Arthur Clarke - The Stroke Of The Sun

It came just after half-time. The ball had been passed to one of our forwards; he ran about fifty feet with it, evaded a couple of the defenders with some neat footwork, and kicked it cleanly into the goal. It had scarcely dropped down from the net when that whistle blew again.

Now what? I wondered. He can’t disallow that .

But he did. The ball, it seemed, had been handled. IVe got pretty good eyes and I never saw it. So I cannot honestly say that I blame anyone for what happened next.

The police managed to keep the crowd off the field, though it was touch and go for a minute. The two teams drew apart, leaving the center of the pitch bare except for the stubbornly defiant figure of the referee. He was probably wondering how he could make his escape from the stadium, and was consoling himself with the thought that when this game was over, he could retire for good.

The thin, high bugle call took everyone completely by surprise— everyone, that is, except the fifty thousand well-trained men who had been waiting for it with mounting impatience. The whole arena became instantly silent, so silent that I could hear the noise of the traffic outside the stadium. A second time that bugle sounded — and all the vast acreage of faces opposite me vanished in a blinding sea of fire.

I cried out and covered my eyes; for one horrified moment, I thought of atomic bombs and braced myself uselessly for the blast. But there was no concussion — only that flickering veil of flame that beat even through my closed eyelids for long seconds, then vanished as swiftly as it had come when the bugle blared out for the third and last time.

Everything was just as it had been before, except for one minor item. Where the referee had been standing, there was a small, smoldering heap, from which a thin column of smoke curled up into the still air.

What in heaven’s name had happened?

I turned to my companion, who was as shaken as I was. “Madre de Dios,” I heard him mutter. “I never knew it would do that ”

He was staring, not at the small funeral down there on the field, but at the handsome souvenir program spread across his knees. And then, in a flash of incredulous comprehension, I understood.

SELDOM do we realize just how much energy there is in sunlight. IVe since looked it up, and the experts say that more than a horsepower hits every square yard of the Earth. Those fifty thousand well-trained fans with their tin-foil reflectors had intercepted most of the heat falling on one side of that enormous stadium — and aimed it all in one direction. Even allowing for the programs that weren’t tilted accurately, the late ref must have absorbed the heat of about a thousand electric fires. He couldn’t have felt much; it was as if he had been dropped into a blast furnace . . .

I doubt if even the ingenious Don Hernando realized exactly what would happen when he had talked his trusting friend, President Riaz, into lending him the necessary manpower. The well- drilled fans had been told that the ref would merely be dazzled out of action for the game. But I’m sure that no one had any regrets; they play football for keeps in Perivia.

Likewise politics. While the game was continuing to its now predictable end, beneath the benign gaze of a new and understandably docile referee, my friends were hard at work. When our victorious team had marched off the field (the final score was 14 — 2), everything had been settled. There had been practically no shooting, and as the President emerged from the stadium, he was politely informed that a seat had been reserved for him on the morning flight to Mexico City.

AS General Sierra remarked to me, when I boarded the same plane as his late chief, “We let the Army win the football match, and while it was busy, we won the country. So everybody’s happy.”

Though I was too polite to voice any doubts, I could not help thinking that this 'was a rather shortsighted attitude. Several million Panagurans were very unhappy indeed, and sooner or later there would be a day of reckoning.

I suspect that it’s not far away. Last week a friend of mine, who is one of the world’s top experts in our specialized field, indiscreetly blurted out one of his problems to me.

“Joe,” he said, “why the devil should anyone want me to build a guided missile that can fit inside a football?”

— ARTHUR C. CLARKE

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