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By Root 586 0

The crowd went up in a great howl of excitement as people reacted to the fragmentation among the teams and the prospect of the score, as Yashenko got ready to pass. But there was one place where confusion did not reign quite supreme. Among the bodies now swarming toward the Chicago goal, George Brickner curled himself down into cannonball—possibly inevitable in the confusion, but at least one player was ready for it—then Brickner pushed sideways off Chicago’s Daystrom and thus opened up a space between them with the equal-and-opposite reaction. There were shouts of confusion, some from his team-mates, but he had seen what they hadn’t, and Melendez had seen his glance. As Yashenko headered the ball at Galitsin for the goal, Melendez braced himself off Galitsin and pushed—and the ball flew with terrible speed past Galitsin, who reached for it but couldn’t stop it, and smacked squarely into the goal outlined in red, white, and blue before it could precess.

There was a roar of rage and disappointment from the Spartak fans as the computer held the ball in place and did a retrace of recent motions to see who picked up the point. But the referee had seen that perfectly well. “Own goal, Moscow,” the referee said over the roar, “credit to South Florida—!”

Another roar, but this time of joy, from the South Florida fans. The rest of the audience was waiting in breathless hope or anguish for the computer to finish the traceback and agree or disagree with the ref, but the digits on the scoreboard hexes embedded in the transparent walls of the spat volume burned briefly bright…and then changed from 2–1–1 to 2–2–1.

Play resumed, and if it had been fast before, it was furious now. Twenty-one men and women, angry or wildly excited or both, jostled for control of the ball as it was fired back into the volume. It vanished into a flying scrum of bodies wearing yellow and red about half and half, while the ones in red, white, and blue changed tactics, as was possibly understandable, and simply tried to keep either of the others from scoring. This was one of those situations in which spatball started to more closely resemble a particularly spiteful playground game of keep-away than anything else. Somehow, though, Chicago managed to get hold of the ball again, and another hand-around began as Hanrahan emerged from the scrum with the ball gripped desperately behind one bent knee. He did a 180-degree somersault in the pitch axis and flung the ball away again, revealing (to Moscow if no one else) that the pass he had been setting up was a feint, and that three of his teammates were lining up in great-circle on South Florida’s goal. But it was too late. The crowd was already counting down, and there was no injury time, and even as Jarvik took the pass from Hanrahan and fired it at Torrance, who in turn fired it at the goal, the South Florida goalie was there, out of nowhere, wrapping herself around the ball like an oyster around somebody’s escaped pearl.

“Houdini!” the South Florida fans screamed at the goalie in tribute, but Zermann paid no attention to them—opening herself up again, glancing around her for no more than a second, and fisting the ball away sideways like a bolt of orange lightning at Brickner, who caught it in his elbow and tightened in for spin—

And the horn went. Catie jumped up and flung her arms around Zermann’s brother Kerry, who had been sitting beside her rigid as a statue for the last fifteen minutes, but now was jumping up and down and screaming “Slugs! Slugs!” like everyone else within the twenty-meter diameter that circumscribed the Slugs friends-and-family area. From behind her, Hal caromed into Catie, and she dropped Kerry Zermann and pounded her brother’s head in sisterly delight. All around them the crowd of sixty thousand was in bedlam, and in the spat volume team members of all kinds were hugging each another and jerseys were being pulled off and sent sailing across the volume to other players, who slipped them on and came across to shake hands, some cheerfully, some with scowls. The announcer was shouting into