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.It surprised me with another when I reread it recently, hence its inclusion here.The Rec FieldWe'd been on Repair Outpost 217-C for thirty-four months when Renzo got the idea to build a rec field.One of us should have thought of it long before that.Except for compu-disks, the only recreation we had was cards and chess and backgammon—indoor games that neither of us cared for much.The thing was, we'd both been raised on outdoor sports.Soccer was Renzo's game and baseball was mine; we would talk soccer and baseball for hours, the classic professional contests, the matchups we'd been involved in ourselves when we were kids back home.Funny how the mind works.All those hours of sports talk and it still took thirty-four months for one of us to suggest a rec field of our own.But then, I guess maybe we'd both blocked off the idea because of the conditions we were working under.Like 217-C itself.It was an uninhabited dwarf planet located just outside the Company's C-Sector shipping lanes, most of it igneous rock and volcanic ash, with here and there little clusters of trees and patches of bright green grass.Gravity was within 2.3 of Earth's, axis rotation was 21.40 Earth hours, but the atmosphere was low in oxygen; you could breathe it without a life-pac, only not if you were doing anything strenuous and not for more than a couple of hours at a time.And the weather was bad; hot and dank all the time, day and night, with a dense cloud cover always hanging low overhead that made even the daylight a dark gray.We never once saw the planet's sun nor either of its two tiny moons.Another thing was that we didn't have any equipment—balls, bats, things like that—and no way of getting any sent in.The Company refused to stock the drone supply ship that came from Sector Base every six months with what they called "frivolous material"; the compu-disks were the only concession they made.And we couldn't leave the outpost ourselves, because if we did we would forfeit all of our accumulated wages.We were aware of that when we signed on, of course; it was in the Company contract.They paid enormous salaries, but the catch was that you had to sign on for a full six years and they withheld all your credits until those six years were up.If any other human beings had come to 217-C we could have asked them to bring us the stuff we needed on a return trip.But in all our thirty-four months the only other man we'd laid eyes on was Dietrich, the Sector Chief, who came in every fifteen months or so on a routine inspection tour.Each of the freighters that were forced to veer in from the lanes for refueling or repairs was a drone, which were cheaper to operate than manned ships.If the Company could have figured a way to run outposts like this with Mechanicals instead of skilled mechanics, I suppose they would have done it.But they hadn't and so here we were — Renzo and me.We got along pretty well from the first, Renzo and me, but even two people with common interests—and we had plenty of them besides sports; that was why we'd been selected to work together as a team—can get on each other's nerves after a while.Particularly in a place like this, where there was no sunlight or moonlight and everything was colorless except for the trees and those beautiful patches of bright green grass.We might even have turned against each other if it hadn't been for the mind-psychs the Company performed on all of its employees.They said the mind-psychs were to keep you from thinking about women and sex and family ties back home, but they were also to keep you from fighting with your partner; they didn't tell you that because they didn't want you worrying about it going in.As it was, we'd stopped talking to each other for days at a time when Renzo came up with the idea for the rec field.Then all the friction disappeared and we were as close as we'd been in the early months.It was almost like being reborn.We went to work right away.The first thing we did was to draw up plans and then keep on redrafting them until we had the field laid out exactly the way we wanted it.It would be a hundred and fifty meters long and a hundred meters wide.It would be enclosed on three sides by a curving wooden fence three meters high; the fourth side would be four rows of spectators' seats, even though no spectators would ever sit in them, because we agreed the field should look as authentic as possible
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