The game of German batball is played with a flabby ball the size of a big honeydew melon. The ball is no more lively than a ten-gallon hat filled with rain water. The game is something like baseball, with a batter striking the ball into a field of opposing players and running around bases; and with the fielders attempting to catch the ball and frustrate the runner. There are, however, only three bases in German batball — first, second, and home. And the batter is not pitched to. He places the ball on one fist and strikes the ball with his other fist. And if a fielder succeeds instriking the runner with the ball when the runner is between bases, the runner is deemed out, and must leave the playing field at once.
The person responsible for the heavy emphasis on German batball on Mars was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who was responsible for everything on Mars.
Howard W. Sams proves in his Winston Niles Rumfoord, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci that German batball was the only team sport with which Rumfoord was at all familiar as a child. Sams shows that Rumfoord was taught the game, when a child, by his governess, a Miss Joyce MacKenzie.
Back in Rumfoord’s childhood in Newport, a team composed of Rumfoord, Miss MacKenzie, and Earl Moncrief the butler, used to play German batball regularly against a team composed of Watanabe Wataru the Japanese gardener, Beverly June Wataru the gardener’s daughter, and Edward Seward Darlington the half-wit stable boy. Rumfoord’s team invariably won.
Unk, the only deserter in the history of the Army of Mars, now crouched panting behind a turquoise boulder and watched the school children playing German batball on the iron playground. Behind the boulder with Unk was a bicyde he had stolen from a gas-mask factory’s bicycle rack. Unk did not know which child was his son, which child was Chrono.
Unk’s plans were nebulous. His dream was to gather together his wife, his son, and his best friend, to steal a space ship, and to fly away to some place where they could all live happily ever after.
“Hey, Chrono!” cried a child on the playground. “You’re up to bat!”
Unk peered around the boulder at home plate. The child who came up to bat there would be Chrono, would be his son.
Chrono, Unk’s son, came up to bat.
He was small for his age, but surprisingly manly through the shoulders. The child’s hair was jet black, bristly — and the black bristles grew in a violently counter-clockwise swirl.
The child was left-handed. The ball rested on his right fist, and he prepared to hit it with his left.
His eyes were deep-set, like his father’s eyes. And his eyes were luminous under their black-thatched eaves. They glowed with an unshared rage.
Those rage-filled eyes flicked this way, then that. Their movements rattled the fielders, drawing them away from their positions, convincing them that the slow, stupid ball was going to come at them with terrible speed, was going to tear them to pieces if they dared to get in the way.
The alarm inspired by the boy at bat was felt by the teacher, too. She was in the traditional position for an umpire in German batball, between first and second base, and she was terrified. She was a frail old lady name Isabel Fenstermaker. She was seventy-three, and had been a Jehovah’s Witness before having her memory cleaned out. She had been shanghaied while trying to sell a copy of The Watchtower to a Martian agent in Duluth.
“Now, Chrono — ” she said simperingly, “it’s only a game, you know.”
The sky was suddenly blackened by a formation of a hundred flying saucers, the blood-red ships of the Martian Parachute Ski Marines. The combined cooing of the ships was a melodious thunder that rattled the schoolhouse windowpanes.
But, as a measure of the importance young Chrono gave to German batball when he came to bat, not a single child looked up at the sky.
Young Chrono, having brought the fielders and Miss Fenstermaker to the brink of nervous collapse, now put the ball down by his feet, took from his pocket a short strip of metal that was his good-luck piece. He kissed the strip for luck, returned the strip to his pocket.