Anyway, Hisst and his minions, including our narrator Gris, arrive at the officers' club by light of the second moon. Gris notes that his boss has a talent for finding darkness as Hisst finds a place to hide all the trucks, and the criminal scum of the not-CIA move in on their quarry, Jettero Heller.
Now this officers' club isn't a nice lounge or a country club or anything, this is a sprawling complex including bars and housing and a freakin' sports stadium that's situated in a mountain valley, able to seat forty thousand. The Apparatus dregs - now there's thirty of them - get into position around the main arena exit, in hopes that their prey will be nice enough not to take a side door out. Then Hisst and Gris go into the crowded stadium full of cheering fans watching a game of bullet ball.
I wonder if anyone's written a paper about the depiction of alien entertainment in speculative fiction, 'cause that could be an interesting topic. The problem of course is that you'd have to be a really creative writer to come up with a whole alien sport out of nowhere, so most writers just put a weird spin on a more familiar pastime. Like Star Trek's multi-level chess, or the games of ring-toss played by the sinister, bloodthirsty Psychlos of Battlefield Earth.
Well, here we get dodgeball with bullets. Two teams of four to six players confined to ten foot circles on the ground fifty feet from each other. Players have a bag of forty-two three-inch-diameter balls and hurl their projectiles at each others' upper torsos at speeds of 75 to 125 Earth miles per hour (for reference, a site I found listed the top recorded speed of a baseball at 104.8 mph). Civilian games use soft balls, while the manly men of big leagues use hard bullets able to break bones and possibly kill someone if you hit 'em in the head. The Fleet variant is played shirtless, just for extra stupid points.
The game being watched by Gris is almost over, down to two against one. The lone player catches his opponents' simultaneously-thrown bullets one in each hand, and since there's no mention of any sort of gloves we can assume that these aliens' fingerbones are tougher than their skulls. When one of his foes throws another bullet, the lone player, who is of course Jettero Heller, is able to loose one of his own bullets and quickly catch the thrown projectile with the same hand, while his counterattack knocks one enemy eight feet out of his circle.
Lombar Hisst is seething with bitter, jealous hatred towards this Heller feller, and Gris takes a moment to ogle the book's hero as he plays:
He was a tall, very good-looking fellow, extremely well built. Everything about him was bright, full of life. He was dancing back and forth on his toes, laughing at the dilemma of his remaining opponent who now had very few bullets left and was ducking and dodging even though nothing was being thrown at him.
"Want to give up?" shouted Jettero. "We can just toss in our bags and call it a draw."
His opponent responds with a shot at Heller's skull, which only makes our hero laugh before winding up with his left hand in an attempt to handicap himself. Bored, he tosses a few easily-caught bullets which the angry opponent doesn't even attempt to capture. The underdog furiously lobs five balls at once, only for Heller to effortlessly dodge them. Out of ammo and facing certain defeat, Heller's opponent steps forward to the edge of his circle and stands still, chest bared, manfully accepting his loss and letting his superior opponent end the match. So Heller throws the game by deliberately stepping outside of his own circle.
I think this is intended to be an act of magnanimity, rather than a way to utterly humiliate a clearly inferior opponent and render his "victory" a hollow mockery. Sort of like how the rest of Heller's behavior is supposed to be charming rather than make him come across as an arrogant bastard. But man, I really wish the underdog could've been the story's hero rather than Heller.
The crowd goes wild and swamps the playing field, the other player laughs with relief at his "victory" and gives Heller a big ol' hug, and Lombar Hisst seethes from the sidelines. Soltan Gris wonders, quite reasonably, how the hell they're supposed to kidnap someone so incredibly popular. The answer will have to wait until next chapter.
Back to Chapter Three
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