We started my training, and it became more or less of an Earth-wide secret that the scientists were fixing me up with some secret weapons which would guarantee the victory. Most of the sportswriters who came to the training camp were tight lipped and disapproving about it--not quite playing the game, you know--but the governmental big shots who were trembling in their boots over the Centaurian threat, made it clear that anything was going to go to insure Solar System victory. So the reporters didn't print the stories they might have. Except for Suzi. Evidently the word got back to her about the weapons I was learning to use, and she let loose at me in her column. Nothing that the Centaurians would understand, of course, but the digs were there. She made it pretty clear that Jak Dempsi was a phony and that only with the use of unsportsmanlike weapons would he consent to go into the arena at all. She had some nasty comebacks, because sentiment was running pretty high throughout the League planets, and anybody saying a word against the Champ was apt to find himself mobbed. They were frightened, understand? The whole Solar System was frightened, and they couldn't bear the thought that I was less than their saviour. But Suzi kept it up. She was the only sports reporter in the system who dared point out what they were all probably feeling. The great trouble in the training was that we hadn't the vaguest idea of what the Centaurians looked like. Their tremendous ship, several times the size of the greatest of ours, hovered motionlessly over Krishna-Krishna, the Venusian capitol city, but thus far not one of them had been spotted. They communicated with us, blank-screened, and we had nothing to go on to decide whether or not they were humanoid, or even if they were air breathers, although the latter would seem likely if they wished to colonize the Solar System since all our life forms are based on oxygen. The only thing was to provide me with several weapons, one each for the various different types of creature our Centaurians might be. In fact, it was only by dint of argument that I was allowed to take my short sword with me into the arena when the day finally arrived. The managers who'd had my training in hand wanted to use the space and weight the sword would take up to carry another half dozen atomic grenades. I growled at them. "Listen, if these grenades are going to work--and how the _kert_ they could possibly fail to work, I don't know--_one_ of them will do the job. I'll take my sword along if only for a good luck charm; I've never been in an arena without it yet." And I added sarcastically, "This is going to be some fight, this is. I feel like a murderer." I kept the sword. * * * * *