Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories Read Free

situations in which I choose a course of action, rather than follow one that has been pre-selected for me, based on a given set of circumstances.”
    “I envy your skills,” I said, “but I feel sorry for you.”
    “Why?” he asked.
    “Because you’ve lived your whole life with the knowledge that you don’t possess free will.”
    “My whole life, as you phrase it, is only 16 days in duration, and I am not aware of any advantages that accrue to one who possesses free will. The element of choice must inevitably imply the possibility of incorrect choices.”
    “I’m sorry for you anyway,” I said.
    I decided the conversation was getting us nowhere, so I started diagramming our plays and giving him their code words. Once every six or seven plays he’d stop and ask a question, but within an hour we were done. I went up to the restaurant for dinner, and when I came back up Ralph was sitting motionless in front of the computer, a small wire going from his left forefinger to the back of the machine. He hadn’t moved when I woke up in the morning.
    We showed up two hours before game time, got into our uniforms, and warmed up for about half an hour—all except Ralph, who didn’t need to work up a sweat (and probably couldn’t sweat anyway).
    Then the game started, and for the first time in two years—well, the first time when I wasn’t nursing an injury—I stayed on the bench.
    It was a slaughter. Wyoming had beaten us by 8 points the last time we’d met, and they’d held Scooter Thornley, our highest scorer, to just two baskets. But this time we were up 22 points at halftime, and we blew them out by 43. I even got to play once the lead was safe. As for the Big Guy, he scored 53 points, pulled down 24 rebounds, and had 9 assists, just missing a triple-double by one assist.
    He got a quadruple-double two nights later in Tulsa, the first player in history ever to pull it off: 61 points, 22 rebounds, 11 assists and 12 blocked shots. It’s a damned good thing he couldn’t feel pain, because all the back-thumping and slapping he got in the locker room could have sent a normal human to the emergency room.
    We had 12 games left on our schedule and won them all. Three other robots had come into the league, and the teams that didn’t have any were screaming bloody murder, because the only time one of the four robot-owning teams lost was when they played another. The league decided that the season was becoming a public relations disaster (in all but four cities, anyway), and declared that this year alone the playoffs would be single-game eliminations rather than seven-game series, that we’d go back to the normal playoff structure, which took about two months, next year when all the teams had robots and there was some form of parity.
    As we entered the playoffs we felt we had the advantage. The Reds, the Gunslingers and the Eagles all had robots, too, but we’d had Ralph a couple of weeks longer, and had had more time to create plays that utilized his special abilities. It didn’t matter much against the rest of the league, but against the teams that had robots as big and strong and quick as he was, we thought it would prove to be the difference.
    We won the first two games by 38 and 44 points, and headed into the quarter-finals. Then the holo-networks, which are never happy, started complaining that Ralph never changed his expression. Seems the audience couldn’t identify with a player who didn’t look happy when he hit from 3-point range with a couple of guys hanging on his arms, or who didn’t act like he’d had an overdose of testosterone when he slammed the ball down through the hoop.
    So they took him away for a few hours, and when he came back he had a happy smile on his face. Problem was, it never changed. He scored 66 points and pulled down 25 rebounds against Birmingham, and all we heard from the networks and press is that he looked like an idiot with a permanent grin on his face.
    So the day before the