failure. The championship of baseball is something called the World Series, and it’s been so long since the Cubs have won it that no one who is alive could remember the last time they won it. It’s so long that no one alive knew anyone who was alive when they won it. We’re talking centuries of abject failure here.”
“So what?” Balla said.
“So the Cubs won the World Series two years ago,” Wilson said. He nodded to Coloma. “I made a joke to Captain Coloma here that I’ve been using that security clearance I have to check baseball box scores. Well, it’s not a lie, I do. I like having that connection back home. Yesterday when Tiege mentioned being a Cubs fan, I sent in a request for the Cubs’ season stats going back to when I left Earth. As a Cards fan, I wanted to rub his face in his team’s continued failure. But then I found out the Cubs had broken their streak.”
Balla looked at Wilson blankly.
“Two years ago the Cubs won a hundred and one games,” Wilson continued. “That’s the most games they’ve won in over a century. They only lost a single game in their entire playoff run, and swept the Cards—my team—in their divisional series. In game four of the World Series, some kid named Jorge Alamazar pitched the first perfect game in a World Series since the twentieth century.”
Balla looked over to her captain. “This isn’t my sport,” she said. “I don’t know what any of this means.”
“It means,” Wilson said, “that there’s no possible way a Cubs fan who has been on Earth anytime in the last two years would fail to tell any baseball fan that the Cubs won the series. And when I identified myself as a Cards fan, Tiege’s first reaction should have been to rub the Cubbies’ victory in my face. It’s simply impossible.”
“Maybe he’s not that big of a fan,” Balla said.
“If he’s from Chicago, it’s not something he would miss,” Wilson said. “And we talked enough about baseball last night that I’m pretty confident he’s not just a casual viewer of the sport. But I grant you could be right, and he’s either not enough of a fan or too polite to mention the Cubs ending a centuries-long drought. So I checked.”
“How did you do that?” Balla asked.
“I talked about the Cubs being the ultimate symbol of professional sports futility,” Wilson said. “I needled Tiege about it for about ten full minutes. He took it and admitted it was true. He doesn’t know the Cubs won the Series. He doesn’t know because the Colonial Union is still enforcing a news blackout from the Earth. He doesn’t know because either he’s a colonist bred and born or is former Colonial Defense Forces who retired and colonized.”
“What about the other people on his team?” Balla asked.
“I talked to them all and casually dropped questions about life on Earth,” Wilson said. “They’re all very nice people, just like Tiege is, but if any of them know anything about Earth anytime since about a decade ago, it got past me. None of them seemed to be able to name things that anyone from the United States or Canada should know, like names of sitting presidents or prime ministers, popular music or entertainment figures, or anything about big stories of the last year. A hurricane hit South Carolina last year and flattened most of Charleston. One of the women, Kelle Laflin, says she’s from Charleston but seems completely oblivious that the hurricane happened.”
“Then what’s going on?” Balla said.
“We’re asking the same question,” Coloma said. “We have a team from Earth here to buy this ship from the Colonial Union. But if they’re not from Earth, where are they from? And what do they intend with the ship?”
Balla turned to Wilson. “You shouldn’t have left them alone,” she said.
“I have a crew member watching the door,” Wilson said. “They’ll let me know if one or more of them try to slip away. I’m also tracking their PDAs, which so far, at least, they don’t seem to separate themselves from. So far none of them show the slightest inclination to sneak off.”
“What we’re trying to decide now is what Colonel Rigney knows about this,” Coloma said. “He’s the one we’ve been dealing with for this mission. It seems impossible to me he’s not behind this charade.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Wilson said. “The Colonial Defense Forces have a long history of inborn sneakiness. It’s one of