Half Past Alligator
By DONALD COLVIN
Illustrated by BARTH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction September 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It takes sportsmanship to make a ball team ...
and foul play to get a backward race civilized!
Bill Bradley shooed away the group of Quxas that had surged overthe first-base line. With broad grins on their flat, piebald faces,they moved away—in the wrong direction, of course—and squattedin a smiling semicircle around Pat Reed, who was playing third.This was bad, because Reed was a fifty-fifty player: It was an evenchance whether he got the ball or the ball got him. One of thehalf-domesticated thrags broke loose and cantered across the outfieldwith its peculiar five-legged gait. In the hubbub, Ray Bush stolesecond. Nobody seemed to notice.
Sighing heavily, Bill returned to the mound and whiplashed in a fastone, tight across the letters. The hitter got only a small piece of it;a pop fly sauntered toward left field. Judging it to a nicety, GustMustas came racing in, evaded a tethered thrag, leaped a hole some Quxahad dug and forgotten, and made a shoestring catch, retiring the side.The Quxas cheered deliriously.
Bill trotted off the mound. For a moment, the thrill of the game heldhim. This was the way things should be: The feel of smoothly flowingmuscles, the thudding sound of horsehide hitting a leather glove, theweight of a bat in your hands in your first ball game after clamberingover and scrabbling in an unexplored planet for fourteen months.
Then he caught sight of Candace Mathews, walking among the pneuma-hutsthat served as the outpost camp for the expedition. Gloom enveloped himagain, surrounding him like a dank fog.
For fourteen long months, Bill had feasted on the memory of CandyMathews, on his recollection of her turquoise eyes and cascading brownhair, on the remembrance of her soft lips on his last night under thefour moons of Vensor III.
Today she had arrived with the seventy-odd men and women who comprisedthe appraisal unit, the final group of the planet's explorers. He hadlooked forward like a schoolboy to her coming. And, like a schoolboy,he had suffered black despair when his dreams were shattered.
For the Candy Mathews who got off the shuttlebug at Camp Outpost wasnot the Candy Mathews who had said soft words on Vensor III. She was,instead, a self-assured young woman, somehow harder, who felt only anindifferent tolerance toward a tall young man named Bill Bradley, andan all-consuming, hero-worshipping infatuation for a newcomer, a dapperwalking brain, Vance Montgomery, one of the council's smart boys, withthe title of planet evaluator.
"He's simply wonderful," she had said. And the joy of life had gone outof Bill Bradley.
The appraisal group brought in athletic equipment and Bill's menspontaneously declared a holiday, their first on the planet. Baseballwas the order of the afternoon and they shanghaied a not unwilling Billto pitch. He should, he knew, be laying out reports for Montgomery tostudy. He did not particularly want to be with Montgomery.
Bill sat on the xetal log that served as a bench.
One Quxa was bent over, examining first base. He made a colorful sight.The first baseman slapped him jovially on the loin cloth to move him.
The owner of the thrag caught up to it and was struggling manfullyto lead it away. The fi