“A strange game,” admitted the official, “but it seems to me disappointingly uncomplicated. Do you really think you can make the contest last a full day?”
“I hope so.”
“Even two days perhaps?”
“With luck.”
“You’ll need it!” He was silent with thought a while, then shook his head doubtfully. “It’s a pity you didn’t think up something like a better and trickier version of alizik. The audience would have enjoyed it and you might have gained yourself a longer lease of life. Everyone would get a great kick out of it if you beat the record for delay before your execution.”
“Would they really?”
“They sort of expect something extra-special from an alien life form.”
“They’re getting it, aren’t they?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” He still seemed vaguely dissatisfied. “Oh, well, it’s your life and your struggle to keep it a bit longer.”
“I’ll have only myself to blame when the end comes.” “True. Play will commence promptly at midday tomorrow. After that, it’s up to you.”
He lumbered away, his heavy footsteps dying along the corridor. A few minutes later the warder appeared. “What did you pick?”
“Arky-malarkey.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“A Terran game.”
“That’s fine, real fine.” He rubbed appreciative hands together. “He approved it, I suppose?”
“Yes, he did.”
“So you’re all set to justify your continued existence. You’ll have to take care to avoid the trap.”
“What trap?” Taylor asked.
“Your partner will play to win as quickly and conclusively as possible. That is expected of him. But once he gets it into his head that he can’t win, he’ll start playing to lose. You’ve no way of telling exactly when he’ll change his tactics. Many a one has been caught out by the sudden switch and found the game finished before he had time to realize it.”
“But he must keep to the rules, mustn’t he?”
“Certainly. Neither you nor he will be allowed to ignore them. Otherwise the game would become a farce.”
“That suits me.”
Somewhere outside sounded a high screech like that of a bobcat backing into a cactus. It was followed by a scuffle of feet, a dull thud and dragging noises. A distant door creaked open and banged shut.
“What goes?” said Taylor.
“Lagartine’s game must have ended.”
“Who’s Lagartine?”
“A political assassin.” The warder glanced at his watch. “He chose ramsid, a card game. It has lasted a mere four hours. Serves him right. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“And now they’re giving him the big squeeze?”
“Of course.” Eying him, the warder said, “Nervous?”
“Ha-ha,” said Taylor without mirth.
The performance did not commence in his cell as he had expected. A contest involving an alien life form playing an alien game was too big an event for that. They took him through the prison corridors to a large room in which stood a table with three chairs. Six more chairs formed a line against the wall, each occupied by a uniformed plug-ugly complete with hand gun. This was the knock-down-and-drag-out squad ready for action the moment the game terminated.
At one end stood a big, black cabinet with two rectangular portholes through which gleamed a pair of lenses. From it came faint ticking sounds and muffled voices. This presumably contained the video camera.
Taking a chair at the table, Taylor sat down and gave the armed audience a frozen stare. A thin-faced individual with the beady eyes of a rat took the chair opposite. The potbellied official dumped himself in the remaining seat. Taylor and Rat-eyes weighed each other up, the former with cold assurance, the latter with sadistic speculation.
Upon the table stood a board from which arose three long wooden pegs. The left-hand peg held a column of sixty-four disks evenly graduated in diameter, the largest at the bottom, smallest at the top. The effect was that of a tapering tower built from a nursery do-it-yourself kit.
Wasting no time, Potbelly said, “This is the Terran game of Arky-malarkey. The column of disks must be transferred from the peg on which it sits to either of the other two pegs. They must remain graduated in the same order, smallest at the top, biggest at the bottom. The player whose move completes the stack is the winner. Do you both understand?”
“Yes,” said Taylor.
Rat-eyes assented with a grunt.
“There are three rules,” continued Potbelly, “which will be strictly observed. You will make your moves alternately, turn and turn about. You may move only one disk at a time. You may not place a disk upon any other smaller than itself. Do you both understand?”
“Yes,” said Taylor.
Rat-eyes gave another grunt.
From his pocket Potbelly took a tiny white ball and carelessly tossed it onto the table. It bounced a couple of times, rolled across and fell off on Rat-eyes’ side.
“You start,” he said.
Without hesitation Rat-eyes took the smallest disk from the top of the first peg and placed it on the third.
“Bad move,” thought Taylor, blank of face. He shifted the second smallest desk from the first peg to the second.
Smirking for no obvious reason, Rat-eyes now removed the smallest disk from the third peg, placed it on top of Taylor’s disk on the second. Taylor promptly switched another disk from the pile on the first peg to the empty third peg.
After an hour of this it had become plain to Rat-eyes that the first peg was not there merely to hold the stock. It had to be used. The smirk faded from his face, was replaced by mounting annoyance as hours crawled by and the situation became progressively more complicated.
By bedtime they were still at it, swapping disks around like crazy, and neither had got very far. Rat-eyes now hated the sight of the first peg, especially when he was forced to put a disk back on it instead of taking one off it. Potbelly, still wearing his fixed, meaningless smile, announced that play would cease until sunrise tomorrow.
The next day provided a long, arduous session lasting from dawn to dark and broken only by two meals. Both players worked fast and hard, setting the pace for each other and seeming to vie with one another in effort to reach a swift conclusion. No onlooker could find cause to complain about the slowness of the game. Four times Rat-eyes mistakenly tried to place a disk on top of a smaller one and was promptly called to order by the referee in the obese shape of Potbelly.
A third, fourth, fifth and sixth day went by. Rat-eyes now played with a mixture of dark suspicion and desperation while the column on the first peg appeared to go up as often as it went down. Though afflicted by his emotions he was no fool. He knew quite well that they were making progress in the task of transferring the column. But it was progress at an appalling rate. What’s more, it became worse as time went on. Finally he could see no way of losing the game, much less winning it.
By the fourteenth day Rat-eyes had reduced himself to an automation wearily moving disks to and fro in the soulless, disinterested manner of one compelled to perform a horrid chore. Taylor remained as impassive as a bronze Buddha and that fact didn’t please Rat-eyes either.
Danger neared on the sixteenth day though Taylor did not know it The moment he entered the room he sensed an atmosphere of heightened interest and excitement. Rat-eyes looked extra glum. Potbelly had taken on added importance. Even the stolid, dull-witted guards displayed faint signs of mental animation. Four off-duty warders joined the audience. There was more activity than usual within the video cabinet.
Ignoring all this, Taylor took his seat and play continued. This endless moving of disks from peg to peg was a lousy way to waste one’s life but the strangling-post was lousier. He had every inducement to carry on. Naturally he did so, shifting a disk when his turn came and watching his opponent with his pale gray eyes.
In the midafternoon Rat-eyes suddenly left
the table, went to the wall, kicked it good and hard and shouted a remark about the amazing similarity between Terrans and farmyard manure. Then he returned and made his next move. There was some stirring within the video cabinet. Potbelly mildly reproved him for taking time off to advertise his patriotism. Rat-eyes went on playing with the surly air of a delinquent whose mother has forgotten to kiss him.
Late in the evening, Potbelly stopped the game, faced the video lenses and said in portentious manner, “Play will resume tomorrow—the seventeenth day!”
He voiced it as though it meant something or other.
When the warder shoved his breakfast through the grille in the morning, Taylor said, “Late, aren’t you? I should be at play by now.”
“They say you won’t be wanted before this afternoon.”
“That so? What’s all the fuss about?”
“You broke the record yesterday,” informed the other with reluctant admiration. “Nobody has ever lasted to the seventeenth day.”
“So they’re giving me a morning off to celebrate, eh? Charitable of them.”
“I’ve no idea why there’s a delay,” said the warder. “I’ve never known them to interrupt a game before.”
“You think they’ll stop it altogether?” Taylor asked, feeling a constriction around his neck. You think they’ll officially declare it finished?”
“Oh, no, they couldn’t do that.” He looked horrified at the thought of it. “We mustn’t bring the curse of the dead upon us. It’s absolutely essential that condemned people should be made to choose their own time of execution.”
“Why is it?”
“Because it always has been since that start of time.” He wandered off to deliver other breakfasts, leaving Taylor to stew the explanation. “Because it always has been.” It wasn’t a bad reason. Indeed, some would consider it a good one. He could think of several pointless, illogical things done on Terra solely because they always had been done. In this matter of unchallenged habit the Gombarians were no better or worse than his own kind.
Though a little soothed by the warder’s remarks he couldn’t help feeling more and more uneasy as the morning wore on without anything happening. After sixteen days of moving disks from peg to peg, it had got so that he was doing it in his sleep. Didn’t seem right that he should be enjoying a spell of aimless loafing around his cell. There was something ominous about it.
Again and again he found himself nursing the strong suspicion that officialdom was seeking an effective way of ending the play without appearing to flout convention. When they found it—if they found it—they’d pull a fast one on him, declare the game finished, take him away and fix him up with a very tight necktie.
He was still wallowing in pessimism when the call came in the afternoon. They hustled him along to the same room as before. Play was resumed as if it had never been interrupted. It lasted a mere thirty minutes. Somebody tapped twice on the inside of the video cabinet and Potbelly responded by calling a halt Taylor went back to his cell and sat there baffled.
Late in the evening he was summoned again. He went with bad grace because these short and sudden performances were more wearing on the nerves than continual day-long ones. Previously he had known for certain that he was being taken to play Arky-malarkey with Rat-eyes. Now he could never be sure that he was not about to become the lead character in a literally breathless scene.
On entering the room he realized at once that things were going to be different this time. The board with its pegs and disks still stood in the center of the table. But Rat-eyes was absent and so was the armed squad. Three people awaited him: Potbelly, Palamin, and a squat, heavily built character who had the peculiar air of being of this world but not with it.
Potbelly was wearing the offended frown of someone burdened with a load of stock in a nonexistent oil well. Palamin looked singularly unpleased and expressed it by snorting like an impatient horse. The third appeared to be contemplating a phenomenon on the other side of the galaxy.
“Sit,” ordered Palamin, spitting it out Taylor sat.
“Now, Mamikot, you tell him.”
The squat one showed belated awareness of being on Gombar, said pedantically to Taylor, “I rarely look at the video. It is suitable only for the masses with nothing better to do.”
“Get to the point,” urged Palamin.
“But having heard that you were about to break an ages-old record,” continued Mamikot, undisturbed, “I watched the video last night.” He made a brief gesture to show that he could identify a foul smell at first sniff. “It was immediately obvious to me that to finish your game would require a minimum number of moves of the order of two to the sixty-fourth power minus one.” He took flight into momentary dreamland, came bade and added mildly, “That is a large number.”
“Large!” said Palamin. He let go a snort that rocked the pegs.
“Let us suppose,” Mamikot went on, “that you were to transfer these disks one at a time as fast as you could go, morning, noon and night without pause for meals or sleep, do you know how long it would take to complete the game?”
“Nearly six billion Terran centuries,” said Taylor as if talking about next Thursday week.
“I have no knowledge of Terran time-terms. But I can tell you that neither you nor a thousand generations of your successors could live long enough to see the end of it. Correct?”
“Correct,” Taylor admitted.
“Yet you say that this is a Terran game?”
“I do.”
Mamikot spread hands helplessly to show that as far as he was concerned there was nothing more to be said.
Wearing a forbidding scowl, Palamin now took over. “A game cannot be defined as a genuine one unless it is actually played. Do you claim that this so-called game really is played on Terra?”
“Yes.”
“By whom?”
“By priests in the Temple of Benares.”
“And how long have they been playing it?” he asked. “About two thousand years.”
“Generation after generation?”
“That’s right.”
“Each player contributing to the end of his days without hope of seeing the result?”
“Yes.”
Palamin fumed a bit. “Then why do they play it?”
“It’s part of their religious faith. They believe that the moment the last disk is placed the entire universe will go bang.”
“Are they crazy?”
“No more so than people who have played alizik for equally as long and to just as little purpose.”
“We have played alizik as a series of separate games and not as one never-ending game. A rigmarole without possible end cannot be called a game by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Arky-malarkey is not endless. It has a conclusive finish.” Taylor appealed to Mamikot as the indisputed authority. “Hasn’t it?”
“It is definitely finite,” pronounced Mamikot, unable to deny the fact.
“So!” exclaimed Palamin, going a note higher. “You think you are very clever, don’t you?”
“I get by,” said Taylor, seriously doubting it.
“But we are cleverer,” insisted Palamin, using his nastiest manner. “You have tricked us and now we shall trick you. The game is finite. It can be concluded. Therefore it will continue until it reaches its natural end.
You will go on playing it days, weeks, months, years until eventually you expire of old age and chronic frustration. There will be times when the very sight of these disks will drive you crazy and you will beg for merciful death. But we shall not grant that favor—and you will continue to play. He waved a hand in triumphant dismissal. “Take him away.”
Taylor returned to his cell.
When supper came the warder offered, “I am told that play will go on regularly as from tomorrow morning. I don’t understand why they messed it up today.”
“They’ve decided that I’m to suffer fate worse than death,” Taylor informed.
&nb
sp; The warder stared at him.
“I have been very naughty,” said Taylor.
Rat-eyes evidently had been advised of the new setup because he donned the armor of philosophical acceptance and played steadily but without interest. All the same, long sessions of repetitive motions ate corrosively into the armor and gradually found its way through.
In the early afternoon of the fifty-second day, Rat-eyes found himself faced with the prospect of returning most of the disks to the first peg, one by one. He took off the clompers he used for boots. Then he ran barefooted four times around the room, bleating like a sheep. Potbelly got a crick in the neck watching him. Two guards led Rat-eyes away still bleating. They forgot to take his clompers with them.
By the table Taylor sat gazing at the disks while he strove to suppress his inward alarm. What would happen now? If Rat-eyes had given up for keeps it could be argued that he had lost, the game had concluded and the time had come to play okey-chokey with a piece of cord. It could be said with equal truth that an unfinished game remains an unfinished game even though one of the players is in a mental home giving his hair a molasses shampoo.
If the authorities took the former view, his only defense was to assert the latter one. He’d have to maintain with all the energy at his command that, since he had not won or lost, his time could not possibly have come. It wouldn’t be easy if he had to make his protest while being dragged by the heels to his doom. His chief hope lay in Gombarian unwillingness to outrage an ancient convention. Millions of video viewers would take a poor look at officialdom mauling a pet superstition. Yes, man, there were times when the Idiot’s Lantern had its uses.
He need not have worried. Having decided that to keep the game going would be a highly refined form of hell, the Gombarians had already prepared a roster of relief players drawn from the ranks of minor offenders whose ambitions never rose high enough to earn a strangling. So after a short time another opponent appeared.
The newcomer was a shifty character with a long face and hanging dewlaps. He resembled an especially dopey bloodhound and looked barely capable of articulating three words, to wit, “Ain’t talking, copper.” It must have taken at least a month to teach him that he must move only one disk at a time and never, never, never place it upon a smaller one. But somehow he had learned. The game went on.
13 Above the Night Page 14