The Golden Globe

If I was John Valentine, I'd look for Sparky in a pinstripe uniform, playing baseball in a rather unusual place. You didn't hear it from me.

"Easy out, easy out!" Sparky shouted. "Burn it in there, Bob! He couldn't hit it if you rolled it on the ground! Easy out!" Sparky pounded his fist into the glove, then set his feet apart and crouched slightly, glove held up a few inches from his mouth and nose. He could smell the soft leather and the oil he'd rubbed into it a few hours ago. He dug his spikes into the green grass, into the soil. He felt a primal co

The batter took the pitch and the umpire turned away, unimpressed.

Ball three.

"Whadda ya, blind?" somebody yelled off to his right.

So it was the bottom of the sixth. No score. There was a man on second trying to look in all directions at once, ready for the shortstop to sneak in behind him for a pickoff, ready to fly at the crack of the bat. Two outs, three balls, two strikes. Nothing to lose.

The guy at the plate wasn't known for fly balls, or long balls. He had no home runs on the season. But he could dribble it into the hole between first and second, and that's where Sparky was playing it. If it got to him there was no way he'd get the man at first. The throw would have to be to the plate. The catcher was good, and the ru

But was Sparky's arm good enough? Should he throw to the pitcher, hope he could cut it off and still get it to the catcher in time? No, wait, wouldn't the pitcher be ru

Damn, but baseball had a lot of things to remember.

He loved every minute of it.

The pitcher wound up, the ru

Everybody relaxed. The ru

For years this had been the only place Sparky could relax, could totally let down his guard, be himself, do something he loved to do, but didn't have to do. He wasn't the best baseball player in the Little League. He wasn't even in the top one hundred. In fact, he was strictly mediocre. For some reason, this was a great comfort to Sparky.

Here on the sweet green grass of the outfield, or digging his spikes into the red dirt of the batter's box, or circling the bases, or even sitting at ease in the dugout with his friends—his friends, not fans of Sparky, the television boy—he felt a magical calm that existed nowhere else in his life. It was the uncomplicated happiness that generations of boys before him had felt on the diamond. It was his own private thing.

If fact, life would be darned near perfect at that moment but for two things: he was hungry and his toes hurt.

The hunger was a familiar thing by now, and he could deal with it. He pulled a candy bar out of his pocket, bit off a hasty chunk, and stuck it in his cheek, conscious of how much he now resembled those black-and-white heroes of the game back on Old Earth. Only there it had not been a wad of chocolate and nuts in their cheeks, but a chaw of tobacco.

So here he was, Jackie Robinson in the outfield, crouching slightly, ready to explode in a blur of motion, the moment stretching, eternal....

Sparky could no more play ball at a regular King City park than he could walk into a Pizza Palace franchise and order a slice and a Coke. But this field was different. This was the recreation dome of the Plain People of Luna: the Outer Amish.

That's what they were called when they first moved to Luna, anyway. Later, groups relocated to Mars and even more distant points. Some now called the original settlers Old-Order Outer Amish, but it was cumbersome, and names stick long after they've lost their original meaning.

When Sparky first started visiting here, he had been told the saga of the Amish and Me

Sparky had thought it would take a great leap of logic for Amish to board a spaceship and leave for Luna, but was it really that different than crossing the Atlantic? America wasn't mentioned in the Bible, but the moon was. Once there, of course, they could not survive entirely with Biblical technology, but they did surprisingly well, and used as few modern things as possible. What had drawn them was the prospect of twelve two-week growing seasons per year. Farmers to the bone, Amish had actually been in the agricultural forefront in matters like crop rotation and soil conservation. They were familiar with hybridization, and genetic engineering was only breeding and selection speeded up, or at least it was to the schismatic leader of the Outers. And they had never been averse to accepting a little help from their neighbors. So while they themselves never entered a bioengineering laboratory, they were instrumental in developing the first strains of Lunar-adapted crops. They put up domes, conditioned the Lunar dust with compost, bacteria, worms—whatever was needed—plowed the resulting soil, planted, and harvested. The new breeds of plants drank the intense sunlight beneath the UV-filtering plastic domes and grew so fast "it could break your arm if you held it too long over a corn seedling," according to Sparky's friend Jan Stoltzfus, the boy who had first invited him into the Amish enclave. "Two weeks of summer growing season, and two weeks of winter... without the snow!"

Self-sufficiency had always been their ideal, but they also had to make a living, so much of the produce they grew was taken into King City and sold at a public market, to health fanatics, antichemical believers, and the very wealthy, at astonishing prices.

"These are crops just as artificially produced as those grown on any corporate farm," Jan had pointed out, enjoying the joke on the "English." "Our food tastes no better and no worse than anyone else's. The only way to distinguish it is our fruits and squashes and melons and tomatoes tend to be a bit smaller, sometimes a lot smaller, more like back on Old Earth. And you find the occasional blemish on a tomato, the odd worm in the apple.

"And do you think we eat it? Very little of it. We buy our vegetables at the market, just like ordinary folks, and bank the difference."

Their lives had seemed full of odd contradictions to Sparky when he first started coming out here. They read old-fashioned books by the light of candles or kerosene lamps, but kept their orchard trees thriving during the two-week "winter" with banks of grow lights suspended overhead. They plowed the ground with teams of horses and wood-and-iron plowshares, then baled hay for the cows with gas-powered machines. In one dome they might heat with a wood-stove or a fireplace—they could not afford real wood, and so used compacted waste from various outside agricultural concerns—and in the next dome over it was thought to be ethical to heat with methane gas. They had endless arguments over what was proper and what was not. But they were good people, and there was one thing they all agreed upon: television was the tool of the devil.