The machine was built to play chess, thought Lame Hans. Long ago, and they were warlocks in those days. Could it be that Gretchen, in kicking about . . . ?
Some motion in the sky made him raise his eyes, looking above the board and over the top of the machine itself. An artillery observation balloon (gray-black, a German balloon then) was outlined against the blue sky. He thought of himself sitting in a dingy little shop full of tobacco all day long, and no one to play chess with—no one he could not checkmate easily.
He moved a pawn, and the black bishop slipped out of the king’s row to tighten the net.
If he won, they would have to pay him. Heitzmann would think everything had gone according to plan, and Professor Baumeister, surely, would hire no assassins. Lame Hans launched his counterattack: the real attack at the left side of the board, with a false one down the center. Professor Baumeister came to stand beside him, and Dr. Eckardt warned him not to distract the player. There had been seven more than fourteen moves—and there was a trap behind the trap.
Lame Hans took the black queen’s knight and lost a pawn. He was sweating in the heat, wiping his brow with his sleeve between moves.
A black rook, squat in its iron sandbags, advanced three squares, and he heard the crowd cheer. “That is mate, Herr Zimmer,” Dr. Eckardt announced. Lame Hans saw the look of relief on Professor Baumeister’s face, and knew that his own was blank. Then over the cheering someone shouted: “Cheat! Cheat!” Gray-black pillbox police caps were forcing their way through the hats and parasols of the spectators.
“There is a man in there! There is someone inside!” It was too clear and too loud—a showman’s voice. A tall stranger was standing on the topmost bench waving Heitzmann’s sweat-stained velvet hat.
A policeman asked, “The machine opens, does it not, Herr Professor? Open it quickly before there is a riot.”
Professor Baumeister said, “I don’t know how.”
“It looks simple enough,” declared the other policeman, and he began to unfasten the catches, wrapping his hand in his handkerchief to protect it from the heat of the brass.
“Wait!” ordered Professor Baumeister, but neither one waited; the first policeman went to the aid of the other, and together they lifted away one side of the machine and let it fall against the railing. The movable circuit card had not been allowed to swing back into place, and Gretchen’s plump, naked legs protruded from the cavity beneath the chessboard. The first policeman seized them by the ankles and pulled her out until her half-open eyes stared at the bright sky.
Dr. Eckhardt bent over her and flexed her left arm at the elbow. “Rigor is beginning,” he said. “She died of the heat, undoubtedly.”
Lame Hans threw himself on her body weeping.
Such is the story of Lame Hans. The captain of police, in his kindness, has permitted me to push the machine to a position which permits Hans to reach the board through the bars of his cell, and he plays chess there all day long, moving first his own white pieces and then the black ones of the machine, and always losing. Sometimes when he is not quick enough to move the black queen, I see her begin to rock and to slide herself, and the dials and the console lights to glow with impatience, and then Hans must reach out and take her to her new position at once. Do you not think that this is sad for Lame Hans? I have heard that many who have been twisted by the old wars have these psychokinetic abilities without knowing it; and Professor Baumeister, who is in the cell next to his, says that someday a technology may be founded on them.
Most games do not inspire the human imagination. A few—a very few—do. Or so it seems to me. There may be a good football story, but I have never come across it. My guess is that there are some good cricket stories, but I couldn’t name even one. Ditto for soccer stories. But baseball! We could start with Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings, then go down a whole list of Ring Lardner short stories—see his collection You Know Me Al. I’ve even committed a baseball story myself, “The On-Deck Circle.”
Chess is like that. Can anybody name a checkers story? I can’t. Monopoly? Dominoes? But chess! Through the Looking-Glass alone would make my point; and there’s Rex Stout’s chess mystery, Gambit, and a whole host of short stories, including this one. One of these days I want to write a chess story that returns chess to its origin, a story in which the rooks are war elephants, the knights chariots, the bishops cavalry, the queens viziers commanding elite corps, and the kings rajas with their bodyguards. If you don’t play chess, you should learn; and then, perhaps, you will see the tall swordsmen we call pawns, nearly naked behind their big rhinoceros-hide shields, see the chariots charging—then wheeling like a flock of birds to rain javelins and arrows upon the enemy’s line.
Hear those trumpetings? No metal horn ever voiced such music. Hear the thunder of their feet? Tigers cower before these soldiers. Their faces are painted a score of colors and their tusks made longer and sharper by steel blades; each bears a painted wooden castle manned by half a dozen archers.
No wonder there are so many chess stories!
Straw
Yes, I remember killing my first man very well; I was just seventeen. A flock of snow geese flew under us that day about noon. I remember looking over the side of the basket and seeing them, and thinking that they looked like a pike head. That was an omen, of course, but I did not pay any attention.
It was clear, fall weather—a trifle chilly. I remember that. It must have been about the midpart of October. Good weather for the balloon. Clow would reach up every quarter hour or so with a few double handfuls of straw for the brazier, and that was all it required. We cruised, usually, at about twice the height of a steeple.
You have never been in one? Well, that shows how things have changed. Before the Fire-wights came, there was hardly any fighting at all, and free swords had to travel all over the continent looking for what there was. A balloon was better than walking, believe me. Miles—he was our captain in those days—said that where there were three soldiers together, one was certain to put a shaft through a balloon; it was too big a target to resist, and that would show you where the armies were.
No, we would not have been killed. You would have had to slit the thing wide open before it would fall fast, and a little hole like the business end of a pike would make would just barely let you know it was there. The baskets do not swing either, as people think. Why should they? They feel no wind—they are traveling with it. A man just seems to hang there, when he is up in one of them, and the world turns under him. He can hear everything—pigs and chickens, and the squeak the windlass makes drawing water from a well.
“Good flying weather,” Clow said to me.
I nodded. Solemnly, I suppose.
“All the lift you want, in weather like this. The colder it is, the better she pulls. The heat from the fire doesn’t like the chill, and tries to escape from it. That’s what they say.”
Blond Bracata spit over the side. “Nothing in our bellies,” she said, “that’s what makes it lift. If we don’t eat today you won’t have to light the fire tomorrow—I’ll take us up myself.”
She was taller than any of us except Miles, and the heaviest of us all, but Miles would not allow for size when the food was passed out, so I suppose she was the hungriest too.
Derek said, “We should have stretched one of that last bunch over the fire. That would have fetched a pot of stew, at the least.”
Miles shook his head. “There were too many.”