The veterans, the old-time players, said something that had always stuck in my mind: “You whack a thousand moles, one time the mole whacks you back.”

I was in a dark room. Yes, and I began to remember how I had come to be there.

“I was the best,” he said, disembodied.
“You were good, not the best,” I said back.
“Bullshit.”

The video screen flashed on, a recording of the Whack-a-Mole championships from a few years back. It was him, in a sudden-death match for the championship. The camera showed him warming up outside the Mole Room, a look of total concentration on his face. He held his Bopper loosely in the first three fingers of his left hand: he was a southpaw.

Now the camera was showing the League Chairman, in his ridiculous Ringmaster costume, building tension before the match. He said a few things to get the crowd psyched up, but I couldn’t hear what they were, because there was no sound coming from the video screen. It didn’t matter, though; I knew what they were. When he was finished, the camera pulled back to show the whole Mole Room, Ringmaster standing on a platform above it, arms raised as though to hold back a flood.

You could see his lips move: “Whack… A… Mole!”

Then a strobe went off, and laser searchlights scissored in the background, delineated by smoke that poured out of the ceiling. The match began.

“Do you remember how loud they were cheering?”
“Yes.”

The video continued. He made me watch it until it was finished. Then the video cut to the award ceremony, where the Ringmaster gave out the gold cup. The Ringmaster was me.

“You gave the trophy to Texas Jack McGraw.”
“He beat you.”
“Liar! He cheated! It wasn’t fair!”
“You missed the last mole by a mile. It ended your career.”
“Don’t tell me what happened! I was there! There was no way I shouldn’t have whacked that mole! You saw me; I was flawless, my form was elegant, I had the pattern all figured out!”
“Pattern?”
“Yes! I knew where each mole would rise, and when. I could see it in my mind! I could see the whole field, like a three-dimensional chess board, electric lines of probability running perpendicular to each other, rising and falling as they intersected, distorting, converging, collapsing. In an instant I saw and whacked every mole that had ever existed, would ever exist until the universe thinned and froze.”
“Yet you lost.”

Because I could not see him, his scream seemed to come from everywhere.

The image on the screen diminished to a point. Now I was in a dark room again, so dark I couldn’t see the edges. At least now I knew who my kidnapper was, why he had brought me here. I still wanted to know what he would do with me. It occured to me that I should be afraid.

“As the creator of the Whack-a-Mole World League Tournament,” he said, after a time, “your opinion on such matters is regarded with favor.”

The darkness was beginning to be interrupted by forms. I could not say for certain yet that they were the things I suspected them to be, but they weren’t likely to be anything else.

“Some even say you could have been a master Whacksman yourself, but you never competed professionally. I wonder why that was? Was it because it wouldn’t have been fair to everyone else?”
“Don’t do this,” I begged.
“You and I know the secrets of the game. How deep it goes. We’ve looked at its dirty heart. If anyone could have rigged the championship, it was you. ”
“Please, no,” I said, as the contents of the room came into view.

Fifteen faces stared back at me. Mole faces. They were modeled after my original carvings. They could have been the originals, for all I knew. We looked at each other few moments as old friends and enemies, then slowly, they descended on hydraulic lifts. A hiss of air sealed them into the floor, and I was alone.

At my feet was a bopping club, one end huge and stuffed with foam, the other sleek and solid, the hilt of a sword to slay strange dragons. I picked it up, turned it over, checked its balance.

“You’ll find it meets League specifications. Everything here is on the up-and-up, just like you would have done. I want this to be fair.”
“What do you hope to accomplish, putting me here?”
“I want to see if you’re really better than me. I want to force you to admit that there is a pattern, and that you manipulated it to sabotage me. Failing that, I want you to die for creating a game that cannot be won.”
“There is no pattern, the moles operate in a random sequence. If it were a pattern, the game would be meaningless.”
“We shall see.”

I started to speak, and was cut off by my own voice blaring from the speakers: “Whack… A… Mole!”

Time had taken a step or two from me, because by the time I was moving the machine gun had already locked on to me and I had to dive behind one of the obstacles in order to avoid it. The mole’s eyes were lit up, and the barrel in its mouth flashed as it purged itself of twenty 7.62mm rounds in two and a half seconds. The eyes did not light up on my originals. It was a nice touch, I thought, stealing a peek from around the corner.

Then the mole descended and I heard the next one come up a few yards to my left. I rose into a run and caught it before it had found me, crushing it with the bopping stick before it could adjust itself. I did not have time to pause, as another rose behind me and I was forced into swinging blindly. I heard its circuits fizzle and knew that in some part of me the game still lived, lo these many years.

“Well-played, but do you really think you can stop them?”
“Shut up,” I said, between teeth.
“There are so many of them!”
“Shut up.”
“They’re getting into your garden!”
“Shut up!”
“They’re going to eat all your vegetables!”
“SHUT UP!”

The next mole was torn out of the ground by the force of my swing. The next two I took in succession, with a scything motion that was an imitation of the great mole-whacker Morris Watson, whose funeral I had spoken at the previous year. My heart was beating faster than it should have been, would have been.

Another rose at the far end of the room and I knew that I could not reach it in time, so I dove as I approached it and hid beneath it, in the shadow of its sensors, staring up at it as it sought blindly after me. I broke its head open without it ever knowing I was there.

“You’re still alive because there is a pattern. If there wasn’t you’d be dead already,” he said, sounding in a distant corner of his voice not uncertain, but perhaps anxious.

I took another mole, and was breathing heavily, when I heard the next one coming up from the other side of an obstacle. I had to leap the wall in order to get it, and when I came down my legs felt like they would buckle, but they held. In the years of my retirement I had never had so much as a twinge of romanticized affection for the thing I had created, which had once seemed so much like a child to me.

Somehow I killed five more, but by then I could barely stand, and the pounding of my own blood in my ears was ominous, like a church bell, ringing out the sound of my heart about to give up. I also could not breathe, nor hardly see, and my legs could not hold me up but drunkenly, swaying, until finally I fell to my knees and clutched the ground, as it to hold on to it. Trying to rise, I found I could not, and so did not try again.

“Well, that’s it, then,” he said, “In the end, he died alone, sprawled, the Ringmaster ringed by his creations; I wonder where the last mole will come from? North, south, east, west?”

A metallic clicking came from inside the earth, and I knew it was the mole coming up from his hole. I had hated the moles for half my life, but I knew then that hatred did no good. You could not keep them from your garden after all. No, no. Whack one, and another rises up, indomitable. Might as well strike at the mysteries of the sea, the orbit of the moon.

I did not forgive them, but I made my peace with them, with myself for creating them.

The sound was so loud that I knew the mole was near. I braced myself for the tearing and ripping I had seen happen to others, but never considered for myself.

Then I saw that the mole was coming up from the floor directly in front of me. Indeed, not two feet away. It was within reach, and as it rose, we were for an instant eye to eye, and I seemed to see something strange in its crudely carved features. It was the look that Giotto had imparted to Christ in his altar-pieces. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. Yes, I finally understood.

The bopping stick at the end of my arm made its eyes go dark. It was all I could do to lift a hand and kill this thing that did not defend itself, whose only defense was forgiveness.

“You knew! You knew where the last mole would come from! There was a pattern!”

The bopping stick fell slid from my hands and made a puffing sound as it hit the floor.