Yoshi was right; they mastered the pitching first.

Their fast balls were wicked, slapping hard into the catcher's soft, bare hands. They introduced their first game adaptation as a result, rotating catchers every inning, just behind the line-up, so that the next few batters up would have unbruised hands. And they developed a selection of deadly curve balls.

They seemed to understand the battle of the count very well. You never knew whether they were going to throw a hittable fast ball or a slicing curve. Of course, as Dr. Chirac pointed out, a random number generator could provide the same challenge. But when you swung through empty air, it sure felt like there was guile behind those mean, fast pitches.

Hunter and Alex loved batting against real pitching for a change, but for old guys like me, it became seriously difficult to get a hit. I took to bunting, putting the ball onto the ground to take advantage of their shaky fielding. This engendered their second big adaptation, moving the infield in whenever slow swingers were at the plate. For three straight games, I couldn't buy a base.

Then one day, standing ready to get out again, I noticed something that I'd missed. Before the pitch, the catcher pointed two of his fat, short fingers at the ground. I reacted instinctively, swinging hard as the pitcher let go. One of our brand new Sluggers (Louisville Sportscraft was one of our official sponsors now) connected with the ball, electrifying my hands with the bright shiver of the sweet spot. The ball soared over the insultingly contracted outfield, and I rounded second before the sheetgrass brought the ball to a stop, three Tau fielders in shambolic pursuit.

I pulled up at third, out of breath and not wanting to risk the awesome Tau throw-in. Alex came out to coach.

"Nice hit, Colonel. Looks like you're out of your slump."

"There's been a new development." She waited patiently as my breath came back. "I read their signs."

"You what? They're flashing signs?" She looked at the third baseman a few meters from us. Her slightly spicy scent drifted over to us in the light breeze.

I nodded. "Our signs, that Hunter and I always used."

"You guys had signs?"

"Yeah. Hunter's idea. No one ever figured it out. Except the Tau, apparently."

"You think they saw you flash all the way from the fence?"

"Too far. They must have picked them up since they started playing us. Still learning."

"And they're consistent?"

"Let's find out."

Honorio, our Cuban military attaché, stepped up to the plate. I squinted at the catcher. As quick as Hunter's agile fingers, she flashed three to the side.

"Change-up."

The pitcher started her usual fastball wind up, but the ball came out of the whirlwind moving a hair slow. Honorio swung early, missing everything.

"Good eye," Alex said quietly.

I called the next two pitches. Honorio did not, and found himself headed to the bench.

"Superb, Colonel," Alex said. "They've adopted our symbolic behavior. Learned our language."

"Chirac's going to eat this up. But I wonder if the Tau know they're supposed to be secret."

"That'll be easy enough to find out, Colonel. Just make it clear we recognize your old signs and we're getting hits because of it. Maybe then they'll make up their own."

"Good idea, but let's talk to Chirac first. And not a word about this to anyone until after the game."

"Sir?"

"Right now I'm going to get me some hits."

"So, Doctor," Jenny Flagg spoke up, "exactly where was, uh … Wittgenstein going with this?"

Dr. Chirac smiled. "His point was that the worker delivering the components doesn't need to know how the slabs and beams are used. Worker B doesn't even need to know that it's a wall they're building. All he has to do is respond to each word with the appropriate action. In this language game, as in most cases when we use natural language, what matters is not understanding, but the appropriate response."

"Sort of like our pitching signs," Alex said. "The pitcher doesn't have to know why the catcher wants a slider or a fastball, as long as the catcher's done her homework."

"And as long as the signs are interpreted correctly, and the right pitch delivered, yes. The pitcher, like Worker B, doesn't actually have to understand the task beyond appropriate responses."

"The pitcher's like a robot," Hunter said, winking at me.

I ignored him, saying, "But in this case, the catcher, Worker A, is also a Tau. She must have some kind of a clue what she wants the pitcher to throw, which means she's got to have some objective in mind."

Dr. Chirac opened her hands to the heavens. "Or possibly Worker A is herself following a learned response. A certain sequence of pitches for a certain batter. Or perhaps they're simply repeating all our pitches since they began their observation, in the same order."

"How come we never just assume they're playing baseball?" Jenny Flagg asked.

"Oh, I assure you, Sergeant," Dr. Chirac said, "they are playing baseball. Wittgenstein's point is that Worker B is still building a wall, whether or not he understands the exact purpose of each piece in it. When we teach children how to use language, we start with just such an absence of background knowledge."

Jenny spoke for all of us. "Huh?"

"Ask a young girl how old she is. She'll say 'three' and hold up three fingers. But this three-year-old cannot accurately define for you what a year is or even know that each finger represents one year in some abstract sense. She has simply been taught to make a certain gesture and sound in response to a certain question."

She turned to Hunter. "But children are not robots, of course. They are simply people with incomplete language development. These simple language games are how they learn the language, like a puzzle falling into place from meaningless pieces."

"So you're saying it doesn't matter whether they're just imitating us or whether they actually understand the game," I said.

"It does matter. With good reason, teachers and parents want to know when the child actually comprehends what a year is. That understanding is the goal of the developmental language game. But in the meantime, what we are doing is not useless. We are teaching them the imitative responses around which real comprehension is built."

I decided to bring it back to my original question. "So we shouldn't let them win?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. The appropriate response in any game is to try to win. We should be upset when we walk a Tau player, not walk several in a row to give up runs. And we should clap and cheer when we win. That's what winning means: It's the thing you want to happen. We must continue to demonstrate that and strive to keep our reactions consistent."

Jenny Flagg shook her head. "But humans don't always try to win every game. Sometimes you let kids win. And you always pitch a little bit easier to them."

"Perhaps my analogy is straining. These are not children. We must assume that these Tau are researchers, scientists even. They may not have PhDs as we understand them, but they have been selected to make contact and learn what they can about us. Right now, that means playing baseball properly."

McGill, who'd read the last transmission from Halihunt and NASA, looked at me.

"Well, I got to say, Houston isn't going to be happy with that," I said. "The PR angle was great, until they realized that the Taus still haven't got so much as a single, and that we clobber them every game. Kind of takes the shine off it."

"We're ambassadors here," McGill chimed in. "We've come in the spirit of friendship. Would it kill us to let them win a couple?"

"Frankly, I think the problem is in your attitude. You're being very American, I must say." We all looked at Ashley Newkirk, who continued. "This isn't about winning, but playing the game properly, which means doing your best. You Americans seem transfixed by the idea that a game that can't be won isn't worth playing. One example: I was in the States once for your so-called 'World Series,' to which no other countries are invited, I might add."

"Except Canada," Jenny said.

"And Havana is in the league now, excuse me," Honorio added.

"Very well, but what happened was this: I understood this 'World Series' was to be seven games long. But when one of the sides won the first four, they simply stopped playing!"

No one else said a word, so I offered, "And …?"

Ashley shook his head. "So typical. Can't win, go home. In cricket, a five-test series always is played to the end, even when one of the sides can no longer possibly win."

"But why?" Jenny cried.

"Because a test series has five matches," Ashley said, not too helpfully. "Why get so caught up with winning? As long as the Tau are willing to play, why not play?"

"Well, we are American, and this is baseball," I said. "And it is a problem."

What I didn't explain was the other part of NASA's concern: how the imbalance in our interplanetary league was playing to the rest of the world. A fundamentally American team was beating a bunch of untrained beginners at our own national game, relentlessly, day in and day out. The perfect sports metaphor for the way we'd been dealing with the rest of the world for the last century.

"It's not quite the morale builder it used to be, either," Jenny added. "With their pitching so good, at least it's fun to try to get hits off them. But three-up, three-down from them nine innings every game is getting tedious. It's not good sport."

Alex gestured to Yoshi. "Any chance of that changing?"

He looked dubious. "Here's the problem."

The wallscreen lit, showing a Tau at bat with skeleton superimposed. It moved slowly through a swing, and red highlights appeared at its upper elbow joints.

"When humans swing a bat, most of the rotation doesn't come from our shoulders; it comes from the elbow and wrist. Taus don't have much mobility there; their two elbows bend less than our one, and they have relatively little wrist action. That's why they throw straight-arm."

"So they'll never get much force?"

"Not enough for a solid hit. And if we pitch slower, like Jenny suggested, it'll just make it worse. They need to connect with a fastball to get any power. As far as I can see, they'll only ever be really good at bunting. For them to score consistently, we'd have to fake some seriously bad fielding."

Alex sighed. "And they're so damn observant, they'd know what we were up to."

"Or worse, interpret it as part of the game," Dr. Chirac said.

"Well, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't," I said. "Any ideas?"

"What about mixed teams?" Jenny said. "Some Tau and some humans on each side."

We looked at Chirac.

"A fascinating idea, but how would we ask?"

I was warming up for another desultory first inning of striking out three hapless Tau when a new batter came up to the plate.

We knew the usual Tau team by now. They rotated among about a dozen regulars, distinguishable by thorax markings, the gray and yellow speckled across what I thought of as their chests. This Tau had a distinct cluster of reddish dots near her right shoulder that I'd never seen before. She also had a strange stance, the bat held out low, almost over the plate, as if she wasn't quite ready yet.

I decided to go easy on her, waving off Hunter's signal for a fastball. (We had changed our signs, given that the Tau were reading them, but our opponents, disappointingly, had yet to alter theirs.) Hunter glanced at the new player, nodded understanding, and signalled a slow ball, a new pitch we'd invented without telling Dr. Chirac. She'd probably noticed the easy throws we were sneaking in, but hadn't complained. The Tau had managed to get a piece of one or two, but never out of the infield. Yoshi was right: If you threw slow, their puny swings couldn't generate any power. If you threw fast, they missed completely.

I did my usual wind-up ritual, spitting with a little extra distance to make the newcomer feel at home, and threw.

The Tau did not swing.

"Strike one!" Chirac called.

I shrugged to Hunter and sent in another meat pitch.

Again, it ignored the ball.

"Strike two!"

"Mighty Casey at the bat," I muttered.

On my third slow pitch, the Tau feebly lifted her bat to meet the ball. It connected, and tipped over Hunter's head. He ran after it, gathered it up, and threw it back to me.

My fourth pitch got the same treatment.

As did my fifth.

Hunter, running back with an annoyed look on his face, signalled for a fastball.

I nodded and wound up, then let a hard one fly.

The Tau's knees bent, the bat rising to again meet the ball. This time the hit angled away from home plate at ninety degrees, rolling toward Yoshi within his forest of new tubed-in cameras.

Yoshi threw it back to me with a puzzled expression.

I shook off Hunter until he gave me a slider, then threw the meanest pitch I could, which broke to the outside just before it reached the Tau.

She didn't swing.

"Ball one!" Chirac cried.

I stretched to loosen up my shoulder, which had twinged a bit on delivery. The Tau didn't swing at bad pitches much anymore. Their incredible eyesight and observational skills were pretty hard to beat. But this was a new player. She was awfully cool for a creature who'd never held a baseball bat before.

Were they reading our signs again?

When Hunter signalled for a fastball, I nodded.

And threw a change-up.

Hunter may have been fooled, but the batter reached out with impeccable timing and tapped the ball backward at about forty-five degrees. One of the xeno team assisting Yoshi was already there, and threw it back to Hunter.

I swallowed. The Taus, or one of them anyway, had come up with a strategy.

Hunter must have realized I wasn't sure about our signs, and his fingers flashed gobbledygook.

I nodded, and threw a curve ball. The Tau left it alone again, and it zoomed past an unprepared Hunter.

"Ball two!"

I tried three more fast balls in succession. The Tau tapped the first two away effortlessly, but by the third my arm was wearing, and she remained motionless as the ball carried low and outside.

"Ball three!"

I threw one into the dirt, aiming for the Tau's bat.

It stepped back, and the ball bounced off Hunter's glove, rolling back toward me across the sheetgrass.

"Ball four. Take your base!" Dr. Chirac cried.

I tugged on my cap and looked around at the fielders. They stared back at me a bit befuddled. We had walked Tau batters before, but none had ever deserved it like this batter. She'd worked the ball like a pro, and frustrated me into giving her the base.

I stretched my arm, hoping there weren't going to be any more at-bats like that one.

There were.

The next batter, a regular player with broad gray stripes that faded in the middle of her thorax, also sat out the first two pitches. But once she had two strikes on her, she consistently tipped the ball over Hunter's head, defending the strike zone with effortless precision. I didn't throw her any intentional balls, but she finally walked when my arm faltered after twelve hard pitches.

"Take your base!"

For the first time ever, a Tau was in scoring position.

I tried deception next. Hunter and I rotated through my selection of curve balls, knuckleballs, and sliders. I did my best to stay on the periphery of the strike zone, trying to give Dr. Chirac some tricky calls.

This Tau also proved too smooth for me, though. She took a stab at anything even approaching a strike, only leaving the obvious wild pitches alone. Since she didn't need a solid hit, she could swing and connect with everything that wasn't garbage. The balls eventually came.

The bases were loaded.

With the next Tau I went inside, hoping the thin end of the bat might pop one up for Hunter to catch. But that extra elbow came in handy; she pulled back easily and used the top of the sweet spot, sending every ball fast and high over Hunter's head. He was getting exhausted from chasing balls.

The first Tau, that new one, walked into home. The Tau had scored their first run.

The usual cheer came from the alien audience, with what sounded to my untrained ear like a little something extra. A few of the humans managed to find their voices as well.

I called Hunter to the mound, and Alex jogged over from third base.

"You need relief, Colonel?"

I rubbed my arm, which was screaming. "Not yet. Let's try one more thing. Hunter, how about you stand up?"

"What?"

"It'll put you in better position to catch the high tips."

"Yeah, with my face." Although we had a catcher's mask, Hunter didn't have a proper chest protector. I made a mental note to request one.

"I'll send some slow ones in. See if we can't get a foul out."

"Okay?" He sounded dubious.

"What are you smiling about?"

Alex shrugged. "This is great. They've found a way to score. Talk about strategic thinking. A whole new way to play baseball."

"Yeah. I guess. If you can call it baseball."

The rest of the inning went much the same way. I got one actual out, managing to squeeze a pop fly from the bottom of their order, the pitcher. After that, they scored five more runs to make it an even ten, walking all the way. Then the next two stood impassively and let me strike them out, which took some doing at that point, my arm on fire from shoulder to fingertips.

Across the rest of the game, we put up a mighty struggle, posting eleven runs of our own, more than we had in ages. We subbed through five different pitchers (I was done after that first inning), but no one managed to get more than one out per inning. It was always the Tau who decided when their ups were over. They scored exactly ten runs per inning, and when the game was done they had walked into home an even ninety times.

For the first time in history, humanity had lost a baseball game.

By seventy-nine runs.

"So what the hell happened?"

"They got a new strategy, I guess."

"No kidding. But how did it happen so fast? From zero runs to ninety in one game."

He nodded. "It surprised me, too. But now that I've thought about it, the real question is: Why didn't they do it all along?"

He queued a field recording, a Tau frozen in the pixelated grayscale of a fly-sized spycam. The creature held a spear out before itself like a sword.

Yoshi eye-moused, and the screen jumped into motion. The Tau wove and dodged, hitting at flying objects with the spear.

"This is one of their pre-hunting rituals, or games, or punishments. I've been focusing on it since our first game with the Tau. The other adults in the hunt are slinging rocks at her, and she's fending them off with her spear."

"Looks dangerous," Jenny said.

"Not for a Tau. Their hand-to-eye is too good, and with those double elbows they can cover their whole body efficiently. The Tau may not swing with any power, but they're good at blocking an object that's coming toward them."

I frowned. "So they've always been capable of the batting they showed today?"

"Sure. Those slings can get a projectile up to two hundred K. And they don't hold back. Any adult Tau could fend off balls thrown by humans. Add a little understanding of the strike zone, and they can get a walk pretty much at will."

"Two hundred kilometers per hour?" I repeated.

He nodded. "Yep. Much faster than any pitch you're going to manage, Colonel."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

"So why did they wait until now to kick our asses?" Alex asked.

Yoshi shrugged. "Cause they didn't think of it?"

Dr. Chirac spoke up. "It wasn't part of the grammar of baseball as they understood it. Human players generally try to get a hit. Look at your terminology: You think of the tipped ball as 'foul,' or bad. You count the first two as strikes. But for a player with the Taus' skill set, the foul ball ultimately puts the batter in control." She nodded to herself. "It seems probable that until now they were imitating us, trying to play the way we do. They were probably more interested in experiencing the game's normal rituals than in beating us."

"But that new player," I said, "the one who led off today, had a different idea."

"She wanted to win," Alex said.

Dr. Chirac lowered her voice. "This is the conceptual breakthrough we have been hoping for."

"And the PR save we needed," McGill said happily. "The Tau finally got a game off us, and they did it by figuring out a totally new way to play baseball."

"Not exactly, Mr. McGill."

We all looked at Alex.

"The way they were playing reminded me of something I read about when I was a kid. While you guys on the field were getting mopped up by aliens, I burned most of my data allowance doing some historical research."

A headsup limned her face, dense fields of scrolling stats. "It turns out this is not a new way to play baseball. In 1887, there was a St. Louis Browns player named James Edward O'Neill. He was known generally as 'Tip' O'Neill, because of his expertise at foul tips. He could keep any ball in play, never striking out, wearing down pitchers until he could get on base. Back then, walks were part of your batting average, so he didn't care if he walked or hit his way on. His average was .485 that year."

"Almost five hundred?" Yoshi shook his head. "That's pretty damn good."

"Yeah, but our six-legged friends are about twice that good."

"They should be," Yoshi said. "They're designed for it."

"So someone must have found a way to stop this O'Neill guy," I said. "I mean, I've never heard of him."

"They didn't stop him," Alex said. "They changed the rules. Since that year, walks don't count in your average. So these days, collecting four balls earns you about as much glory as getting hit by a pitch."

"Yeah," Yoshi said, "except that the Tau don't know about batting averages. We don't even know if they can conceive of averages."

"Hell," I muttered. "We don't even know if they can count. I mean, they beat us like a rented mule. Seventy-nine runs!"

"They clearly can count," Chirac said. "They were quite exact in scoring ten runs each inning."

"Do you think that's significant?" Alex asked. "Is it some kind of SETI thing, like they're trying to establish a base-ten rubric for future communication?"

"Perhaps they were declaring," Ashley Newkirk said. "In the mother game, a far better side doesn't keep relentlessly thrashing an opponent once they've beat them. Wouldn't be cricket."

"But ninety runs?" I said. "That's one hell of a safety margin."

Yoshi grunted. "It's nothing to the score they could have racked up. They let us off the hook after ten runs an inning. Our pitching only ever got their pitcher out, and then only about every other at-bat."

"Thank god they don't know about designated hitters," Jenny muttered.

Alex still had her headsup on, and her fingers moved. "So we manage only one out every eighteen ups, which is three outs every fifty-four. That's fifty-one runs an inning. Which is … four hundred fifty-nine runs a game."

"Good god," Ashley said, "that sounds rather like a—" He stopped without saying another word.

"Like a royal ass-kicking," Jenny Flagg said.

The games went incredibly long now. The Tau innings were torturous. Each lasted sixteen at-bats, most of which went ten pitches or more. The Tau went through relief pitchers like potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday, leaving half the human inhabitants of the planet walking around with their arms in a sling. Late in the game, we had to intentionally walk to save our arms for the gimme outs. Otherwise, there'd be no one left who could throw a strike at all.

Playing the Tau was so depressing that it became hard to motivate nine players onto the field. Chirac and the rest of the xenos were merciless, however. They weren't about to give up their close contact just because a bunch of whining soldiers and construction workers didn't want to get their butts kicked every day. And Chirac refused to give us a bigger strike zone. Just as she had when the Taus were losing, she insisted on sticking with Alexander Cartwright's rules.

Halihunt and NASA didn't like the way things were going any more than we did. The U.S. media took less than a week to go into crisis mode, with long essays about how the country's ascendancy was clearly over. Beaten at our own game by the first aliens we'd run into. My team's inability to get an out became the current metaphor for America's outdated infrastructure, our dependence on old paradigms and fossil fuels, our preference for force over finesse. Halihunt's sponsorship schemes crumbled like a cheap taco in a Texas tornado, and their stock price took a beating. How was our little colony supposed to save the American economy if we couldn't throw a strike?

Needless to say, the rest of the world just ate it up with a spoon. Finally, the little guys were kicking our ass. But we were forbidden from giving up the game. The last thing Houston, or Washington for that matter, could abide was for us to look like bad losers.

We were still damned if we did and damned if we didn't.

And boy, was my right arm sore.

We had a long dry spell, the Coriolis rains not interrupting our power supply for long enough to fully charge our batteries, and managed to keep the tube open for fifteen straight days. Finally we had the stability to make every teleport a smooth one, and that's when some genius in Houston got the idea …

We kept the transport shed unlit, using the night vision on our headsups. It was local midnight, when the fewest humans would be awake to notice our little brownout. If something went wrong—a one-in-forty chance at our current power levels—we didn't want anyone to know what had happened, here on Tau or back in the rest of humanity. I would have kept Yoshi out of it, but he was the only MD who I could imagine being sympathetic to our little plan.

Alex stepped up to the tube controls, checking the connection strength, and nodded to me. I could see her fingers crossed in the grainy green of my headsup.

"Night vision off, unless you want to go blind," I said. My accomplices, the tube, and shed disappeared into blackness.

"Three, two …" Alex said softly.

The tube glowed, and suddenly everything was as white as a fresh snowfall at noon. I heard a shout of surprise somewhere else in the camp as we leeched every drop of juice. On Earth, whole cities must have flickered.

The light sputtered, then dropped off into blackness again.

I switched my headsup back on and blinked until the green shapes became recognizable.

"Alex, you don't have to look."

"Not a problem, sir."

"Do I?" Yoshi asked.

"That's why you're here."

I saw Yoshi's headsup flicker to life as he stepped forward toward the transport. I popped the clean-seals and was surprised by the absence of a vacuum hiss. Of course, they'd spent the extra power to send air along this time.

No point in waiting. I pulled the lid up hard.

"Madre!"

That was a good sign.

"Madre de dios!"

"Mr. Rodriguez?" Yoshi asked. "How do you feel?"

"Like someone put mescal in my cornflakes, man. Do you guys do this all the time?"

Alex and I looked at each other. This was our first hint that Sammy "La Bamba" Rodriguez had not been fully briefed on the situation.

But at least he was alive.

The Tau human team had a new ringer.

Only Jenny Flagg immediately saw what was up.

"New talent?"

I nodded. "Get a team together, a good one. The best eight we can field, for a game at the usual time."

"But not the usual game, I see, sir."

I nodded. "And pull Hunter off whatever he's doing right now. We'll need an hour of warm-up to acclimate La Bamba's arm to point-nine-five gees."

"You got it, sir." She stood, scanning the mess tent for the best players, a happy smile on her face. Jenny had never stopped trying to win.

"She's cute," Rodriguez said.

I blinked. It had a been a couple of years since I'd heard a typical male response to a new female face. "Let's talk about baseball, Mr. Rodriguez."

"I am here to play."

"You know our problem."

"I've seen video. You have trouble getting a strike-out. They keep tipping until you walk them."

"Right. They'll give you the first two strikes, but after that it's impossible."

"Not for La Bamba."

"We'll see. Just make sure you throw soft for the first two balls. Nice, easy strikes. Might as well not give them any warning."

"Don't worry, Colonel. I will win your game for you. For America. For humanity."

Sammy Rodriguez was a man in purgatory. Early in his brilliant career, it was thought he'd be one of the great pitchers in the history of the game. He'd been a rare unanimous selection for the Cy Young Award. Over his first three playoff series, he'd managed an ERA of less than one, and was one of the few modern pitchers who regularly went nine innings. He'd come within a walk of a perfect game three times. The guy could even swing a bat. He had an average of .274, the best of any pitcher in the National League. On a planet of amateurs, he was Babe Ruth squared.

He also had an addiction. The man liked to gamble. If only he'd kept it to the horses, the slots, the Super Bowl—hell, anything but baseball—he'd be in Tampa right now instead of seven light-years from the nearest beach. But for the moment, he was banned for life from the game he loved, an exile odious enough that he had risked a quite possibly fatal ride down a quantum tube to get one more crack at immortality. And, of course, redemption of a very lucrative kind.

NASA and Halihunt loved this narrative. Immigrant laborer embraced and enriched by his new country, falls from grace due to tragic character flaw, and rebuilds his life on the new frontier. The story was all set up and ready to go. They had been working the U.S. media around to the angle that we were the underdogs now, playing to win against a superhuman foe whose idea of baseball was pernicious and un-American and, frankly, not baseball at all. But La Bamba had come here to save us—in secret even, wanting no credit (and in case he'd turned to mush in the tube)—and to save baseball itself.

Sammy bounded out to the mound with that walk we'd all had two years before, not quite toned down for the low gravity yet. NASA had been training him with a specially designed, taxpayer-funded, ninety-five-percent-weight ball for a couple of weeks, so after a few perfect deliveries to Hunter, I'd decided to save his arm for the game. The two of them had spent the rest of the morning on a new set of signs. I wanted every advantage in this first encounter. It was possible the Tau would adapt to his pitching after a few games and prove once and for all that they could beat any team of humans, professional or amateur, at any time. But at least we'd have this one win after our string of fifty-three losses.

I was pleased when the first Tau stepped up to the plate, the one with reddish dots who'd started our losing streak in the first place. She would be the one to suffer maximum shock when La Bamba opened up his big guns.

"Play ball," Chirac yelled, and even the humans in the never-reached outfield looked ready to go.

Rodriguez followed my advice and sent the first two in soft and easy. The Tau let them by, giving up the strikes.

La Bamba, it must be said, had a sense of drama. He allowed himself a long warm-up for the third pitch, checking the bases as if they were loaded, squinting at Hunter's sign although we'd already agreed on a screwball for this pitch.

When he let fly, it was spectacular. I'd never watched a major-league pitcher from dugout range before. The ball screamed toward the plate, looking to go inside. The Tau had picked up its hind feet, ready to step back for a ball, when it broke back to the right and down, smacking into Hunter's glove in the middle of the strike zone.

"Strike three, you're out!" Chirac cried.

The Tau had struck out looking.

Maybe it was my imagination, but the creature seemed a bit stunned as it headed back toward the alien dugout. Except for when the Taus declared after ten runs, that particular player had never gotten out in her career.

"Builds character," I said to myself.

La Bamba worked his magic on the next two aliens in short order. They managed a couple of pokes to send the ball foul, but they weren't ready for his speed and breadth of repertoire. After years as the best pitcher on the planet, I had forgotten how mediocre I really was. Probably, that was for the best. I'd done very little to prepare our alien friends for what a real human pitcher could do.

For our ups, we led off with Rodriguez, and he managed a credible double off the third pitch. From second, he caught my eye and nodded his head, showing some respect. The Tau were fine pitchers; they simply were no more prepared for a pro batter than they had been for a pro pitcher.

The rest of the human team rose to the occasion, lifting their offensive game so that La Bamba, then Hunter and Alex could score in the first. Rodriguez ploughed through the Tau order for the next two innings without breaking a sweat, and by the time the fourth rolled around, we were up eight to zero.

And the reddish-spotted Tau was back.

After the first two strikes, she shifted her stance, adjusting the bat to bring it higher. He threw her a standard curve next, which she managed to glance past Hunter. She fended off the next two pitches as well.

An epic battle ensued. Rodriguez worked her from every conceivable angle, attacking the strike zone with knuckle balls and screws and straight-up speed. But she deftly kept her at-bat alive.

I was so mesmerized by the contest that I almost missed Alex waving at me from third. She was making our sign for intentional walk.

I passed it to Hunter, who signalled La Bamba. The man waved it off at first, but after a few more foul tips he relented, letting the Tau on base. As long as it was just this one, we could afford it, and we had to keep Rodriguez's arm in the game.

We got out of that inning okay, but the Taus were gradually adapting.

They scored their first run in the seventh. Our ringer had intentionally walked a couple of Taus who were proving troublesome, and had been whittled down by a third. With two outs, they were back at the top of the order, and Redspots managed to force in a run before Rodriguez sealed the inning.

By that time, the human team had scored twenty-three, the most runs our dispirited crew had put together in ages. But it was clear the Taus were getting better with every inning, analyzing the new pitches coming their way, and full counts were the norm as they wore down La Bamba's arm with long and exhausting at-bats.

I sighed. If only this had been a seven-inning game. But the geniuses at NASA had demanded a regulation nine.

In the eighth, the Tau really started to score. The effortless look had returned to their batting, and Hunter was panting from chasing the foul tips that soared over his head. La Bamba pitched heroically, pain distorting his face with every throw, but they chipped away at our lead. With the bases loaded he dispatched their pitcher, battled through the order for one more out, then got the pitcher again. Seven runs, for a total of eight.

Rodriguez came back to our dugout, all the low-gravity bounce gone from his step, and clutched an ice pack to his right arm.

"How're you doing?"

He looked at me sullenly. "We will win, Coach. Don't worry."

Alex trotted over from third. "Colonel, we've got twenty-three runs, so we've got to get seven more."

"How do you figure?"

"If Sammy keeps fighting every batter, he's going to lose his arm for good. But he can still get their pitcher. Hell, even you get her every once in a while."

I let that pass. Yesterday I'd been the best pitcher on the planet. How quickly they forget.

Alex continued. "If Rodriguez walks the other eight players, that's three times through the full order. Twenty-four batters on base, minus three to load: twenty-one runs. That'll give them twenty-nine total. If we can haul thirty runs, we win. And we've got two more ups. We can do it!"

I nodded, but seven runs in two innings was a tall order.

"Let's see how this one goes."

We almost sealed it in the bottom of the eighth. Alex passed the word that we needed more runs, and we managed to load the bases. La Bamba, gritting his teeth in pain, drove in all three of them, then Alex sent him home. After a couple of strike-outs, we had the bases loaded again.

But Jenny Flagg let us down. The Tau sent her a meat pitch, and she dropped her usual Texas-leaguer into the close outfield. The Tau were already in motion, though, coming in to make the catch.

She staggered to a stop on the way to first, hands over her face.

I shook my head. You had to admit the Tau had learned a lot from us.

"Don't worry, Jenny," I shouted. "We've got one more inning."

I told Rodriguez the plan.

"Eight intentional walks in a row? Madre!"

"Don't fight them, Sammy. Save your arm for the pitcher. She's the weak link."

He shook his head, pulled down his filter mask and spat. "That is no way to win." He walked to the mound without another word.

He fought the first batter in the order, but the red-spotted Tau took him apart, whacking his fastball around like a piñata on a short string. Sammy's arm was faltering, weakening with every pitch, and the pain finally convinced him that Alex's plan was the only way. For the next seven batters, Hunter stood off to the side to catch underhanded throws, and we watched the Taus' score climb to thirteen. Then La Bamba plugged away at the pitcher, taking her down with four exquisite pitches. Eight walks later, they had twenty-one. For a second out, Rodriguez's third pitch caught the pitcher looking with a crafty knuckle ball that dropped like a rock into the strike zone.

He walked eight more, until they had twenty-nine, then motioned Hunter back to the plate.

It was a fierce battle, fifteen pitches of trench warfare with a full count and bases loaded, eight more runs looming if La Bamba let the pitcher on base, but he finally managed to find that third strike. She went swinging.

Bottom of the ninth, and we were two runs behind. And we did not want to go into extra innings.

Yoshi batted first. He took a vicious swing at the first pitch and sent a pop fly soaring into the red sky. Three Taus converged beneath it between second and third, squeaking at each other as if telling jokes while they waited to make the catch.

Then came Hunter. He fouled off the first, then let a strike go past, then missed a fast ball that Joe DiMaggio couldn't have connected with.

Two up, two down.

La Bamba was next, and we all relaxed for the moment. He would at least keep us alive. At a National League game, you usually take a piss-break when the pitcher's up, not realizing that most of them are in the top percentile of humanity. Against the still-amateur Taus, he was batting a thousand so far.

Alex went on deck, warming up with two extra bats. I remembered with some nostalgia the days when we'd had only one Slugger, worn electrical tape around its neck to replace the grip, and nothing at stake.

The first pitch came in, and Sammy ignored it.

"Strike one!" Chirac proclaimed.

He stepped back on the second pitch, scratching his ear disdainfully.

"Strike two!"

He moved into a bunter's crouch. When the next pitch came in, he glanced it off toward third base, well foul. He foul tipped the next one as well.

Alex jogged over and hissed, "Is he doing what I think he's doing?"

I nodded. "He's getting them back. Playing their own game against them."

"Why doesn't he just wail on it?"

He bunted another pitch foul.

"Could be his arm. Could be his ego."

He stepped back from the next pitch, a ball. One-fourth of a walk.

But La Bamba's plans were subtler than we knew. Two pitches later, he hauled off and swung for real, hoping to catch us all by surprise. But the bat cracked like a rifle shot, scattering splinters from home plate to the mound. The ball bounced tepidly to first, where the baseman picked it up and stepped on the bag.

Humanity had lost again.

"No, all-star swingers to rack up a big score, with lots of relief at the end."

"Better hope they never hear about the designated hitter rule."

We were sitting in the mess tent—defeated players, the military, the xeno team—trying to figure what to do next. Somehow, the discussion had got around to whether any team of humans could ever beat the Taus.

La Bamba sat with his head on the table, three ice packs strapped to his pitching arm. He kept saying, "Everything, everything."

Alex rubbed his shoulders. "Cheer up, Sammy. You'll still be a hero for trying."

He turned his head from side to side without lifting it from the table, as if rolling out pie crust with his face.

"No, I lose everything! House … car …"

I shared a look with Alex. "Rodriguez? You didn't bet on this game, did you?"

He was silent.

Then I remembered that some London bookie had offered twenty-to-one that humans wouldn't beat the Tau on their own planet anytime this year. Rodriguez must have figured that his secret call-up was the fix of the century.

"Swimming pool," he whimpered.

"You win for humanity, huh?" I said.

Alex shrugged and continued to rub his shoulders.

McGill groaned, his eyes rolling up in his head. "This is a PR disaster! We bring in a pro to beat the poor defenseless aliens, and we still lose. Then it turns out our ringer was betting on the game."

"Maybe you should just sneak me home. Like you snuck me here," Rodriguez said. "Forget this game ever happened."

"That would be nice," I said. "But not everyone on this planet is U.S. military. We can only control the story for so long."

Alex stopped her massage. "Wait a second, Sammy. Did you say send you home?"

"Yes. I want to go home now. My arm is broken."

I swallowed. La Bamba had not in fact been fully briefed. "Rodriguez, you do know that the tube isn't up to two-way teleport yet, right? We don't have enough power for a push from this end. Nothing bigger than a speck of dust, anyway."

"Speck of dust? What?"

Alex leaned closer, her hands still on his shoulders. "You can't go back for six months at least, Sammy."

"Madre!"

"Any brilliant solutions to your sporting dilemma yet, Colonel?"

I looked up at him through a haze of Iain Claymore's whisky.

"Not much of a dilemma. Don't see that I have any choice one way or the other. Lose or lose does not constitute a dilemma."

"And you were so close. Poor Mr. Rodriguez doesn't have another game in him?"

"He's on strike. Breach of contract."

"Ah, labor disputes. Always a messy business in sport. But surely there are choices. You could give up the game."

I shook my head. "Make us look even worse. Besides, there's glory in losing. Must soldier on. Every country remembers the battles they lost: Bunker Hill, Pearl Harbor, Gallipoli, Damascus. 'Remember the Alamo,' we still say in Texas. No survivors that fine day, Ashley. Not a one."

"Do you really think that today's game was a sublime and memorable defeat?"

"Not particularly." I poured myself another drink, not offering. "All I hope is that once the oil starts flowing, everyone'll forget all about baseball. Until then, we'll just have to look bad."

He nodded, and took a seat uninvited.

"What if I said there was an alternative?"

I looked up at him.

"A way to take some of the sting out of losing. Maybe even win a few for humanity."

I emptied the glass down my throat, then slapped it to the table. "Talk."

He handed over a piece of paper. I took it carefully. Real paper was still something precious here on Tau. If you've ever moved a box of books, you know how heavy it can get. But we all had a notebook or two: the only place to store our private thoughts.

On the sheet was a list of equipment. I skimmed to the bottom and cried out at the total mass.

"Christ, Ashley, fifty kilos? La Bamba just about blew NASA's budget for the year."

"All very necessary. And I'm sure Halihunt still has some money socked away."

I sighed, nodding. Whole political parties had disappeared by underestimating the wealth of oil companies. And Ashley's idea had one unmistakable advantage: It got me off the hook. I imagined long, luxurious days of worrying about solar arrays and oil drills instead of batting orders.

"Have you talked to Dr. Chirac about this?"

He nodded vigorously. "She's thrilled with the idea. Wants to do a comparative study and all that. But I leave convincing Mr. McGill to you."

"And you think we can win?"

He sighed. "If you insist on putting it in those narrow terms, yes. There are certain tactical advantages which I would be glad to explain."

"Spare me." I took a deep breath and nodded. "If NASA and Halihunt are game, I am. Just one thing: Do you really need the uniforms? We've got some already."

"But we have baseball uniforms, my dear colonel. They have colors on them, for God's sake. If we want the Tau to have a genuine cultural experience, we simply can't take the field in anything other than all white."

"Because …?"

He sighed, rolling his eyes. "It just wouldn't be cricket."

"No, you're supposed to be at third man!" he was yelling at Jenny Flagg. "Third man, I said! You're at fine leg! Get over to third man! Good heavens. Look, just move over to bloody left field!"

She finally nodded and jogged across the outfield.

Or perhaps it was the infield. Backfield? It was hard to tell. The two wickets were placed about twenty meters apart in the middle of the field, and there were two Taus batting. I seem to remember that cricket switched directions every half-dozen pitches or so. There were fielders dotted all around me, dressed in the fresh new white uniforms that had cost Pasadena its air-conditioning for three long summer nights.

As Ashley Newkirk continued his battle with field placements, I found Alex standing close to one of the batters, just to one side of the newly rolled rectangle of dirt between the wickets. She took off her helmet as I approached.

"How's it going, Captain?"

"Pretty well so far. We got their first batter—sorry, batsman—on a deflection. The one with red spots, and we got her for only twenty runs."

"Only twenty?"

"It's okay; they're chasing our score of three ninety, and that's just our first innings."

I shook my head.

"Bit funny playing without gloves, though," she added.

I looked around. "Hunter's got some."

"He's the wicket-keeper."

"Ah. And how come you're the only one with a helmet?"

"Because I'm at silly mid-off."

"I recognize all those words, Alex, but not in that order."

She cleared her throat. "I'm standing right next to the batsman, in case she tips it short. But it's a bit dangerous if she hits it hard, which is what 'silly' means. Yoshi's at short leg on the other side. And take a look at that slips cordon."

I followed her gesture to the row of five fielders strung out behind one of the Tau batters. If only we'd thought of that for baseball: just put the fielders behind the batter. Any foul tip would go straight into their hands.

Of course, you can't put your fielders in foul territory. Wouldn't be baseball.

"How do the Taus like it?"

"They love it. The attendance is bigger, at least. It's the perfect sport for the Taus. You can hit the ball in any direction and score."

"So how come they aren't beating us yet?"

"Because you can't get a walk in cricket. Simple as that. And we can put fielders in position all three hundred and sixty degrees around them. The field placements are totally up to the captain, um, to Ashley. We have a chance of catching any deflection they make."

I nodded. Simple as that.

"What if they come up with something unexpected? Like their foul tipping in baseball?"

She shrugged. "Ashley says the game's been played for eight hundred years. Seems like it'd be hard to come up with any new tricks."

"Yeah, we'll see."

"Colonel, please?" Ashley had set his field, and waved me off.

I retreated to the edge of the impact crater. Alex was right. There were at least two hundred Taus around the field, raptly watching the new game. According to Dr. Chirac's first report, the aliens had decided to learn this new set of rules by more usual methods: sign language and direct example rather than passive observation. The xeno team was having its first face-to-face conversations with the Taus, pointing and miming to explain wickets and bowling and whatever the hell silly mid-off was.

A breakthrough of cosmic proportions.

Ashley had backed up to a spot about thirty meters from one wicket. He ran toward it, charging all the way up to the little wooden triptych and releasing the ball straight toward the Tau at the other wicket. The ball bounced short, flying up from the divoted ground at an unexpected angle. The Tau swung the broad, flat bat and got a piece of it. It soared over her right shoulder, just above the cordon of fielders behind her. She started running as Jenny, placed deeper, ran it down and threw it in.

The two Taus held up their run, having changed positions once.

"Not a bad stroke, eh, Colonel?"

Iain Claymore had appeared next to me. He held one of Yoshi's cameras and a small flask.

"You understand this game?"

He looked around and lowered his voice. "My mother's from Manchester. Tell no one."

"Your secret is safe with me."

We watched another delivery. The batter clipped it, angling it away at ninety degrees, just over Alex's reach and almost to the edge. The Taus ran again, switching places twice.

"Two runs, I presume?"

"Aye. They're learning to play cricket even faster than they did that daft American game."

I nodded, smiling to myself. "I just hope Ashley knows what he's in for."

"How do you mean?"

"It's not much fun to have your national game taken away from you."

Claymore lifted his head and laughed. "You Americans crack me up. Cricket, taken away from the English? Those poor bastards havenae won a cricket series in decades. The Indians, the Sri Lankans, the South Africans all kick the crap out of them on a regular basis. Christ, they were put out of the Cup by bloody Yemen last year."

I shook my head. "But what are they going to do when the tube opens for good, and aliens show up and beat them at their own game?"

"Ach, that happened about two hundred years ago. Only they were called Australians."

I swallowed. "It's not the same."

"Don't be daft, Colonel. The English are wankers, but at least they gave up their empire gracefully. You lot could learn something from that. They don't mind losing a friendly game against the old possessions. They don't need to win. They're just happy that two billion people on the Indian subcontinent drive on the left side of the road. It may not be much of a legacy, but it's a damn sight better than the mess that you Yanks are going to leave behind in the Middle East."

I turned to Iain with surprise. I'd never heard him say anything remotely political before, unless his relentless attacks on Ashley Newkirk's cooking counted.

"But enough of that," he said. "Let's watch the game."

All those years, as we all know now, our charming half-Scot had been brewing up more than whisky in his still. Slowly and surely, he had engineered a bacterium distantly related to the ones that eat oil slicks off the ocean surface, but adapted for Tau's deep underground reserves.

For a Greenpeace radical, he was quite an interventionist. By the time we started pumping, he had infected every oil reserve within a thousand clicks of our facility. Like metal spikes driven into old-growth trees, Iain's creation made Tau crude useless for earthly consumption. No amount of retooling at our refineries back at home could save the tainted oil.

But not everyone knows what really became of him. Contrary to the official story, "St. Iain" was not executed. As a United European subject, I didn't consider him a traitor, whatever my commanders said. Besides, after all our labor and heartache on that planet, killing was too good for him.

Instead, I exiled him on Tau after it was clear that the oil was useless, the array not worth maintaining, the tube closing forever on Earth's first contact era after the last of us had stepped back through. And I made sure that Claymore had all the equipment and supplies necessary for a long, lonely life on an alien planet, surrounded by a hundred thousand inhuman creatures who wanted nothing to do with him except to play a very English game.

Of course, to give him a fighting chance of staying sane, I let him keep his still.

After all the whisky I'd drunk from it, I thought that only cricket.