The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens Read Free Page A

when he got near her his tongue got glued to the roof of his mouth. So he studied the pink card he found thumb-tacked to the back of the bleacher seat in front of him. On this were listed, by number, the things he was supposed to do with a big square of cardboard, orange on one side and black on the other, when the cheerleader gave the command, in order to present a letter, number, or picture to the opposite side of the stadium.
    He finally said: “D’I tell you we decided to bid Hithafea? Speak it not in Gath, though; it’s confidential.”
    “I won’t,” said Alice, looking very blonde and lovely. “Does that mean that when John takes me to your dances, Hithafea will ask to dance with me?”
    “Not if you don’t want him to. I don’t know if he dances.”
    “I’ll try not to shudder. Are you sure he didn’t use his mysterious hypnotic powers to make you propose him?”
    “Fooey! Professor Kantor in psych says all this talk about the hypnotic powers of the Osirians is bunk. If a man’s a naturally good hypnotic subject he’ll be hypnotizable, otherwise not. There aren’t any mysterious rays the Osirians shoot from their eyes.”
    “Well,” said Alice, “Professor Peterson doesn’t agree. He thinks there’s something to it, even though nobody has been able to figure out how it works—oh, here they come. Hithafea makes a divine yell-leader, doesn’t he?”
    Although the adjective was perhaps not well-chosen, the sight of Hithafea, flanked by three pretty co-eds on each side, and prancing and waving his megaphone, was certainly unforgettable. It was made even more so by the fact that he was wearing an orange sweater with a big black A on the chest, and a freshman beanie on his head. His locomotive-whistle voice rose above the general uproar:
    “Atlantic! A-T-L-A-N . . .”
    At the end of each yell, Hithafea flung out his arms with talons spread and leaped three meters into the air on his birdlike legs. He got much more kick out of the rooters’ reaction to his yell-leading than the players did, since they were busy playing football. Hithafea himself had had hopes of going out for intercollegiate athletics, preferably track, until the coach had broken it to him as gently as possible that nobody would compete against a being who could broad-jump twelve meters without drawing a deep breath.
    As both teams were strong that year, the score at the end of the first quarter stood 0-0. Yale completed a pass and it looked as if the receiver were in the clear until John Fitzgerald, the biggest of the fourteen right tackles of the Atlantic varsity, nailed him. Hithafea screamed:
    “Fitzcheralt! Rah, rah, rah, Fitzcheralt!”
    A drunken Yale senior, returning to his seat after visiting the gentlemen’s room under the stands, got turned around and showed up on the grass strip in front of the Atlantic side of the stadium. There he tramped up and down and bumped into people and fell over the chairs of the Atlantic band and made a general nuisance of himself.
    At last Hithafea, observing that everybody else was too much interested in the game to abate this nuisance, caught the man by the shoulder and turned him around. The man looked up at Hithafea and shrieked: “I got ’em! I got ’em!” and tried to break away.
    He might as well have saved his trouble. The Sha’akhfi freshman held him firmly by both shoulders and hissed something at him. Then he let him go.
    Instead of running away, the man threw off his hat with its little blue feather, his furry overcoat, his coat and vest and shirt and pants. Despite the cold he ran out on to the field in his underwear, hugging his bottle under one arm and pretending it was a football.
    Before he was finally taken away, the man had caused Yale to be penalized for having twelve men on the field during a play. Luckily the Yale rooters were too far away on the other side of the stadium to understand what was happening, or there might have been a riot. As it was, they were