by Gene Wolfe
“Agreed!” Hitler said immediately. “But you have made all the rules. Now we Germans will make a rule. Driving is on the right.”
“Here in Britain,” Churchill said, “we drive on the left. Surely you know that.”
“My Germans drive on the right and would be at a disadvantage driving on the left.”
“Actually,” Churchill said slowly, “I had given that some consideration before I spoke. Here is what I propose. One side of the course must, for versimilitude, be lined with shops and parked lorries and charabancs. Let the other remain unencumbered for spectators. Your Germans, driving on the right, will go clockwise around the track, while the British drivers, on the left—”
“Go the other direction,” Hitler exclaimed. “And in the middle—ZERSTOREND GEWALT!”
“Traffic jam,” Churchill interpreted coolly. “You are not afraid?”
The date was soon set—precisely a fortnight from the day upon which the challenge was given and accepted. The Japanese consented to supply the traffic with their drone cars, and the exposition officials to cooperate in setting up an artificial street on the course surrounding the grounds. I need not say that excitement was intense; an American firm, Movietone News, sent not less than three crews to film the race, and there were several British newsreel companies as well. On the appointed day excitement was at a fever pitch and it was estimated that more than three million pounds were laid with the bookmakers, who were giving three to two on the Germans.
Since the regulations (written, largely, by Mr. Churchill) governing the race and the operation of the unmanned Japanese cars were of importance, and will, in any event, be of interest to those concerned with logical games, allow me to give them in summary before proceeding further. It was explained to the Japanese operators that their task would be to simulate actual traffic. Ten radio-controlled cars were assigned (initially) to the “suburban” half of the course (the start for the Germans, the home stretch for the British team), while fifty were to operate in the “urban” section. Eighty parking positions were distributed at random along the track, and the operators—who could see the entire course from a vantage point on one of the observation decks of the dirigible tower—were instructed to park their cars in these for fifteen seconds, then move onto the course once more and proceed to the nearest unoccupied position according to the following formula: if a parking space were in the urban sector it was to be assigned a “distance value” equal to its actual distance from the operator’s machine, as determined by counting the green “distance lines” with which the course was striped at five-yard intervals—but if a parking position were in the suburban section of the track, its distance value was to be the counted distance plus two. Thus the “traffic” was biased—if I may use the expression—toward the urban sector. The participating German and English drivers, unlike the Japanese, were required to park in every position along the route, but could leave each as soon as they had entered it. The spaces between positions were filled with immobile vehicles loaned for the occasion by dealers and the public, and a number of London concerns had erected mock buildings similar to stage flats along the parking side of the course.
I am afraid I must tell you that I did not scruple to make use of my slight acquaintance with Mr. Churchill to gain admission to the paddock (as it were) on the day of the race. It was a brilliant day, one of those fine early spring days of which the west of England justly boasts, and I was feeling remarkably fit, and pleased with myself as well. The truth is that my game with Lansbury was going very satisfactorily indeed; putting into operation the suggestions I had received from Herr Goering I had overrun one of Lansbury’s most powerful domains (France) in just four moves, and I felt that only stubbornness was preventing him from conceding the match. It will be understood then that when I beheld Mr. Churchill hurrying in my direction, his cigar clamped between his teeth and his old Homburg pulled almost about his ears, I gave him a broad smile.
He pulled up short, and said: “You’re Goering’s friend, aren’t you—I see you’ve heard about our drivers.”
I told him that I had heard nothing.
“I brought five drivers with me—racing chaps who had volunteered. But the Jerries have protested them. They said their own drivers were going to have to be Sturmsachbearbeiters and it wasn’t sporting of us to run professionals against them; the exposition committee has sided with them, and now I’m going to have to get up a scratch team to drive for England, and those blasted SS are nearly professional caliber. I’ve got three men but I’m still one short even if I drive myself …”
For a moment we looked at one another; then I said: “I have never raced, but my friends all tell me I drive too fast, and I have survived a number of accidents; I hope you don’t think my acquaintance with Herr Goering would tempt me to abandon fair play if I were enlisted for Britain.”
“Of course not.” Churchill puffed out his cheeks. “So you drive, do you? May I ask what marque?”
I told him I owned a Centurion, the model the British team would field; something in the way he looked at me and drew on his cigar told me that he knew I was lying—and that he approved.
I wish that my stumbling pen could do justice to the race itself, but it cannot. With four others—one of whom was Mr. Churchill—I waited with throbbing engine at the British starting line. Behind us, their backs toward us, were the five German Sturmsachbearbeiters in their “People’s Cars.” Ahead of us stretched a weirdly accurate imitation of a London street, in which the miniature Japanese cars already dodged back and forth in increasing disorder.
The starting gun sounded and every car shot forward; as I jockeyed my little vehicle into its first park I was acutely aware that the Germans, having entered at the suburban end of the course, would be making two or three positions to our one. Fenders crumpled and tempers flared, and I—all of us—drove and parked, drove and parked, until it seemed that we had been doing it forever. Sweat had long since wilted my shirt collar, and I could feel the blisters growing on my hands; then I saw, about thirty yards in front of me, a tree in a tub—and a flat painted to resemble, not a city shop, but a suburban villa. It dawned on me then—it was as though I had been handed a glass of cold champagne—that we had not yet met the Germans. We had not yet met them, and the demarcation was just ahead, the halfway point. I knew then that we had won.
Of the rest of the race, what is there to say? We were two hundred yards into the suburban sector before we saw the slanted muzzle of the first “People’s Car.” My own car finished dead last—among the British team—but fifth in the race when the field was taken as a whole, which is only to say that the British entries ran away with everything. We were lionized (even I); and when Reichschancellor Hitler himself ran out onto the course to berate one of his drivers and was knocked off his feet by a Japanese toy, there was simply no hope for the German “People’s Car” in the English-speaking world. Individuals who had already taken dealerships filed suits to have their money returned, and the first ships carrying “People’s Cars” to reach London (Hitler had ordered them to sail well in advance of the race, hoping to exploit the success he expected with such confidence) simply never unloaded. (I understand their cargo was later sold cheaply in Morocco.)
All this, I realize, is already well known to the public; but I believe I am in a position to add a postscript which will be of special interest to those whose hobby is games.
I had, as I have mentioned, explained the game Lansbury and I had developed to Mr. Churchill while we were waiting for the demonstrations of the “People’s Car” to begin, and had even promised to show him how we played if he cared to come to my rooms; and come he did, though it was several weeks after the race. I showed him our board (the map shellacked over) and regretted that I could not also show him a game in progress, explaining that we had just completed our first, which (because we counted the Great War as one) we called World War Two.
“I take it you were victorious,” he said.
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sp; “No, I lost—but since I was Germany that won’t discomfort you, and anyway I would rather have won that race against the real Germans than all the games Lansbury and I may ever play.”
“Yes,” he said.
Something in his smile raised my suspicions; I remembered having seen a similar expression on Lansbury’s face (which I really only noticed afterward) when he persuaded me that he intended to make his invasion of Europe by way of Greece; and at last I blurted out: “Was that race really fair? I mean to say—we did surprisingly well.”
“Even you,” Churchill remarked, “beat the best of the German drivers.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what bothers me.”
He seated himself in my most comfortable armchair and lit a fresh cigar. “The idea struck me,” he said, “when that devilish Japanese machine came scooting out while I was talking to Hitler. Do you remember that?”
“Certainly. You mean the idea of using the Japanese cars as traffic?”
“Not only that. A recent invention, the transistor, makes those things possible. Are you by any chance familiar with the operating principle of the transistor?”
I said that I had read that in its simplest form it was merely a small chip or flake of material which was conductive in one direction only.
“Precisely so.” Churchill puffed his cigar. “Which is only to say that electrons can move through the stuff more readily in one direction than in another. Doesn’t that seem remarkable? Do you know how it is done?”
I admitted that I did not.
“Well, neither did I before I read an article in Nature about it, a week or two before I met Herr Hitler. What the sharp lads who make these things do is to take a material called germanium—or silicon will do as well, though the transistor ends up acting somewhat differently—in a very pure state, and then add some impurities to it. They are very careful about what they put in, of course. For example, if they add a little bit of antimony the stuff they get has more electrons in it than there are places for them to go, so that some are wandering about loose all the time. Then there’s other kinds of rubbish—boron is one of them—that makes the material have more spots for electrons than electrons to occupy them. The experts call the spots “holes,” but I would call them “parking places,” and the way you make your transistor is to put the two sorts of stuff up against each other.”
“Do you mean that our track …”
Churchill nodded. “Barring a little terminological inexactitude, yes I do. It was a large transistor—primitive, if you like, but big. Take a real transistor now. What happens at the junction point where the two sorts of material come together? Well, a lot of electrons from the side that has them move over into the side that doesn’t—there’s so much more space there for them, you see.”
“You mean that if a car—I mean an electron—tries to go the other way, from the side where there are a great many parking places—”
“It has a difficult time. Don’t ask me why, I’m not an electrical engineer, but some aspects of the thing can’t be missed by anyone, even a simple political journalist like myself. One is that the electron you just mentioned is swimming upstream, as it were.”
“And we were driving downstream,” I said. “That is, if you don’t mind my no longer talking about electrons.”
“Not at all. I pass with relief from the tossing sea of cause and theory to the firm ground of result and fact. Yes, we were driving with the current, so to speak; perhaps it has also occurred to you that our coming in at the urban end, where most of the Japanese cars were, set up a wave that went ahead of us; we were taking up the spaces, and so they were drawn toward the Germans when they tried to find some, and of course a wave of that sort travels much faster than the individuals in it. I suppose a transistor expert would say that by having like charges we repelled them.”
“But eventually they would pile up between the teams—I remember that the traffic did get awfully thick just about when we passed through the Germans.”
“Correct. And when that happened there was no further reason for them to keep running ahead of us—the Jerries were repelling them too by then, if you want to put it that way—and then the rules (my famous distance formula, if you recall) pulled them back into the urban area, where the poor Huns had to struggle with them some more while we breezed home.”
We sat silent for a time; then I said, “I don’t suppose it was particularly honest; but I’m glad you did it.”
“Dishonesty,” Churchill said easily, “consists in violating rules to which one has—at least by implication—agreed. I simply proposed rules I felt would be advantageous, which is diplomacy. Don’t you do that when you set up your game?” He looked down at the world map on the table. “By the way, you’ve burnt your board.”
“Oh, there,” I said. “Some coals fell from Lansbury’s pipe toward the end of the game—they cost us a pair of cities in south Japan, I’m afraid.”
“You’d better be careful you don’t burn up the whole board next time. But speaking of the Japanese, have you heard that they are bringing out an automobile of their own? They received so much attention in the press in connection with the race that they’re giving it a name the public will associate with the toy motorcars they had here.”
I asked if he thought that that would mean Britain would have to beat off a Japanese invasion eventually, and he said that he supposed it did, but that we Americans would have to deal with them first—he had heard that the first Japanese-made cars were already being unloaded in Pearl Harbor. He left shortly after that, and I doubt that I will ever have the pleasure of his company again, much though I should like it.
But my story is not yet finished. Readers of this magazine will be glad to learn that Lansbury and I are about to begin another game, necessarily to be prosecuted by mail, since I will soon be leaving England. In our new struggle, the United States, Britain, and China will oppose the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Poland, Romania, and a number of other Eastern European states. Since Germany should have a part in any proper war, and Lansbury would not agree to my having her again, we have divided her between us. I shall try to keep Mr. Churchill’s warning in mind, but my opponent and I are both heavy smokers.
Sincerely,
“Unknown Soldier”
EDITOR’S NOTE. While we have no desire to tear aside the veil of the nom de guerre with which “Unknown Soldier” concluded his agreeable communication, we feel we are yet keeping faith when we disclose that he is an American officer, of Germanic descent, no longer young (quite) and yet too young to have seen action in the Great War, though we are told he came very near. At present “Unknown Soldier” is attached to the American Embassy in London, but we understand that, as he feels it unlikely his country will ever again have need of military force within his lifetime, he intends to give up his commission and return to his native Kansas, where he will operate an agency for Buick motorcars. Best of luck, Dwight.
FATHER’S DAY
The Adopted Father
John Parker’s hands gripped the edge of the counter. “Do you mean,” he said, “that although I paid for the deliveries, I can’t see the records?”
“I mean,” the nurse in the screen answered carefully, “that there are no more records, Mr. Parker. We have already given you copies of all those we have. Our records show the names, dates, and times of birth of your three children, their medical history here, and the medical history of Ms. Roberts. That is all we have.”
“There must be more,” John Parker said. To either side of him, women stood arguing with similar nurses in similar screens.
“There is no more, Mr. Parker. You have seen what we have. Ms. Roberts has been here three times. Your children were named—by her—Robert, Marian, and Tina. There were no complications. Ms. Roberts’s confinements were paid for by the North American Division of World Assurance—not by you, as you appear to believe.”
“You must fingerprint them,” John Parker said. “For the poli
ce, if for no other reason. Or footprints. Don’t you take footprints?”
“No, Mr. Parker,” the nurse said. “That hasn’t been done for many years. At birth the infant remains with its mother until its wrist has been banded. The band cannot be removed. There is no possibility of an exchange.”
“Is there some way I can talk to a human being?” John Parker asked.
The nurse in the screen shook her head. “Not in my hospital, Mr. Parker. Not in any modern hospital.”
Although he would have liked it very much if there had been, there was nothing modern about the foyer of John Parker’s building. There was nothing old about it either, no suggestion of more gracious days. It was contemporary, in a period when contemporary meant the cheapest possible construction that would do the job, a period when a hundred million people drew unemployment benefits and the cost of labor was (John Parker smiled bitterly to himself) astronomical. Snow had been tracked onto the floor of this foyer, and a pouch of orange drink had been spilled in the elevator. John Parker pressed the button for the seventy-fifth floor, wondering why he did so.
A few days before, the elevator had stopped on the sixty-seventh, no doubt because some child had pushed UP, then dashed back into his own apartment. John Parker had not noticed. He had left the elevator and walked down a corridor precisely like his own. He had knocked on the door that should have been his, before he had seen the obscenity painted on it. Obscenities were no novelty, but this one had been old, the Day-Glo magenta paint flaking, and not his. He had walked back down the corridor to the elevator then and seen that he had gotten off at sixty-seven, eight floors too low.