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"You must be joking. A Grog can already outreach you. You'll just be cutting yourself shorter."
"I'd rather swing a handy short crook than an awkward long one.
The crowd broke out in consternation when Ahn-Kha buried his old TMCC utility machete into the haft of the crook where Valentine indicated, and broke it over his knee.
Valentine tried the crook again. Now he could run with it.
Five hundred yards away, in the center of the field, the Grog waited. He looked huge even at this distance.
"Good luck, David," the Dispatcher said.
"Is anyone taking odds?" Valentine asked.
"You don't want to know," Price said.
"All you have to do is get the ball back to our line," the Dispatcher said. Valentine marked the stakes, stretching a hundred yards to either side, with the crowd spread out behind. "How you do it's up to you."
Valentine looked at Ahn-Kha. The Golden One's ears twitched in anxiety, but one of the great limpid eyes winked.
Valentine raised his arm to the crowd and turned to walk into the center of the field, stretching his arms and legs as he went. The legworm ride yesterday had tasked his muscles in a new way, a trace of stiffness which gave him a good deal more cause to doubt. He wondered how the Bulletproof would feel about a valiant try ...
The "referee" wore taped-up glasses and a modest crucifix. He carried a basketball under his arm, and leaned over to speak to the Grog as Valentine approached the halfway point. Valentine noticed a pistol in a holster, with a lanyard running up to the referee's neck.
The Grog rivaled Ahn-Kha in size, almost as tall and a good deal wider of shoulder and longer of arm. Pectoral muscles like Viking roundshields twitched as he shifted his half ton of weight from side to side. The Grog's legworm crook lay before his massive hands as though to establish a line Valentine would never cross.
"You're Tuck?" the referee asked.
"Change of programming," Valentine said. "I'm David."
"David, your Wildcat opponent is Vista. Vista, your Bulletproof opponent is David. Don't touch me or you forfeit. Interference by anyone else also results in a forfeit for the interfering side. This mark"-he indicated a pair of flat river stones-"is the center of the field, agreed to by your respective Dispatchers."
The Grog yawned, displaying a mellon-sized gullet guarded by four-inch yellow incisors, capped with steel points, top and bottom. The great, double-thumbed hand picked up the long crook.
The referee held out the basketball. "The object of the contest is to get this ball to your own line. The game begins when the ball hits the ground, and ends when the winner brings it home to his own goal line. I'll fire my pistol in the air to indicate a victory."
Valentine noted the hook on Vista's crop had been chewed to a sharpened point, and hoped that his intestines wouldn't end up draped over the loop at some point.
"Any questions?" the referee finished, stepping to the two stones in the center.
Neither said anything. Vista glared at Valentine. Valentine stared back. The referee held out the ball between them, and when he lowered it for the bounce-toss the Grog was looking away.
"May the best. . . ummm . . . contestant win."
The referee tossed the basketball straight up into the air and backpedaled out from between man and Grog, quickly enough that Valentine felt air move.
Valentine heard a faint sound like a distant waterfall and realized it was cheering, cut with a few whistles. He felt not at all encouraged, and took a few steps back out of clobbering range as Vista raised his crook-No sense getting my head knocked off the second the ball hits.
The damn thing took forever to fall. Was it filled with helium?
The ball struck. Valentine's brain registered that it took a Wildcat bounce, helped along by a quick swing of Vista's crook that Valentine didn't have the length to intercept.
But Vista went for him instead of the ball. The Grog leaped forward, using one of his long arms as a decathlete might use a pole, and upon landing swung his crook for-
The air occupied by Valentine. If Vista didn't want the ball, Valentine would take it. Valentine sprinted after the ball, now rolling at a very shallow angle toward the Bulletproof on its second bounce.
The instinct to just go toe-to-toe with Vista and decide the contest in a brawl surged for a moment. But he'd lose. Valentine looked back to see Vista galloping toward the ball, crook clenched at the midpoint in those wide jaws. Grogs running on all fours looked awkward, but they were damn fast-
Valentine cut an intercepting course.
