"Just one," Ashley said, a smile visible behind his pipe. "What if today they decided they don't like baseball and never show up again?"

Yoshi laughed aloud. "Don't worry about that, Newkirk. Everyone likes baseball."

NASA and Halihunt, of course, decided to play ball.

Our request couldn't have come at a better time. The current powers in Washington were not those who had originally funded the mission, and the s.p.a.ce agency, as always, was looking for ways to improve its image. Within the U.S., the idea of exporting the national pastime to Tau was a natural. The Halihunt public relations wing immediately annexed half our discretionary data bandwidth, demanding video of aliens at play. The mission had been a Halihunt loss leader for a decade now, tough to swallow for corporate execs used to thinking about the next quarter, not eight-year s.p.a.ce journeys. But here was good PR with its own revenue stream. They wanted to license images and find sponsors for equipment teleports. There were even plans to send us uniforms through the tube. With snazzy corporate logos, of course.

On the international front, a breakthrough in the mission's scientific side was a G.o.dsend. Outside the reach of the U.S. media, the Tau expedition was pretty much seen for what it was: an attempt to restore the U.S. to unquestioned superpower status. Seventy years of unilateralism on global warming, oil dependence, and off-and-on military occupation of the Middle East had p.i.s.sed off pretty much the whole world. Despite the fact that every other economic bloc had converted to renewable, Earth's fossil fuel supply was finally drying up. America's decision to open up whole new worlds to drilling was going down like day-old fried eggs.

After two years of hard work, I'd started to get nervous, wondering if the economics of our primary mission would prove viable. Our oil wells were useless unless the hundred-square-kilometer solar array could keep transport cheap: The energy costs went down geometrically when power was available at both ends of the tube. And the longer you kept a single tube open, the cheaper and more stable it became. Thus, the London-New York-Bejing tube was very efficient, and long-haul aircraft a thing of the past, but you still had to drive to the local store. The math said that a perpetual tube carrying a thousand barrels a minute of crude from Tau to Earth was profitable in the extreme and would give the U.S. economy another hundred years to switch over. But the technology had never been tested in industrial quant.i.ties on an interplanetary scale.

If Tau's frequent Coriolis rains interrupted input to the solar array, if the planet's petroleum reserves varied unusably in composition, if the transport math didn't hold up over interstellar distances . . . I had lived daily with the possibility that all our work here might be pointless.

Until now.

As of that first game, we had done something no other human beings had ever done. After two years of being snubbed by the locals, as if they knew what we were up to and didn't approve, we had finally made contact with them. They had walked into our camp, held our tools in their big hands, tried to communicate on our terms.

They even wanted to play with us.

That night after the first game, having drunk six beers and sent off my report, I went to bed happy, feeling as if my little colony finally belonged here on Tau.

Part Two Yoshi was right; they mastered the pitching first.

Their fast b.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s.

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 sheetgra.s.s 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 attache, 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."

"Wittgenstein speaks of a 'language game' in which two workers are building a wall. Worker A says 'block,' 'pillar,' 'slab,' or 'beam.' Worker B hands him the appropriate piece of rock or wood, and the wall gets built."

"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 a.s.sume they're playing baseball?" Jenny Flagg asked.

"Oh, I a.s.sure 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 a.n.a.logy is straining. These are not children. We must a.s.sume 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 amba.s.sadors 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 att.i.tude. 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 d.a.m.n observant, they'd know what we were up to."

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

"Well, we're d.a.m.ned if we do and d.a.m.ned 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?"

A week later, everything changed.

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 cl.u.s.ter 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 signaled 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, signaled 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.