“That makes twenty-eight of them,” said Meek.
“I told you,” Gus accused him, “that we hadn’t got them all. You better take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.”
“Chiggers,” Meek told him, “burrow into a person to lay eggs.”
“Maybe these things do, too,” Gus contended.
The radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning in on one of the regular newscasts from Titan City out on Saturn’s biggest moon.
The syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with excitement and pride.
“Next week,” he said, “the annual Martian-Earth football game will be played at Greater New York on Earth. But in the Earth’s newspapers tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the sporting world down into secondary place.”
He paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with delight.
“The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a game. There may have been some of them who didn’t, at first, know what it was.
“But they’re going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten so it really doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that when men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy of one of the two sectors.”