It was gory. Time after time, the skaters shot off the banked boards into the “audience” of old stew-bums and thrill seekers rather than get a razor-sharp elbow spike. And their own spikes worked havoc. Almost us, Norvell thought numbly. At a hundred bucks a lapful, almost us.
For the first time hi his life, he found himself wondering when and where it all had started. Bone-crushing football? Those hockey games featured by concussions? Impatient sidewalk crowds that roared “Go-go-go” to a poor crazed ledge-sitter? Those somewhat partisan Chicago fans who flipped lighted firecrackers at the visiting team outfielders as they raced for a fly? “We don’t take no prisoners in this outfit, kid”? White phosphorus grenades? Buchenwald? Napalm?
And then before he knew it Kemp was shaking his shoulder and growling, “All right, ya yella punk. You an’ yer frenns, yer on. Take yer basket.” Numbly he took the basket and looked at the noisemakers and the “gravel”—three-inch rocks, some of them. He followed the section as it moved out onto the field. He became aware that Hubble and Mundin were half-carrying him. Shep was staring open-mouthed.
“Don’t flake out on us, damn it,” Mundin was begging. “We need every man, Norvie!”
He gave Mundin a pale grin and thought, Maybe I won’t have to, anyway. Maybe I won’t have to. That’s the thing to stick with. Maybe I won’t have to…. But if I do——
“Ladies and gentlemen!” the M.C. was roaring as they assumed their places around the tank, as the riggers hastily finished setting up the two towers and stringing the wire. “Ladies and gentlemen, Monmouth Stadium is proud and happy to present to you for the first time in this arena’s distinguished history a novel and breath-taking feat of courage and dexterity. This young man——”
Don had been hustled atop one of the towers. Norma was
weeping uncontrollably. Hubble and Mundin were passing among the hecklers handing out bills, Shep looming ominously behind. “No heckling, understand? Shut your lip. I said no heckling. Just keep quiet. You’ll get this much more after it’s over—if the kid makes it. Anybody crosses us up, we’ll throw him to the fish. Understand? It’s your life if he goes. No heckling, understand?”
“—this young man, utterly without previous experience in tne gymnastic art, will essay to cross the fifteen feet from tower to tower against the simultaneous opposition of these sixteen energetic hecklers. They will be permitted to jeer, threaten, sound horns, and cast gravel but not to shake the towers——”
Audience identification, thought Norvell. The sixteen “opponents” would be there to do exactly what the audience wanted to do but was too far away to do. Still, a good strong arm with a favoring wind and a brick—or a zip gun, if someone besides the Wabbits had smuggled one in——
“The special feature, ladies and -gentlemen, of this performance lies now hi the tank above which this young daredevil will essay to cross. At enormous expense, Monmouth Stadium has imported from the headquarters of the Amazon River in far South America a school of the deadliest killers, the most vicious fish known to man, the piranha. Your binoculars, ladies and gentlemen! Don’t miss a single second of this! I am about to drop a fifty-pound sheep into the tank alive, and what will ensue you shall see!”
In went the bleating, terrified animal—shaved and with a few nicks hi its side for the scent of blood. Then they pulled on the rope and hauled out—bloody bones. There were still ghastly little things flopping and wriggling, dangling remorselessly from the skeleton. The stagehands beat them off into the water as the crowd shrieked in delight.
Just like you, you bastards, Norvell thought. But maybe I won’t have to do it——
Shep was looking at him curiously again, and Norvell instinctively moved away. He glanced up at Don Lavin, waiting immobile for the signal, unmoved—at least outwardly unmoved—by the spectacle below. Twenty-two years old, thought Norvell. A moment of absent-minded passion, between bouts at the drawing board and the stockholders’ meet- *
ings, and he was conceived. Nine months of «aausea and stretching pains and clumsiness climaxed with agony, an