, you could stay at the Elks’ Hall,” the official said. “But until you are initiated into a frat, you must find whatever public or private lodging you can. It is not always easy.”

  Churchill thanked him and walked out. Following the official’s directions, he drove to the House of Lost Souls.

  Here he found all the men he had left. Like him, they were dressed in native costume. Like him, they had sold their clothing.

  They exchanged news of what had happened since the day before. Churchill asked where Sarvant was.

  “We haven’t heard a word about him,” Gbwe-hun said. “And we still don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “If you’re willing to be patient,” Churchill said, “you might be able to sail back to home.”

  He outlined for them what he knew about the maritime industry of Deecee and the chances they might have for seizing a ship. He concluded, “If I get a ship, I’ll see that you have a berth on it. First, you have to be capable of filling a seaman’s position. That means you’re going to have to be initiated into one of the nautical frats, and then you will have to ship out for training. The whole plan will take time. If you can’t stand the idea, you can always try it overland.”

  They discussed their chances and, after two hours, decided to follow Churchill.

  He rose from the table. “All right. You make this your headquarters until further notice. You know where to contact me. So long and good luck.”

  Churchill allowed the deer pulling the carriage to set their own preferred slow pace. He dreaded what he might find when he returned to the Whitrow home, and he still did not know what he would do.

  Eventually, the carriage pulled up before the house. The servants drove the team off. Churchill forced himself to enter the house. He found Robin and her mother sitting at the table, chattering away like a pair of happy magpies.

  Robin jumped up from her chair and ran to him. Her eyes were shining, and she was smiling ecstatically.

  “Oh, Rud, it has happened! I am carrying the Sunhero’s child—and the priestess said it will be a boy!”

  Churchill tried to smile, but he could not do it. Even when Robin had thrown her arms around him and kissed him and then had danced merrily around the room, Churchill could not smile.

  “Have a cold beer,” Robin’s mother said. “You look as if you’d had some bad news. I hope not. Today should be a day of rejoicing. I am the daughter of a Sunhero, and my daughter is the child of a Sunhero, and my grandchild will be the son of a Sunhero. This house has been triply blessed by Columbia. We should reward her with the gratitude of laughter.”

  Churchill sat down and drank deep of the cold dark beer in the huge stone mug. He wiped the foam from his lips and said, “You must forgive me. I have been listening to the troubles of my men. However, that is no concern of yours. What I would like to know is, what will Robin do now?”

  Angela Whitrow looked shrewdly at him as if she guessed what was going on inside him.

  “Why, she will accept some lucky young man as her husband. She may have trouble making up her mind, since at least ten men are very serious about her.”

  “Does she favor anyone in particular?” Churchill asked in what he hoped was a nonchalant manner.

  “She hasn’t told me so,” Robin’s mother said. “But if I were you, Mr. Churchill, I’d ask her here and now—before the others get here.”

  Churchill was startled, but he kept a stiff face.

  “How did you know I had that in mind?”

  “You’re a man, aren’t you? And I know that Robin favors you. I think you’d make her the best of husbands.”

  “Thank you,” he murmured. He sat for a moment, drumming his fingers on the table top. Then he rose and walked to where Robin was petting one of her cats, and seized
her by the shoulders.

  “Robin, will you marry me?”

  “Oh yes!” she said, and she went into his arms.

  That was that.

  Once Churchill had made up his mind, he proceeded on the assumption that he had no grounds for resenting Stagg’s child or Robin’s conceiving it. After all, he told himself, if Robin had been married to Stagg and borne his child, and then Stagg had died, he, Churchill, would have had nothing to resent. And the situation in effect amounted to the same. For one night, Robin had been married to his former captain.

  And though Stagg wasn’t dead yet, he soon would be.

  The upsetting factor had been his reacting with a set of values to a situation in which they did not apply. Churchill would have liked his bride to be a virgin. She wasn’t, and that was that.

  Nevertheless, he had more than one moment of feeling that, somehow, he had been betrayed.

  There wasn’t much time to think. Whitrow was called home from his office. He wept and embraced his daughter and son-inlaw-to-be and then got drunk. Meanwhile, Churchill was taken away by the female servants and given a hair-trimming and a bath. Afterwards, he was massaged and oiled and perfumed. When he came out of the bathhouse, he found Angela Whitrow busy with some friends arranging a party to be held that night.

  Shortly after supper, the guests began pouring in. By this time, both Whitrow and his daughter’s fiancé were deep in their cups. The guests did not mind. In fact, they seemed to expect such a condition, and they tried to catch up with the two.

  There was much laughter, much talking, much boasting. Only one ugly incident happened. One of the men who had been courting Robin made an allusion to Churchill’s foreign pronunciation and then challenged Churchill to a duel. It was to be knives at the foot of the totem pole, the two to be tied by their waists to the pole, and the winner to take Robin.

  Churchill punched the young man on the jaw, and his friends, laughing and whooping, carried off the unconscious body to its carriage.

  About midnight Robin left her friends and took Churchill by the hand.