Where the Phph Pebbles Go

By MIRIAM ALLEN DeFORD
It was a strange world and a deadly one, the incredible alien planet—
Gral and Hodnuth were playing phph. In case you are not a phph fan, and haven't ever seen Bliten's classic Ways of Improving Your Phph Game , its essence consists in lobbing pebbles at a target as near the horizon as your skill permits. After each throw, you fly over to see how far you went.
It sounds like a simple game, but it has complicated restrictions and rules, and a good phph player can command any amount of heavy service from the spectators. Since a lot of the Ground Dwellers are also phph addicts (they could never become players, of course, being far too small and light to handle the phph pebbles), this means that a real champion never has to do any kind of work again, being fed, clothed, housed and entertained by his admirers, and can devote all his time to the game.
Gral and Hodnuth, having alternated as champions for many a long ganath, had it pretty easy. But neither of them was given to lying back on his laurels and growing soft. This meant that when a match was announced, Ground Dwellers as well as we Real People came by the hanthoids from zygils around to watch through viewing-tubes—and whichever of the two won piled up a lot of bilibs of voluntary service. (Voluntary service, as most economists admit, is true wealth, since the pledge is incumbent on the offerer's heirs until it is fully satisfied, and can likewise be willed by the recipient to his heirs).
Naturally, no phph player is absolutely perfect; if he were, there would be no contest and nobody would bother to attend a game. Pebbles fall short, they go awry, and sometimes they are thrown so hard that they escape altogether from our light gravity and fly into outer space. At the end of the game period the referee (usually a superannuated former champion) tots up the score and announces how many times each player missed the target and by which of these errors he missed it. By a rather confusing arithmetical computation he then determines which of them won, and the winner collects his pledges—and the fans collect the side bets they have been making all through the game.