Touchdown, Touchdown, Rah, Rah, Rah!

“No, no, not at all,” Ray said. He gestured with the form. “I’m here to apply for some enzyme pills.”

“You are? Well, I’m not sure how long it will take to fulfill your requisition, but we’ll do our best to expedite the matter. By the way, how is your business?”

“I’m hanging on,” Ray said.

“So I’ve heard.” Nyquist sat down on the other side of the writing table. “Of course, you’re barely making a profit, even with that deal you just signed with Vrekle University. It hardly seems worth it, especially with all the trouble you’re causing.”

Ray struggled to sound innocent. “I hope I’m not causing you any problems.”

“Not you, personally,” Nyquist said, and sighed. “But Vrekle itself—their dean has been in contact with several people on Earth. She wants to purchase a rather large assortment of scientific and cybernetic equipment.”

“Is that illegal?” Ray asked.

Nyquist grimaced. “Unfortunately, no. Some rather greedy American corporations have made it impossible for the UN to restrict dangerous exports to Kya. They’re more interested in profits than in avoiding damage to the development of kya society.”

“I don’t see where giving them computers and lab gear will hurt them,” Ray said. “We did all right.”

“We made our own discoveries,” Nyquist countered. “By injecting advanced science and technology into kya society, we could rob them of the need to discover things on their own. They could become parasitical on humanity, atrophying into a world which depends on us to fulfill their needs. You should reconsider what you’re doing to them.”

Ray didn’t respond to that. It was plausible, he admitted—and if he argued, Nyquist might delay his requisition. “I’ll think about that,” he said.

Nyquist took the requisition. “You do that.”

* * *

Bagdrag received its name, Ray had learned, because the center of the game was a bag of sand which weighed almost two hundred pounds. The game was played by three teams on a hexagonal field. Three of the sides were home goals, and a team scored one point every time it carried the bag across its scoring line at the field’s edge. The other three sides of the hexagon were shared goals, and two teams could win two points apiece by cooperating to carry the bag across the line between their home goals. When it came to competition, Ray thought, the kya just didn’t get it.

A week after Faber’s enrollment at Vrekle, Ray walked past the school’s bagdrag field on his way to the lecture halls. The field was occupied by three teams, who were busily shoving and snorting as they hauled a weathered gray bag across the grassy field. Ray looked, but he didn’t see Faber among the crouching, hairy figures loping around the field.

Ray checked his notepad. Its compass display pointed him toward one of the lecture halls, where he had been told he would find Elizabeth Sheffield. He went into the tan-colored dome, and blinked against the dim light. Finding Elizabeth might take a while, he reflected; there were at least five hundred kya in the amphitheater.

He changed that estimate at once when he heard her amplified voice. Her scarecrow figure stood on the round stage at the center of the hall, where a holographic projector displayed a two-yard tall bust of Abraham Lincoln. “Unlike the kya and your herd instinct,” Elizabeth was saying in Wideplain, “we humans have something which is best described as a tribal instinct. As herd beings, you kya tend to hold one another in almost equal regard, while giving your nominal leaders a minimum of authority. When you receive an order, the average kya will stop to wonder how obedience to that order will effect everyone else.

“On the other hand, we humans tend to defer to what we call an ‘authority figure.’ ” As Ray took a seat he heard hundreds of pencils scribble down that term. “An authority figure can be a deity, a parent, an athlete, an entertainer, a politician—basically, anyone who is powerful or famous. The average human tends to give unthinking allegiance to such a figure. Sometimes this has benefits, as it gives the leader the cooperation needed to solve otherwise intractable problems. However—” The image of Lincoln winked out, to be replaced by a projection of Adolf Hitler. “—Sometimes they are problems.”

Ray listened to Elizabeth’s lecture for the next hour or so. Most of it sounded vaguely familiar; he hadn’t taken a history course since high school, but he had watched a lot of war movies. The lecture ended and the kya students began to leave the lecture hall. “—Going to have nightmares for a year,” Ray heard one say. “And I thought we had problems,” another gronked on the way to the exit.