Over the River and Through the Woods

  “Just home from a masquerade?” asked Rush.

  The stranger did not answer at once, but stood silently, looking at the student.

  When he did speak, his voice was soft and slurred and his English carried an accent Rush could not place.

  “You will pardon the intrusion,” the stranger said. “I did not wish to disturb you. I merely wanted to know if you are Rush Culver, fullback for the Wisconsin football team.”

  “I have a good mind to lay one on you,” said Rush with feeling. “Almost three o’clock in the morning and me wrestling with math. Want to know if I’m Rush Culver. Want my autograph, maybe?”

  The stranger smiled. “I hardly understand,” he said. “I know nothing of autographs. But you are having trouble. Maybe I can help.”

  “If you can, brother,” declared Rush, “I’ll lend you some clothes so you can get home without being pinched. The cops in this town are tough on students.”

  The stranger walked forward, picked up the book, glanced at it and threw it aside. “Simple,” he said. “Elementary. This problem.”

  He bent over and ran a finger down the work sheet. His words came softly, in measured cadence.

  “It is this way…and this way…and this way—”

  Rush stared. “Say, it’s simple,” he chortled. “But it never was explained to me that way before. I can see how it goes now.”

  He rose from the chair and confronted the stranger.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  II.

  HAP FOLSWORTH snarled through his cigar at Jimmy Russell.

  “So you came back empty-handed,” he growled. “You, the demon reporter for the Evening Rocket. In the name of double-dipped damnation, can’t you ever do anything? I send you out on a simple errand. ‘Just run over to Coach Snelling,’ says I, ‘and get the line-up for the Earth team’. Any office boy could do that. And you come back without it. All you had to do was ask the coach for it and he would hand it to you.”

  Jimmy snarled back. “Why, you space-locoed tramp,” he roared, “if it’s as simple as that, go down and get it yourself. If you ever lifted yourself out of that easy chair and found out what was happening, instead of sitting there thinking up wisecracks, you might call yourself a newspaperman. I could have told you a week ago there was something screwy about this Earth team. All sorts of rumors floating around. How much news have we printed about it? How much has Morning Space-Ways and the Evening Star printed about it? But you sit here and look wise and tell the world that Snelling is just using some high-powered psychology to get the Martians’ goat. Making it appear he has some new material or some new plays. Say, that old buzzard hasn’t had a new play since the first spaceship blew up.”

  Hap snorted and rescued the cigar. He jabbed a vicious forefinger at the reporter.

  “Listen,” he yelled. “I was a newsman when you were still in diapers. I’ll lay you five to one I can call up Snelling and have him agree to give us a list of players.”

  Silently Jimmy picked up the visaphone set and handed it to Hap.

  The sports-writer set the dial for the field-house wave length. A face appeared in the glass.

  “Let me speak to the coach,” said Hap.

  The glass went dead as the connection was shifted.

  The face of Coach Snelling appeared.

  “Say, coach—” said Hap. But that was as far as he got.

  “Listen, Hap,” said the coach, “I’m a friend of yours. I like you. You’ve said some nice things about me when the wolves were out after my hide. If I had anything to tell anyone, I’d tell it to the Evening Rocket. But I haven’t anything to tell anyone. I want you fellows to understand that. And if you send any more of those high-powered reporters of yours around I’ll just naturally kick them out on their faces. That’s a promise.”

  The phone went dead.

  Jimmy laughed at the bewildered stare in Hap’s eyes.

  “Pay up,” he demanded.

  THE COACH’S office was empty and Jimmy was glad of that. It fitted in with his plans.

  He hadn’t liked the nasty light in the chief’s eyes when he had been told to get a list of the Earth’s new team. Nothing about how he was to get it. No suggestions at all, although it was understood that it couldn’t be gotten directly from the coach. Presumably some other means of obtaining it would have to be worked out.

  But while the chief had said nothing about how to get it, he had said plenty about what would happen if he returned without it. That was the way with editors, Jimmy reflected glumly. No gratitude. Just a hunk of ice for a heart. Who was it had given the Rocket a scoop on the huge gambling syndicate which had tried to buy a victory for the Earth team? Who was it had broken the yarn about the famous jewel-ship robbery off the orbit of Callisto when a governmental clique—which later went to the Moon penal colony—had moved Heaven and Earth to suppress the story? Who had phoned the first flash and later written an eye-witness story that boosted circulation over 6,000 copies concerning the gang murder of Danny Carsten? No one other than James Russell, reporter for the Evening Rocket. And yet, here he was, chasing a team list with sulphurous threats hanging over his head if he failed.

  Jimmy tiptoed into the coach’s office. He wasn’t used to getting his news this way and it made him nervous.

  There were papers on the desk. Jimmy eyed them furtively. Maybe among them was the list he sought. With a quick glance about the room, he slithered to the desk. Rapidly he pawed through the papers.

  A footstep sounded outside.

  Moving quickly, the reporter sought refuge behind a steel locker that stood in one corner of the room. It was an instinctive move, born of surprise, but Jimmy, chuckling to himself, realized he had gained an advantageous position. From his hiding place, he might learn where the list was kept.

  Coach Snelling strode into the room. Looking neither to right nor left, he walked straight ahead.

  In the center of the room he disappeared.

  The reporter rubbed his eyes. Snelling had disappeared. There was no question about that, but where had he gone? Jimmy looked about the room. There was no one there.

  Slowly he eased himself from behind the locker. No one hailed him.

  He walked to the center of the room. The coach had disappeared at just about that point. There seemed to be nothing unusual in sight. Standing in one spot, Jimmy slowly wheeled in a circle. Then he stopped, stock-still, frozen with astonishment.

  Before him, materializing out of nothing, was a faintly outlined circular opening, large enough for a man to walk through. It looked like a tunnel, angling slightly downward from the floor level. It was into this that Coach Snelling must have walked a few moments before.

  With misgivings as to the wiseness of his course, Jimmy stepped into the mouth of the tunnel. Nothing happened. He walked a few steps and stopped. Glancing back over his shoulder he could see nothing but the blurred mouth of the tunnel behind him. He reached out his hands and they encountered the walls of the tunnel, walls that were hard and icy-cold.

  Cautiously he moved down the tunnel, half-crouched, on the alert for danger. Within a few steps he saw another mouth to the tunnel ahead of him, only faintly outlined, giving no hint into what it might open.

  Momentarily he hesitated and then plunged forward.

  He stood gaping at the scene before him. He stood in a wilderness and in this wilderness, directly in front of him, was a football gridiron. Upon the field were players, garbed in Gold and Green uniforms, the mystery team of the Earth. On all sides of the field towered tall, gnarled oaks. Through a vista he could see a small river and beyond it blue hills fading into an indistinct horizon.

  At the farther end of the field stood several tents, apparently of skins, with rudely symbolic figures painted upon them in red and yellow. Pale smoke curled up from fires in front of the tents and even where he stood Jimmy caught the acrid scent of burning wood.

  Coach Snelling was striding across the field toward him and behind him traile
d several copper-colored men dressed in fringed deerskin ornamented with claws and tiny bones. One of them wore a headdress of feathers.

  Jimmy had never seen an Indian. The race had died out years before. But he had seen pictures of them in historical books dealing with the early American scene. There was no doubt in his mind that he was looking upon members of the aboriginal tribes of North America.

  But the coach was close now.

  Jimmy mustered a smile. “Nice hide-out you have here, coach,” he said. “Nice little place for the boys to practice without being disturbed. That tunnel had me fooled for a while.”

  Coach Snelling did not return the smile. Jimmy could see the coach wasn’t overjoyed at seeing him.

  “So you like the place?” asked the coach.

  “Sure, it’s a fine place,” agreed Jimmy, feeling he was getting nowhere with this line of talk.

  “How would you like to spend a few weeks here?” asked the coach, unsmilingly.

  “Couldn’t do it,” said Jimmy. “The chief expects me back in a little while.”

  Two of the brawny Indians moved forward, laid heavy hands on the reporter’s shoulders.

  “You’re staying,” said the coach, “until after the game.”

  HAP FOLSWORTH stepped up to the editor’s desk.

  “Say,” he demanded, “did you send Russell out to get the team line-up?”

  The editor looked up. “Sure I did, just as you asked me to. Isn’t that petrified newshound back yet?”

  The sports-writer almost foamed at the mouth. “Back yet!” he stormed. “Don’t you know he never gets back on time? Maybe he won’t get back at all. I hear the coach is out after his blood.”

  “What’s the matter with the coach?”

  “Russell asked him if he was going to use the same three plays this year he has used for the last ten,” explained Hap.

  “I don’t know what I can do,” said the editor. “I might send one of the other boys down.”

  Hap snorted. “Mister,” he said, “if Russell can’t get the story, none of your other men can. He’s the best damn reporter this sheet has ever had. But someday I’m going to kick his ribs in just to ease my feelings.”

  The editor rustled papers and grumbled.

  “So he’s at it again,” he mused. “Just wait until I get hold of that booze-soaked genius. I’ll pickle him in a jar of bocca and sell him to a museum. So help me, Hannah, if I don’t.”

  III.

  SOMETHING was holding up the game. The largest football crowd ever to pack the stadium at the Martian city of Guja Tant rumbled and roared its displeasure.

  The Martian team already was on the field, but the Earth team had not made its appearance.

  The game would have to start soon, for it must be finished by sundown. The Terrestrial visitors, otherwise, would suffer severely from the sudden chill of Martian twilight, for although the great enclosed stadium held an atmosphere under a pressure which struck a happy medium between air density on Earth and Mars, thus affording no advantage to either team, it was not equipped with heating units and the cold of the Martian night struck quickly and fiercely.

  A rumor ran through the crowd.

  “Something is wrong with the Earth team. Rule Eighteen. The Board of Control is holding a conference.”

  A disgruntled fan grumbled.

  “I knew there was something wrong when the members of the Earth team were never announced. This stuff the newspapers have been writing about a new mystery team must be right. I just thought it was some of Snelling’s work, trying to scare the Martians.”

  His neighbor grumbled back.

  “Snelling is smart all right. But psychology won’t win this ball game. He’d better have something to show us today after all that’s been written about the team.”

  The Martian stands shouted wild battle cries of the olden days as the Red Warriors went through their preliminary practice on the gridiron.

  About the stadium lay the colorful Martian city with its weird architecture and its subtle color blending. Beyond the city stretched the red plains, spotted here and there with the purple of occasional desert groves. The sun shone but dimly, as it always shone on the fourth planet.

  “Here they come,” someone shouted.

  The crowd took up the roar as the Earth team trotted out on the field, running in a long line, to swing into separate squads for the warming up period.

  The roar rose and swelled, broke, ebbed lower and lower, until silence reigned over the stands.

  A whistle shrilled. The officials walked out on the field. The two teams gathered. A coin flashed in the feeble sunlight. The Earth captain spoke to the referee and jerked his thumb at the north goal. The Earth team took the ball. The teams spread out.

  Earth was on the defensive.

  A toe smacked against the ball. The oval rose high into the air, spinning slowly. The Red Warriors thundered down the field. A Martian player cupped his arms, snared the ball.

  The teams met in a swirl of action.

  Players toppled, rolled on the ground. Like a streak of greased lightning, an Earth player cut in, flattened out in a low dive. His arms caught the ball carrier below the knees. The impact of the fall could be heard in the stands.

  The teams lined up. The Martians thundered a bloodthirsty cry. The ball was snapped. Like a steel wall the Earth team rose up, smacked the Martian line flat. The backfield went around the ends like thundering rockets. The carrier was caught flat-footed. Mars lost three yards on the play.

  The Terrestrial fans leaped to their feet and screamed.

  THE TEAMS were ready again. The ball came back. It was an end play, a twister, a puzzler. But the Earth team worked like a well-oiled machine. The runner was forced out of bounds. Mars made two yards.

  Third down and eleven to go. In two tries the Red Warriors advanced the oval but five yards. Sports-writers later devoted long columns to the peculiar psychology which prevented the Martians from kicking. Perhaps, as Hap Folsworth pointed out, they were overconfident, figured that even on fourth down they could advance the ball the necessary yardage. Perhaps, as another said, they were too stunned by the Earth defense.

  The ball went to the Gold and Green.

  The team shifted. The ball went back from center. Again there was a swirl of players—sudden confusion which crystallized into an ordered pattern as an Earth ball carrier swung around right end, protected by a line of interference that mowed down the charging Martians. When the Terrestrial was brought down the ball rested on the Mars’ twenty-yard line.

  Signals. Shift. The ball was snapped. Weaving like a destroyer in heavy seas, a Green and Gold man, ball hugged to him, plowed into the center of the line. His team-mates opened the way for him, and even when he struck the secondary he still kept moving, plowing ahead with pistonlike motion of his driving legs until he was hauled down by superior strength.

  The ball was only two yards from the final stripe. For the first time in many years the Red Warriors were backed against their own goal line.

  The Druzec war cry thundered from the Martian stands, but the Earth fans sat dumbfounded.

  No one could explain the next play. Maybe there was nothing to explain about it. Perhaps the Terrestrials simply charged in and by sheer force pushed the entire Martian line back for the necessary two yards. That was the way it looked.

  An official raised his arms. The gigantic scoreboard clicked. Earth had scored!

  The Earth stands went insane. Men and women jumped to their feet and howled their delight. The stadium shook to foot-stamping.

  And throughout the entire game the Earth side of the stadium was a mad pandemonium as score after score was piled up while the Terrestrial eleven systematically ripped the Martian team apart for yard after consistent yard of ground.

  The final count was 65–0 and the Earth fans, weak with triumph, came back to the realization that for four long quarters they had lived in a catapulting, rocketing, unreal world of delirious joy. For four
long quarters they had made of the stadium a bedlam, a crazy, weaving, babbling, brass-tongued bedlam.

  In the Martian stands sounded the long wail of lament, the death dirge of the ancient Druzecs, a lament that had not been intoned over an Earth-Mars football game for more than three-score years.

  That night the Terrestrials took Guja Tant apart, such as is the right and custom of every victorious football delegation. And while the Martians may accept defeat in a philosophical manner, those who participated in the kidnaping will tell one they objected forcefully when the mascot zimpa—which had paraded in honor of many a Martian victory—was taken from his stable and placed on board the Earth liner chartered for the football run.

  HAP FOLSWORTH, who had covered the game for the Evening Rocket, explained it to Sims of the Star and Bradley of the Express.

  “It’s just a lot of star-dust,” he said. “Some of Snelling’s psychology. He got a bunch of big boys and he kept them under cover, taught them a lot of new tricks and built them up as a mystery team. Them Red Warriors were scared to death before they ever faced our fellows. Psychology won that game, you mark my word—”

  Sims of the Star interrupted. “Did you get a good look at any of the boys on our team?” he asked.

  “Why, no, I didn’t,” admitted Hap. “Of course, I saw them out there on the field from where I was in the press section, but I didn’t meet any of them face to face. The coach barred us from the dressing rooms, even after the game. That’s a hell of a ways to go to win a ball game, but if he can win them that way I’m all for him.”

  He puffed on a Venus-weed cigar, “But you mark my word. It was the old psychology that turned the trick.” He stopped and looked at his two fellow sports-writers.

  “Say,” exploded Hap, “I don’t think you fellows believe what I am saying.”

  They didn’t speak, but Hap looked at their faces again and was certain they didn’t believe him.

  Arthur Hart, editor of the Evening Rocket, looked up as the door opened.

  Framed in the doorway was Jimmy Russell. Just behind him stood a copper-colored man, naked except for a loin cloth.