By Dale Waters

By Dale Waters

This is the full story(untitled) about the future of professional football—with aliens. Thefirst ten pages are posted separately for AWG critique. Mildly crude.

I was having the best dream ever about the Super Bowl. It was fourth and goal from the eight yard line with the final seconds ticking down. Coach called for a naked bootleg. The whole season came down to this one play, and it was all on my shoulders. The Patriots’ defense took the fake as I reversed field and rolled right. I only had the cornerback to beat. He came up fast, but I faked him out of his socks and waved the ball in his face and skipped across the goal line. The zebras were all throwing their hands in the air to indicate touchdown and the crowd was screaminglike they were going crazy and somewhere nearby drums were pounding out a jungle beat in celebration. It was incredible.

Through a sleepy haze I realized my phone was ringing. I have this system that plays the jungle drums as my household ringtone, and I’m usually very fond of it—it was one of the reasons cited by the former Mrs. Chang when she filed for divorce—but this particular morning it was just annoying. Yesterday’s post-game victory party had burned late into the night, and I needed my beauty sleep. Speaking of beauty, Erica Hart, the soon-to-be future Mrs. Chang, stirred in bed beside me and uttered a sleepy expletive.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Who could it be at this hour?” Erica said.

“Maybe it’s Jerry. He’s been negotiating a major bump in my playoff bonus.”

“You’d better answer it,” Erica said. She pulled a pillow over her head. All the rest of the bedding had been tossed aside in the night so she was otherwise naked. That stirred the thought that I had more important things to do than answer the phone. But then again, Jerry might be calling to discuss obscene amounts of cash. Business was business, and if we won the Super Bowl they’d be calling me Cha-Ching Chang.

I said, “Answer phone, voice only.”

The drumming stopped and Fella Jameson’s voice filled the room. “Wake up, Darius. This is important.”

“I thought you were my agent calling about my bonus,” I said. “Go away.”

“There might not be a bonus if you don’t listen to what I have to tell you. Turn on the picture, will you?”

“Erica’s naked,” I said.

“Like I haven’t seen that before,” Fella said. “Hi, Erica.”

Erica mumbled a few unladylike comments from beneath her pillow about what Fella should go do to himself.

“All right, cover yourselves up and make some coffee,” Fella said. “I’ll be over in twentyminutes. I’m serious. You both need to hear this.” He switched off.

Fella Jameson is my best friend and my favorite target, a wide receiver with all the tools. His mother named him Goodfellow in a perverse tribute to some favored ancestor, and he got called Goodie as a kid until he got big enough to whip all their butts. He’s been Fella ever since. And, just so you know, Fella set several Cowboy receiving records in the regular seasonand was now in the process of shattering all the playoff records. Together we were unbeatable.

Erica was still in the shower when Fella showed up. I was sipping coffee and watching the highlights from yesterday’s division playoff game on the video wall in my breakfast room. Fella poured himself a cup of my finest. I have fresh coffee beans flown in from South America every two weeks.

“Check this out,” I said. On the slow motion video image I rolled to the right, dodgeda blitzing safety, and lofted the ball just over a leaping Chicago Bears defender into the back corner of the end zone. Fella stretched out in a full Superman dive and pulled in the pass for a touchdown. “That was twenty-one zip and we never looked back,” I said. “We’re headed for a ring, baby. Who’s going to stop that?”

“The Patriots,” Fella said.

“Get real,” I said. “We might meet the Pats in the Super Bowl, but they can just take their beating and go home like everybody else.”

“If you’re done, I have something to show you,” Fella said. He ordered the video wall to bring up the regular news and scrolled down until he found what he wanted on page four. It was a rather obscure headline that said: Intergalactic Council Declares Pop-Ka-Jeezees Human.Fellaexpanded the article and said, “Look at this.”

“Why do I care?” I said.

“We’re toast,” Fella said, “game over and good night. Have you ever heard of the Cheezies?”

Erica padded into the room ina borrowed Dallas Cowboy’s robe. Her long dark hair was wet and combed out straight,framing her perfect face. She said, “Warm blooded, carbon-basedrace from the Tau Ceti systems. Contact is fairly recent. Considered to be moderately intelligent and non-threatening.”

“Don’t show off,” I said and pushed her the cream and sugar.

“Erica’s right,” Fella said, “but there’s more. The Cheezies sent an ambassador here last year to negotiate trade deals. Don’t even try to pronounce his real name. He goes by Mamoo. Let me pull up a picture.”

Fella talked to the system and found an image of the Cheezie ambassador. It was a group shot taken outside the old United Nations building in Manhattan, now home tothe Intergalactic Council. The alien was a meter and a half wide and half a meter taller than the earthlings around him. His face was vaguely human with eyes, nose, and mouth in the right places, but alien and scary, too. He had long floppy ears that hung down over the lapels of his well-tailored suit.

“That’s one big hombre,” I said.

“And you’re only seeing his front legs. He’s got two more behind like one of those mythological half-man, half-horse creatures.”

“A centaur,” Erica said.

“That’s the one,” Fella said. “ButCheezies have stumpy legs and big bellies that almost drag along the ground, a low center of gravity.”

“You woke me up to discuss the effect of gravityon alien beer guts?” I said.

“Listen, you moron,” Fella said. “Ambassador Mamoo signed before the season to play football with the Patriots. The other owners sued, of course, and they managed to get a court orderdeclaring that only human players are allowedto play in the NFL. This new ruling by the Intergalactic Council just cleared the path for him to rejoin the team.”

“How come we’ve never had this problem before?” I said. “Ever since Erica’s granddaddy invented the Hart Drive, we’ve been zooming around this arm of the Milky Way and discovering aliens. Those idiots at the I.C. have been handing out legal rights to all sorts of outer-space crawlies and gas-bags for thirty years, but none of them ever wanted to steal my Super Bowl ring.”

“None of them were built like Mamoo. Besides, he needs the cash. I hear he likes to gamble, and Crump’s casinos have been cleaning his clock.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Football is a game of skill. Just because he’s a big ape doesn’t make him a football player.”

Fella snorted.“You think not? Look at this.” He pulled up an article from Intergalactic Geographic. It was all about the Cheeziesand their home planet with stories and videos taken by the first Earth ships that landed there.

As he scrolled down through the text, I said, “Stop…there! See that part? It says they are non-aggressive with no meaningful history of murder or war.That doesn’t sound like football material to me.”

“I’m surprised weallowed them to be human,” Erica said. Which was a joke, I think.

“But look at this,” Fella said. “Marriage rituals: When two males are competing for the same female, they have a contest. The game is named for a fruit called a crat-pop. They position it inside a circle that’s roughly twenty meters across and the other Cheezies—including the blushing bride to be—all crowd around. The two horny males enter the ring and the winner is the one who can get the crat-pop in his mouth, without using his hands,and carry it outside the circle to his girlfriend.”

“Seems simple enough,” I said.

“Ah, it might be for me or you, but Cheezies can’t see anything that small outside two or three feet. So they stumble around looking for the crat-pop and kicking it this way and that and butting heads and generally running over other Cheezies and crashing through walls. The mob keeps shoving them back in the direction of the circle until one of them stumbles over the fruit and manages to get it in his mouth. Sometimes this can take hours.”

“It sounds very romantic,” Erica said.

I ignored her.“That’s just crazy, Fella. It’s nothing like football.”

“You think not?” Fella said. “What it tells me is this: If the Pats give the ball to Mamoo and point him in the right direction, there’s not much we can do with our puny bodies to stop him.”

“That would be like cheating,” I said.

“This is the Patriots we’re talking about,” Fella reminded me.

My heart sank. Two years earlier, in their latest brush with rule-breaking, the Pats got caught with a time-warp device in their stadium at Foxboro during the AFC Championship game. The visiting Steelers protested after they were penalized seventeen times for ‘delay of game’ in the first half. To add insult to injury, the Patriots quarterback Dan Young was observed eating a sandwich on the sideline between offensive snaps. The NFL investigated and determined that New England had indeed manipulated time to their advantage, but there wasn’t yet a written rule against it, so the game results stood.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “We are completely and totally toast if Mamoo plays.”

Fella said “We’ve only got three weeks to figure something out.”

I should have married Erica a long time ago, but it’s complicated. Her daddy, Franklin Hartley Hart, Jr., owns the Dallas Cowboys. He also owns the trading rights to about half the known galaxy. Erica’s an only child and stands to inherit the whole thing. Shehas three advanceddegrees—law, business, and planetary engineering—so she’ll be prepared to run Hart SpaceEnterprises someday.

That’s where the Super Bowl comes in. I was already the league MVP, and if I had a Super Bowl ring on my resume, I could damn well name my price for my upcoming contract negotiations. Jerry assured me I’d be the richest man in football and nobody could accuse me of being some kind of trophy husband. So Erica and I sort of had this agreement that we wouldn’t announce our engagement or anything until I had that Super Bowl ring.

The following Saturday—after Fella told me about the Cheezie Ambassador and his deal with the Pats—we romped over the Forty-Niners 39-14 in the NFC Championship game. I threw four touchdown passes, three of them to Fella. We were on our way to the Super Bowl and I should have been walking on clouds, but until I knew what was going to happen with the Cheezie situation, I couldn’t stop worrying.

On Sunday, Fella and Erica came by my place to watch the Patriots and Chiefs play the AFC Championship gamein Kansas City. To this day, I hardly have words to describe what I saw. Mamoo took the field during warm-ups wearing the Pats’ blue and silver. His skin tight pants covered all four legs and his bloated lower body. On his upper half, his short, thick arms stuck out of a huge jersey with the number seven, a quarterback number.

The partisan Kansas City crowd laughed at first, thinking it was some kind of marketing stunt. But after the Pats received the opening kickoff for a touchback, Mamoogalloped onto the field with the offense to take over on the twenty yard line.He was wearing a double-sized Patriots helmet with his big, floppy ears protruding through holes in the top and streaming behind him in the breeze. The fans were stunned to silence. Even the booth announcers were speechless.

“They are really going through with it,” Fella said. “I heard he’s so blind they have to put him under center for the snap.”

Sure enough, Mamoo moved up behind the line. The Patriot’s regular quarterback, Dan Young, helped his Cheezieteammate find the center, then went into the half-back position and called the signals.The center shoveled the ball to Mamooand got out of the way as fast as he could. In fact, the whole Patriots’ offensive line just sort of trotted off towards the sidelines. The pigskin disappeared in Mamoo’s giant paws and he charged forward into the Chiefs’ defense. Dan Young did his part by running alongside Mamoo to nudge him back on course whenever he started to wander.

It was carnage. By the time the Cheezie crossed the goal line, there were orange-clad Chiefs scattered across the turf all the way down the field.

Mamooflashed a huge grin at the close up camera in the end zone. His ears stood out to the sides for a moment, then went straight up as if to signal touchdown. Heperformed a couple of four-legged hip thrusts and stuck the entire ball in his mouth beforeDan Young forced him to cough it up and led him back to the bench. Thirty seconds into the game, the Pats were winning by a touchdown.

The officials called time-out and medical teams came onto the field to clear away the most seriously injured Chiefs’ defenders. The broadcast switched to a beer commercial featuring a pair of cute Cheezie cubs—obviously an ad prepared special for the occasion. Football might be ruined forever, but at least there was still beer.

“That’s it,” Erica said. “No ring this year.” I wasn’t sure if she was talking about my Super Bowl ring or her wedding ring, but it didn’t really matter.

“I’m not sure I can watch,” I said.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Fella said. “We’ve got to watch every play. All of us. He’s got to have a weakness, and we need to find it.”

The rest of the game was torture. Not just for me, but for all the Chiefs’ fans and anybody else who gave a flip about football. Ever since mankind pushed out into interstellar space, the planet had become a much more peaceful place, and national pride didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore—except when it came to football—America’s game. And now this big space ape was taking that last little bit of Americana away from us. Erica slipped her hand into mine as we watched.

The outcome was never in doubt. After a while theKansas City defense figured out how to get eight or nine guys on one side of the Cheezie and tip him over. It wasn’t easy. And they started knocking down Dan Young whenever they could. Without Young’s directions, Mamoo would often wander out of bounds, but he still seemed to pick up twenty or thirty yards on every play. The final score was 77-7. The few remaining fans filed numbly out of the stadium and went home.

“There you have it,” Fella said as he switched off the wall, “the death of football as we know and love it.”

“We have to do something,” Erica said.

“Murder?” I suggested.

“He’s an alien ambassador,” Fella said.

“I mean Ronald Crump,” I said, naming the owner and CEO of the Pats.

“I’d love to,” Fella said. “But that wouldn’t keep Mamoo out of the Super Bowl. We need to get creative.”

“Bribery? Extortion?” Erica said.

“Possible,” Fella said, “but I doubt even your rich daddy can outbid Crump and his casinos. If there’s one thing that brings in more money than space trade, it’s gambling.”

“We’ve got to get to know this Cheezie better,” Erica said.

“It’ll be hard getting close to him. Let’s take a shot in Miami,” Fella said, naming the site of this year’s Super Bowl. The teams would be showing up together the following Sunday, a week before the game. Any way you looked at it, we didn’t have much time.

Ericaarrived in Miami on her private sub-orbital jump ship and picked us up in a limo at the airport for the ride to the hotel. The Cowboys were staying at the Hilton, and, of course, the Pats were bunking down at the Crump Plaza and Casino. If we were going to get close to Mamoo, we’d have to infiltrate enemy territory—the bar at the Crump Hotel.

In the back of the limo, I cracked open the mini-bar and poured myself a healthy dose of vodka on ice with a splash of Venusian swamp-tomato juice for a little tang. Fella and Erica declined my offer to mix one for them. “What did you find out over the last week?” Fella asked. We were all supposed to be researching everything we could about Mamoo.