HUNCHED behind the controls, Meek slowly circled Gus’ crate, waiting for the signal, half fearful of what would happen when it came.
Glancing to left and right, he could see the other ships of Sector Twenty-three, slowly circling too, red identification lights strung along their hulls.
Ten miles away a gigantic glowing ball danced in the middle of the space-field, bobbing around like a jigging lantern. And beyond it were the circling blue lights of the Thirty-seven team. And beyond them the glowing green space-buoys that marked the Thirty-seven goal line.
Meek bent an attentive ear to the ticking of the motor, listening intently for the alien click he had detected a moment before. Gus’ ship, to tell the truth, was none too good. It might have been a good ship once, but now it was worn out. It was sluggish and slow to respond to the controls, it had a dozen little tricks that kept one on the jump. It had followed space trails too long, had plumped down to too many bumpy landings in the maelstrom of the Belt.
Meek sighed gustily. It would have been different if they had let him take his own ship, but it was only on the condition that he use Gus’ ship that Thirty-seven had agreed to let him play at all. They had raised a fuss about it, but Twenty-three had the law squarely on its side.
He stole a glance toward the sidelines and saw hundreds of slowly cruising ships. Ships crammed with spectators out to watch the game. Radio ships that would beam a play by play description to be channeled to every radio station throughout the Solar system. Newsreel ships that would film the clash of opposing craft. Ships filled with newsmen who would transmit reams of copy back to Earth and Mars.
Looking at them, Meek shuddered.
How in the world had he ever let himself get into a thing like this? He was out to see the solar system, not to play a polo game… especially a polo game he didn’t want to play.
It had been the bugs, of course. If it hadn’t been for the bugs, Gus never would have had the chance to talk him into that coaching business.
He should have spoken out, of course. Told them, flat out, that he didn’t know a thing about polo. Made them understand he wasn’t going to have a thing to do with this silly scheme. But they had shouted at him and laughed at him and bullied him. Been nice to him, too. That was the biggest trouble. He was a sucker, he knew, for anyone who was nice to him. Not many people had been.
Maybe he should have gone to Miss Henrietta Perkins and explained. She might have listened and understood. Although he wasn’t any too sure about that. She probably had plenty to do with starting the publicity rolling. After all, it was her job to make a showing on the jobs she did.
If it hadn’t been for Gus dusting off the place on the mantelpiece. If it hadn’t been for the Titan City Junior Chamber of Commerce. If it hadn’t been for all the ballyhoo about the mystery coach.
But more especially, if he’d kept his fool mouth shut and not made that bet with Craney.
MEEK groaned and tried to remember the few things he did know about polo. And he couldn’t think of a single thing, not even some of the things he had made up and told the boys.
Suddenly a rocket flared from the referee’s ship and with a jerk Meek hauled back the throttle. The ship gurgled and stuttered and for a moment, heart in his throat, Meek thought it was going to blow up right then and there.
But it didn’t. It gathered itself together and leaped, forcing Meek hard against the chair, snapping back his head. Dazed, he reached out for the repulsor trigger.
Ahead the glowing ball bounced and quivered, jumped this way and that as the ships spun in a mad melee with repulsor beams whipping out like stabbing knives.
Two of the ships crashed and fell apart like matchboxes. A third, trying a sharp turn above the field of play, came unstuck and strewed itself across fifty miles of space.
Substitute ships dashed in from the sidelines, signalled by the referee’s blinking light. Rescue ships streaked out to pick up the players, salvage ships to clear away the pieces.
For a fleeting moment, Meek got the bobbing sphere in the cross-hairs and squeezed the trigger. The ball jumped as if someone had smacked it with his fist, sailed across the field.
Fighting to bring the ship around, Meek yelled in fury at its slowness. Desperately pouring on the juice, he watched with agony as a blue-lighted ship streamed down across the void, heading for the ball.
The ship groaned in every joint, protesting and twisting as if in agony, as Meek forced it around. Suddenly there was a snap and the sudden swoosh of escaping air. Startled, Meek looked up. Bare ribs stood out against star-spangled space. A plate had been ripped off!
Face strained behind the visor of his spacesuit, hunched over the controls, he waited for the rest of the plates to go. By some miracle they hung on. One worked loose and flapped weirdly as the ship shivered in the turn.
But the turn had taken too long and Meek was too late. The blue-lamped ship already had the ball, was streaking for the goal line. Jensen somehow had had sense enough to refuse to be sucked out goalie position, and now he charged in to intercept.
But he muffed his chance. He dived in too fast and missed with his repulsor beam by a mile at least. The ball sailed over the lighted buoys and the first chukker was over with Thirty-seven leading by one score.
The ships lined up again.
The rocket flared from the starter’s ship and the ships plunged out. One of Thirty-seven’s ships began to lose things. Plates broke loose and fell away, a rocket snapped its moorings and sailed off at a tangent, spouting gouts of flame, the structural ribs came off and strewed themselves along like spilling toothpicks.
Battered by repulsor beams, the ball suddenly bounced upward and Meek, trailing the field, waiting for just such a chance, played a savage tune on the tube controls.
The ship responded with a snap, executing a half roll and a hairpin turn that shook the breath from Meek. Two more plates tore off in the turn, but the ship plowed on. Now the ball was dead ahead and Meek gave it the works. The beam hit squarely and Meek followed through. The second chukker was over and the score was tied.
Not until he was curving back above the Thirty-seven goal line, did Meek have time to wonder what had happened to the ship. It was sluggish no longer. It was full of zip. Almost like driving his own sleek craft. Almost as if the ship knew where he wanted it to go and went there.
A hint of motion on the instrument panel caught his eye and he bent close to see what it was. He stiffened. The panel seemed to be alive. Seemed to be crawling.
He bent closer and froze. It was crawling. There was no doubt of that. Crawling with rock-bugs.
BREATH whistling between his teeth, Meek ducked his head under the panel. Every wire, every control was oozing bugs!
For a moment he sat paralyzed by the thoughts that flickered through his brain.
Gus, he knew, would have his scalp for this. Because he was the one that had brought the bugs over to the rock where Gus lived and kept the ship. They thought, of course, they had caught all of them that was on his suit, but now it was clear they hadn’t. Some of them must have gotten away and found the ship. They would have made straight for it, of course, because of the alloys that were in it. Why bother with a spacesuit or anything else when there was a ship around.
Only there were too many of them. There were thousands in the instrument panel and other thousands in the controls and he couldn’t have brought back that many. Not if he’d hauled them back in pails.
What was it Gus had said about them burrowing into metal just like chiggers burrow into human flesh?
Chiggers attacked humans to lay their eggs. Maybe… maybe…
A battalion of the bugs trooped across the face of an indicator and Meek saw they were smaller than the ones he had seen back on Gus’ rock.
There was no doubt about it. They were young bugs. Bugs that has just hatched out. Thousands of them… millions of them, maybe! And they wouldn’t be in the instruments and controls alone, but all through the ship. They’d be in the motors and the firing mechanisms… all the places where the best alloys were used.
Meek wrung his hands, watching them play tag across the panel. If they’d had to hatch, why couldn’t they have waited. Just until the game was over, anyhow. That would have been all he’d asked. But they hadn’t and here he was, with a couple of million bugs or so right smack in his lap.
The rocket flared again and the ships shot out.
Bitterness chewing at him, Meek flung the ship out savagely. What did it matter what happened now. Gus would take the hide off him, rheumatism or no rheumatism, as soon as he found out about the bugs.
For a wild moment, he hoped he would crack up. Maybe the ship would fall apart like some of the others had. Like the old one hoss shay the poet had written about centuries ago. The ship had lost so many plates that even now it was like flying a space-going box-kite.
Suddenly a ship loomed directly ahead, diving from the zenith. Meek, forgetting his half-formed hope of a crackup a second before, froze in terror, but his fingers acted by pure instinct, stabbing at keys. Although in the petrified second that seemed half an eternity, Meek knew the ships would crash before he even touched the keys. And even as he thought it, the ship ducked in a nerve-rending jerk and they were skinning past, hulls almost touching. Another jerk and more plates gone and there was the ball, directly ahead, with the repulsor beam already licking out.
Meek’s jaw fell and a chill through his body and he couldn’t move a muscle. For he hadn’t even touched the trigger and yet the repulsor beam was flaring out, driving the ball ahead of it while the ship twisted and squirmed its way through a mass of fighting craft.
Hands dangling limply at his side, Meek gaped in terror and disbelief. He wasn’t touching the controls, and yet the ship was like a thing bewitched. A split second later the ball was over the goal and the ship was curving back, repulsor beam snapped off.
“It’s the bugs!” Meek whispered to himself, lips scarcely moving. “The bugs have taken over!”
The craft he was riding, he knew, was no longer just a ship, but a collection of rock bugs. Bugs that could work out mathematical equations. And now were playing polo!
For what was polo, anyhow, except a mathematical equation, a problem of using certain points of force at certain points in space to arrive at a predetermined end? Back on Gus’ rock the bugs had worked as a unit to solve equations… and the new hatch in the ship was working as a unit, too, to solve another kind of problem… the problem of taking a certain ball to a certain point despite certain variable and random factors in the form of opposing spaceships.
Tentatively, half fearfully, Meek stabbed cautiously at a key which should have turned the ship. The ship didn’t turn. Meek snatched his hand away as if the key had burned his finger.
BACK on the line the ship wheeled into position of its own accord and a moment later was off again. Meek clung to his chair with shaking hands. There was, he knew, no use of even pretending he was trying to operate the ship. There was just one thing that he was glad of. No one could see him sitting there, doing nothing.
But the time would come… and soon… when he would have to do something. For he couldn’t let the ship return to the Ring. To do that would be to infest the other ships parked there, spread the bugs throughout the solar system. And those bugs definitely were something the solar system could get along without.
The ship shuddered and twisted, weaving its way through the pack of players. More plates ripped loose. Glancing up, Meek could see the glory of Saturn through the gleaming ribs.
Then the ball was over the line and Meek’s team mates were shrieking at him over the radio in his spacesuit… happy, glee-filled yells of triumph. He didn’t answer. He was too busy ripping out the control wires. But it didn’t help. Even while he was doing it the ship went on unhampered and piled up another score.
Apparently the bugs didn’t need the controls to make the ship do what they wanted. More than likely they were in control of the firing mechanism at its very source. Maybe, and the thought curled the hair on Meek’s neck, they were the firing mechanism. Maybe they had integrated themselves with the very structure of the entire mechanism of the ship. That would make the ship alive. A living chunk of machinery that paid no attention to the man who sat at the controls.
Meanwhile, the ship made another goal…
There was a way to stop the bugs… only one way… but it was dangerous.
But probably not half as dangerous, Meek told himself, as Gus or the Junior Chamber or the Thirty-seven team… especially the Thirty-seven team… if any of them found out what was going on.
He found a wrench and crawled back along the shivering ship.
Working in a frenzy of fear and need for haste, Meek took off the plate that sealed the housing of the rear rocket assembly. Breath hissing in his throat, he fought the burrs that anchored the tubes. There were a lot of them and they didn’t come off easily. Rockets had to be anchored securely… securely enough so the blast of atomic fire within their chambers wouldn’t rip them free.
Meanwhile, the ship piled up the score.
Loose burrs rolled and danced along the floor and Meek knew the ship was in the thick of play again. Then they were curving back. Another goal!
Suddenly the rocket assembly shook a little, began to vibrate. Wielding the wrench like a madman, knowing he had seconds at the most, Meek spun two or three more bolts, then dropped the wrench and ran. Leaping for a hole from which a plate had been torn, he caught a rib, swung with every ounce of power he had, launching himself into space.
His right hand fumbled for the switch of the suit’s rocket motor, found it, snapped it on to full acceleration. Something seemed to hit him on the head and he sailed into the depths of blackness.