There was nothing for the Commander to say. The two men waited silently for the enemy's attack, hoping only that they could damage it in the seconds before it would overwhelm them and kill them.
"He's playing the second game," said the Second Officer, puzzled. "And I just heard him say 'Let's get on with it.' "
"His voice could be recorded. He must have made some plan of play for Newton to follow; but it won't fool the berserker for long. It can't."
Time crept unmeasurably past them.
The Second said: "He's lost the first four games. But he's not making the same moves every time. I wish we'd made a board…"
"Shut up about the board! We'd be watching it instead of the panel. Now stay alert, Mister."
After what seemed a long time, the Second said: "Well, I'll be!"
"What?"
"Our side got a draw in that game."
"Then the beam can't be on him. Are you sure…"
"It is! Look, here, the same indication we got last time. It's been on him the better part of an hour now, and getting stronger."
The Commander stared in disbelief; but he knew and trusted his Second's ability. And the panel indications were convincing. He said: "Then someone—or something—with no functioning mind is learning how to play a game, over there. Ha, ha," he added, as if trying to remember how to laugh.
The berserker won another game. Another draw. Another win for the enemy. Then three drawn games in a row.
Once the Second Officer heard Del's voice ask coolly: "Do you want to give up now?" On the next move he lost another game. But the following game ended in another draw. Del was plainly taking more time than his opponent to move, but not enough to make the enemy impatient.
"It's trying different modulations on the mind-weapon," said the Second. "And it's got the power turned way up."
"Yeah," said the Commander. Several times he had almost tried to radio Del, to say something that might keep the man's spirits up—and also to relieve his own feverish inactivity, and try to find out what could possibly be happening now. But he could not take the chance. Any interference might upset the miracle.
He could not believe the inexplicable success could last, even when the checker match turned gradually into an endless succession of drawn games between two perfect players. Hours ago the Commander had said good-bye to life and hope, and he still waited for the fatal moment. And waited.
"—not perish from the Earth!" said Del Murray, and Newton's eager hands flew to loose his right arm from its shackle.
A game, unfinished on the little board before him. had been abandoned seconds earlier. The mindweapon had been turned off at the same time, when Gizmo had burst into normal space right in position and only five minutes late; and the berserker had been forced to turn all its energies to meet the immediate all-out attack of Gizmo and Foxglove.
Del saw his computers, recovering from the effect of the beam, lock his aiming screen onto the berserker's scarred and bulging midsection, as he shot his right arm forward, scattering pieces from the game board.
"Checkmate!" he roared out hoarsely, and brought his fist down on the big red button.
"I'm glad it didn't want to play chess," Del said later, talking to the Commander in Foxglove's cabin. "I could never have rigged that up."
The ports were cleared now, and the men could look out at the expanding cloud of gas, still faintly luminous, that had been a berserker; metal fire-purged of the legacy of ancient evil.
But the Commander was watching Del. "You got Newt to play by following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?"
Del grinned. "He couldn't. But his toys could. Now wait before you slug me." He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal's hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of one possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-colored arrow indicating each possible move of Del's pieces.
"It took a couple hundred of these boxes," said Del. "This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking—that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way," said Del, demonstrating. "Ah, this one's blue. That means, make the move indicated on the corner by a blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position. See?" Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. "No orange beads left; there were six of each color when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the Scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly."
"Well," said the Commander. He thought for a moment, then reached down to scratch Newton behind the ears. "I never would have come up with that idea."
"I should have thought of it sooner. The basic idea's a couple of centuries old. And computers are supposed to be my business."
"This could be a big thing," said the Commander. "I mean your basic idea might be useful to any task force that has to face a berserker's mindbeam."
"Yeah." Del grew reflective. "Also…"
"What?"
"I was thinking of a guy I met once. Named Blankenship. I wonder if I could rig something up…"
A BOARD IN THE OTHER DIRECTION
Ruth Berman
Iskander was senile.
Having no children, he was therefore, of course, entered in a state home. It would not necessarily have made any difference if he'd had any; the homes were lavishly funded, thanks to the votes of the young and guilty. But he might then have had visits and outings to look forward to. As it was, he had nothing to do except look at pieces he no longer knew how to move. On bad days there was nothing but the varying smells of food, deodorant, urine, and feces to occupy his failing senses. On warm days he could go into the garden.
A bright torus, checkered with blue-steel and white-steel magnetic squares, spun on the clear plastic axis attaching it to the clear plastic frame. The plastic was as near invisible as makes no difference, to kibitzers, but to the players it was half-glimpsed curves of light broken into rainbows and reflecting stray bits of color on the board and the blue and white pieces jutting out all over it.
There were some who had said they had seen that Iskander was failing even before Mbara of Uganda beat him, 13 variations out of 20. But others, who knew Mbara's play better, said that they were both in top form and Mbara had genuinely become the better player. They said it was the shock of losing to a youngster which had ended him.
In fact, Mbara was quite old enough to be tagged as a spinster, married like Iskander to the game alone. It caused quite a stir when she married the following month—and to a nonplayer, at that.
The sunlight was clear and harsh on the dusty park ground. An ordinary chessboard was marked out, but the pieces on it were living men, armed with wooden swords and shields, and sweating heavily under their padding.
Iskander was delighted when he found himself faced with two visitors, at last, on a warm day. Dimly, he heard the words, "Copter ride."
"Yes, yes," he said eagerly. "Copter ride. Most kind of you, Mr… Most… Yes." He plucked at the diapers he wore, trying to express his pleasure by freeing himself from the constriction, but they were fastened too securely. He was too excited at the prospect of a ride to mind, however.
But once they were in the copter, one of the men poked him with a needle. He sobbed at this unkindness until he felt himself growing drowsy, and then he went to sleep.
He woke to find himself on a couch in a sunny room. A woman of 65 or so sat rocking opposite him. She looked familiar, but it was not until he tried subtracting years from her face that he recognized her. He sat up slowly, pulling himself on the rim of the couch. "Hello, Miriam. Been a long time. Still in politics?"
"Yes. H
ow do you feel?"
"Fine. And you?" But he had no sooner finished the formality of the exchange than he realized that he did not feel fine. He felt weak and—oddly—happy. The first was not unusual of late. The second seemed strange. It was not as if he had played an interesting game that day.
In fact, he had not played since he could not think when. At that thought, the pawns in his head leaped forward on a dozen different kinds of chessboards, and he knew that he could continue all those games to their ends. Which was as it should be, but not as it had been recently.
The bullet shot over the board… A green knight hop-frogged over a white to take a red pawn… The Fool circled idly around the other pieces and cut down the Moon....
"Well as can be expected," Miriam was saying, and her words took up no more time than Iskander needed to orient himself.
"Testing some kind of intelligence drug on me?" he said as soon as she stopped.
One side of her mouth quirked up, and she leaned forward, saying, "Not exactly. It's an experimental drug which allows the body to tap reserves of energy to overcome the effects of old age."
"Indeed. What happens when the reserves run out?"
She hesitated, and stopped rocking for a moment. "Death? It's not like you to be sentimental, my dear."
"No, I suppose not." She started the rocker going again. "It's a dangerous drug, certainly. It'll be quite a few hours before you need to worry about unpleasant side effects, though. If you want out of the project, before then, we can reverse it."
"Who do you want me to play?" he said eagerly.
"I didn't say it was chess."
"What else could I possibly mean?"
"That's not a fair way to put it, Zander."
He smiled at her and shrugged. "No. But who do you want me to play? And why?"
She stopped rocking and stretched herself up out of the chair. "You get dressed and come out. I'll show you." She pointed at a suit draped over the end of the couch, and left the room.
Iskander looked down at himself, dressed in diapers, plastic pants, and sandals. He felt a quick flash of nudity-taboo embarrassment, followed by disgust at the appearance of his body. He tried to suppress that reaction as equally irrational, but failing, ignored his feelings as well as he could and simply began dressing. The suit provided was one of his own from a few years back. It had become a little too large for him, but the looseness of the fabric was pleasant.
"Ready," said Iskander. He stepped through the door into a long, windowless corridor. He blinked for a moment as his eyes adjusted to the change in light.
"Good," said Miriam.
An intense gentleman standing beside her immediately broke into protest. "Madam Chairman," he said, "Have you warned—"
"Yes, of course. Iskander, this is Dr. Hudek. He will be very annoyed with me if anything happens to you."
"Oh, do you play chess, Doctor?" said Iskander, bowing.
"No," said Hudek, obviously puzzled by the question.
"No, he's just a physician," Miriam explained. "This way." She set off down the corridor, and the two men followed.
A Bishop's Pawn opening was unusual, but the QBP was a better fighter than a Live Pawn should be, and worth using as a major piece.
Miriam took them into a small room with a one-way glass wall opposite the door. It looked into a council chamber and was fitted up with outlets for tri-d cameras and tapers, along with pencil sharpeners and the other esoteric paraphernalia of the press.
"Do you plan to broadcast the game?" Iskander asked. He felt out of place, almost a little dizzy at being in a pressroom. He had watched broadcasts of other people's matches often enough, and so he knew what such rooms looked like—or at least what the front sections of them looked like—and he knew that he had been watched many times from such rooms, but he had never been in one before.
"No, we'll only record it," Miriam said. "But there's your opponent."
He glanced quickly at the figure seated at a table going over some papers, and looked back to Miriam, astonished. "It's not Mbara."
"Zander! You're impossible. Why should we risk your life to play her?"
"For the sake of the game?" Iskander made it sound joking, although it wasn't really. "If it's anyone else, why didn't you get Mbara?"
"We would have," Miriam said. "But she died in childbirth a few months ago."
"So I wasn't your first choice," Iskander said regretfully.
"That's irrelevant, Zander. By the way, you still haven't looked at your opponent properly."
Iskander looked. His opponent was… a dryad? It had delicate facial bones, like a woman, but a straight-lined body, like a man. It had brown skin, perhaps a little darker than his own, and long green hair, braced up over golden combs on the head, giving a crownlike effect, then falling like a cloak down the back. But even more than the hair, the set of the face and the lines of the body were wrong: the eyes too large and set too wide, the shoulders sloping down too much from the neck, the legs and arms too long. And the most startling wrongness of all was that each of the individual oddities looked right on it. It was not deformed, it was simply not human. And it was beautiful. He found himself tracing designs in the air with one finger. He wanted to get some clay—no, wood was better—and carve a copy of it to be the Magician in a set of Tarotchess pieces or should it be the Fool? But if he carved it dancing like the Fool, how would those long limbs shape themselves to show arrested motion? And what kind of dog would fit with a Fool carved in that likeness?
"Zander?"
"Won't you sit down, sir?" Hudek set a chair behind Iskander, nudging it close enough to touch his legs.
Iskander sat down automatically, then came out of it enough to smile at Hudek. "I'm all right, Doctor. Don't worry."
Miriam sat down in a chair level with his. "Well, Zander."
"From outer space?"
"Right." She nodded, as if granting him a point. "You hadn't heard about the Visitors before, I think?"
"No."
"They represent a confederation of intelligent beings within our Galaxy. They maintain a fleet of scout ships to go around checking promising planets every so often to find peoples ready for membership. The basic criteria are space travel and world government."
"Defined how?" said Iskander.
"Cautious, aren't you? Yes, that's the stinger. Defined as interstellar travel—which, we gather, is most economically managed by treating space-time as four spatial dimensions and traveling cross-time to go places—and a government with some reasonable power to enforce its legislation."
"We don't qualify, then. A pity."
"No, we don't. But we're so close to it, I hate to let the opportunity go. And besides… I don't trust people."
Iskander simply nodded, but Hudek's eyes went wide, and for the first time he forgot to address the nominal world leader with respect. "That's a hell of a thing for you to admit!"
"Wait till you're my age, Doctor, and maybe you'll feel the same." She turned back to Iskander. "They made a mistake about us. We were coming along nicely the last time they surveyed us, and they really expected to find us ready for membership this time. Which we almost are, close enough to cause confusion. So they entered openly—in fact, they walked in on a General Assembly debate." For a moment her eyes gleamed with uncharitable mirth. "I'm afraid that if they find out the truth and reject us, we'll do something silly. Heaven knows, we have enough tense situations threatening to become wars at any moment. If we can fool them and send them away arranging proceedings to invite us into their confederation, I think… I hope… it'll give us that little extra incentive we need to make peace with each other… at last. We've been so close to peace so long, and so close to Armageddon."
Iskander was silent for a moment. "And the space travel?"
"Less important in their reckoning. And easier. We'll get it soon."
"Mmm. Maybe so." Iskander looked into the council chambers at the being, still intent on its papers.
"Or ma
ybe not," Hudek put in. "Maybe the rejection would give us that little extra incentive, as far as that goes."
"Yes. Maybe," said Miriam. "And if this gambit doesn't work, let's hope that one does." She looked at him briefly and then turned back to Iskander. "We have all the forms of a world government now—encouraging that mistake is easy. But to keep them thinking we have four-dimensional travel—I'd like you to go out there and play a game of four-dimension chess."
"So. I thought you were leading to that. You really do need Mbara—that variant was her invention. And did anyone ever play it except for her and me?"
"Not a complete game."
"She was a fine player, you know. Playing against her was a kind of heaven, except for losing." He shrugged and half smiled at his own egotism. "But if you don't have her, I'd think a chess-playing mathematician with a specialty in n-dimensional geometry would be your best bet."
"No. You've told me often enough that you can tell a master player from a good one. Our visitor claims to be a master at their equivalent of chess—I gather that it's a good way of spending the time between planetfalls. Both of you will be handicapped, of course, playing an unfamiliar variant, but your familiarity with playing all sorts of variants, I hope, will see you through. You don't have to win, you understand. All you have to do is play well enough to make him think you know what you're doing."
"All right."
The medieval bishop two-stepped its way across the board, to join the slow-moving queen in attack.
They went round by the corridor and entered the council chamber. The alien's big eyes opened even wider. It tossed its head eagerly and cleared away its papers into a sort of briefcase. It said something and a microphone at its throat said, "You are chess master Madam Chairman promised to invite?"
"Yes, how do you do." Iskander bowed.
The alien mimicked the gesture. "White or black?" it said through its mike.
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