by Gene Wolfe
“In gold?”
“In a draft on an account the university maintains in Fürstenwalde—you can present it there for gold the first thing in the morning.”
“You must understand,” said Herr Heitzmann, “that the machine requires a certain amount of care, or it will not perform properly.”
“I am buying it as is,” said Professor Baumeister. “As it stands here before us.”
“Done, then,” said Herr Heitzmann, and he put out his hand.
The board was folded away, and six stout fellows carried the machine into the professor’s room for safekeeping, where he remained with it for an hour or more. When he returned to the inn parlor at last, Dr. Eckardt asked if he had been playing chess again.
Professor Baumeister nodded. “Three games.”
“Did you win?”
“No, I lost them all. Where is the showman?”
“Gone,” said Father Karl, who was sitting near them. “He left as soon as you took the machine to your room.”
Dr. Eckardt said, “I thought he planned to stay the night here.”
“So did I,” said Father Karl. “And I confess I believed the machine would not function without him. I was surprised to hear that our friend the professor had been playing in private.”
Just then a small, twisted man, with a large head crowned with wild black hair, limped into the inn parlor. It was Lame Hans, but no one knew that then. He asked Scheer the innkeeper for a room.
Scheer smiled. “Sitting rooms on the first floor are a hundred marks,” he said. He could see by Lame Hans’s worn clothes that he could not afford a sitting room.
“Something cheaper.”
“My regular rooms are thirty marks. Or I can let you have a garret for ten.”
Hans rented a garret room, and ordered a meal of beer, tripe, and kraut. That was the last time anyone except Gretchen noticed Lame Hans that night.
* * *
A
nd now I must leave off recounting what I myself saw and tell many things that rest solely on the testimony of Lame Hans, given to me while he ate his potato soup in his cell. But I believe Lame Hans to be an honest fellow, and as he no longer, as he says, cares much to live, he has no reason to lie.
One thing is certain. Lame Hans and Gretchen the serving girl fell in love that night. Just how it happened I cannot say—I doubt that Lame Hans himself knows. She was sent to prepare the cot in his garret. Doubtless she was tired after drawing beer in the parlor all day and was happy to sit for a few moments and talk with him. Perhaps she smiled—she was always a girl who smiled a great deal—and laughed at some bitter joke he made. And as for Lame Hans, how many blue-eyed girls could ever have smiled at him, with his big head and twisted leg?
In the morning the machine would not play chess.
Professor Baumeister sat before it for a long time, arranging the pieces and making first one opening and then another, and tinkering with the mechanism, but nothing happened.
And then, when the morning was half-gone, Lame Hans came into the professor’s room. “You paid a great deal of money for this machine,” he said, and sat down in the best chair.
“Were you in the inn parlor last night?” asked Professor Baumeister. “Yes, I paid a great deal: seven hundred and fifty kilomarks.”
“I was there,” said Lame Hans. “You must be a very rich man to be able to afford such a sum.”
“It was the university’s money,” explained Professor Baumeister.
“Ah,” said Lame Hans. “Then it will be embarrassing for you if the machine does not play.”
“It does play,” said the professor. “I played three games with it last night after it was brought here.”
“You must learn to make better use of your knights,” Lame Hans told him, “and to attack on both sides of the board at once. In the second game you played well until you lost the queen’s rook; then you went to pieces.”
The professor sat down, and for a moment said nothing. And then: “You are the operator of the machine. I was correct in the beginning; I should have known.”
Lame Hans looked out the window.
“How did you move the pieces—by radio? I suppose there must still be radio-control equipment in existence somewhere.”
“I was inside,” Lame Hans said. “I’ll show you sometime; it’s not important. What will you tell the university?”
“That I was swindled, I suppose. I have some money of my own, and I will try to pay back as much as I can out of that—and I own two houses in Fürstenwalde that can be sold.”
“Do you smoke?” asked Lame Hans, and he took out his short pipe, and a bag of tobacco.
“Only after dinner,” said the professor, “and not often then.”
“I find it calms my nerves,” said Lame Hans. “That is why I suggested it to you. I do not have a second pipe, but I can offer you some of my tobacco, which is very good. You might buy a clay from the innkeeper here.”
“No, thank you. I fear I must abandon such little pleasures for a long time to come.”
“Not necessarily,” said Lame Hans. “Go ahead; buy that pipe. This is good Turkish tobacco—would you believe, to look at me, that I know a great deal about tobacco? It has been my only luxury.”
“If you are the one who played chess with me last night,” Professor Baumeister said, “I would be willing to believe that you know a great deal about anything. You play like the devil himself.”
“I know a great deal about more than tobacco. Would you like to get your money back?”
And so it was that that very afternoon (if it can be credited) the mail coach carried away bills printed in large black letters. These said:
IN THE VILLAGE OF ODER SPREE
BEFORE THE INN OF THE GOLDEN APPLES
ON SATURDAY
AT 9:00 O’CLOCK
THE MARVELOUS BRASS CHESSPLAYING AUTOMATON
WILL BE ON DISPLAY
FREE TO EVERYONE
AND WILL PLAY ANY CHALLENGER
AT EVEN ODDS
TO A LIMIT OF DM 2,000,000
Now, you will think from what I have told you that Lame Hans was a cocky fellow, but that is not the case, though like many of us who are small of stature he pretended to be self-reliant when he was among men taller than he. The truth is that though he did not show it, he was very frightened when he met Herr Heitzmann (as the two of them had arranged earlier that he should) in a certain malodorous tavern near the Schwarzthor in Furthenwald.
“So there you are, my friend,” said Herr Heitzmann. “How did it go?”
“Terribly,” Lame Hans replied as though he felt nothing. “I was locked up in that brass snuffbox for half the night, and had to play twenty games with that fool of a scholar. And when at last I got out, I couldn’t get a ride here and had to walk most of the way on this bad leg of mine. I trust it was comfortable on the cart seat? The horse didn’t give you too much trouble?”
“I’m sorry you’ve had a poor time of it, but now you can relax. There’s nothing more to do until he’s convinced the machine is broken and irreparable.”
Lame Hans looked at him as though in some surprise. “You didn’t see the signs? They are posted everywhere.”
“What signs?”
“He’s offering to bet two thousand kilomarks that no one can beat the machine.”
Herr Heitzmann shrugged. “He will discover that it is inoperative before the contest, and cancel it.”
“He could not cancel after the bet was made,” said Lame Hans. “Particularly if there were a proviso that if either was unable to play, the bet was forfeited. Some upright citizen would be selected to hold the stakes, naturally.”
“I don’t suppose he could at that,” said Herr Heitzmann, taking a swallow of schnapps from the glass before him. “However, he wouldn’t bet me—he’d think I knew some way to influence the machine. Still, he’s never seen you.”
“Just what I’ve been thinking myself,” said Lame Hans, “on my hike.”
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“It’s a little out of your line.”
“If you’ll put up the cash, I’d be willing to go a little out of my line for my tenth of that kind of money. But what is there to do? I make the bet, find someone to hold the stakes, and stand ready to play on Saturday morning. I could even offer to play him—for a smaller bet—to give him a chance to get some of his own back. That is, if he has anything left after paying off. It would make it seem more sporting.”
“You’re certain you could beat him?”
“I can beat anybody—you know that. Besides, I beat him a score of times yesterday; the game you saw was just the first.”
Herr Heitzmann ducked under the threatening edge of a tray carried by an overenthusiastic waiter. “All the same,” Herr Heitzmann said, “when he discovers it won’t work . . .”
“I could even spend a bit of time in the machine. That’s no problem. It’s in a first-floor room, with a window that won’t lock.”
And so Lame Hans left for our village again, this time considerably better dressed and with two thousand kilomarks in his pocket. Herr Heitzmann, with his appearance considerably altered by a plastiskin mask, left also, an hour later, to keep an eye on the two thousand.
B
ut,” the professor said when Lame Hans and he were comfortably ensconced in his sitting room again, with pipes in their mouths and glasses in their hands and a plate of sausage on the table, “but who is going to operate the machine for us? Wouldn’t it be easier if you simply didn’t appear? Then you would forfeit.”
“And Heitzmann would kill me,” said Lame Hans.
“He didn’t strike me as the type.”
“He would hire it done,” Hans said positively. “Whenever he got the cash. There are deserters about who are happy enough to do that kind of work for drinking money. For that matter, there are soldiers who aren’t deserters who’ll do it—men on detached duty of one kind and another. When you’ve spent all winter slaughtering Russians, one more body doesn’t make much difference.” He blew a smoke ring, then ran the long stem of his clay pipe through it as though he were driving home a bayonet. “But if I play the machine and lose, he’ll only think you figured things out and got somebody to work it, and that I’m not as good as he supposed. Then he won’t want anything more to do with me.”
“All right, then.”
“A tobacconist should do well in this village, don’t you think? I had in mind that little shop two doors down from here. When the coaches stop, the passengers will see my sign; there should be many who’ll want to fill their pouches.”
“Gretchen prefers to stay here, I suppose.”
Lame Hans nodded. “It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve been all over, and when you’ve been all over, it’s all the same.”
L
ike everyone else in the village, and for fifty kilometers around, I had seen the professor’s posters, and I went to bed Friday night full of pleasant anticipation. Lame Hans had told me that he retired in the same frame of mind, after a couple of glasses of good plum brandy in the inn parlor with the professor. He and the professor had to appear strangers and antagonists in public, as will be readily seen, but this did not prevent them from eating and drinking together while they discussed arrangements for the match, which was to be held—with the permission of Burgermeister Landsteiner—in the village street, where an area for the players had been cordoned off and high benches erected for the spectators.
Hans woke (so he has told me) when it was still dark, thinking that he had heard thunder. Then the noise came again, and he knew it must be the artillery, the big siege guns, firing at the Russians trapped in Kostrzyn. The army had built wood-fired steam tractors to pull those guns—he had seen them in Wriezen—and now the soldiers were talking about putting armor on the tractors and mounting cannon, so the knights of the chessboard would exist in reality once more.
The firing continued, booming across the dry plain, and he went to the window to see if he could make out the flashes, but could not. He put on a thin shirt and a pair of cotton trousers (for though the sun was not yet up, it was as hot as if the whole of Brandenburg had been thrust into a furnace) and went into the street to look at the empty shop in which he planned to set up his tobacco business. A squadron of Ritters galloped through the village, doubtless on their way to the siege. Lame Hans shouted, “What do you mean to do? Ride your horses against the walls?” but they ignored him. Now that the truce was broken, Von Koblenz’s army would soon be advancing up the Oder Valley, Lame Hans thought. The Russians were said to have been preparing powered balloons to assist in the defense, and this hot summer weather, when the air seemed never to stir, would favor their use. He decided that if he were the commissar, he would allow Von Koblenz to reach Glogów and then . . .
But he was not the commissar. He went back into the inn and smoked his pipe until Frau Scheer came down to prepare his breakfast. Then he went to the professor’s room where the machine was kept. Gretchen was already waiting there.
“Now then,” Professor Baumeister said, “I understand that the two of you have it all worked out between you.” And Gretchen nodded solemnly, so that her plump chin looked like a soft little pillow pressed against her throat.
“It is quite simple,” said Lame Hans. “Gretchen does not know how to play, but I have worked out the moves for her and drawn them on a sheet of paper, and we have practiced in my room with a board. We will run through it once here when she is in the machine; then there will be nothing more to do.”
“Is it a short game? It won’t do for her to become confused.”
“She will win in fourteen moves,” Lame Hans promised. “But still it is unusual. I don’t think anyone has done it before. You will see in a moment.”
To Gretchen, Professor Baumeister said, “You’re sure you won’t be mixed up? Everything depends on you.”
The girl shook her head, making her blond braids dance. “No, Herr Professor.” She drew a folded piece of paper from her bosom. “I have it all here, and as my Hans told you, we have practiced in his room, where no one could see us.”
“You aren’t afraid?”
“When I am going to marry Hans, and be mistress of a fine shop? Oh, no, Herr Professor—for that I would do much worse things than to hide in this thing that looks like a stove and play a game.”
“We are ready, then,” the professor said. “Hans, you still have not explained how it is that a person can hide in there when the sides can be removed allowing people to look through the machinery. And I confess I still don’t understand how it can be done, or how the pieces are moved.”
“Here,” said Lame Hans, and he pulled out the board as Herr Heitzmann had done in the inn parlor. “Now will you assist me in removing the left side? You should learn the way it comes loose, Professor—someday you may have to do it yourself.” (The truth was that Hans was not strong enough to handle the big brass sheet by himself and did not wish to be humiliated before Gretchen.)
“I had forgotten how much empty space there is inside,” Professor Baumeister said when they had it off. “It looks more impossible than ever.”
“It is simple, like all good tricks,” Lame Hans told him. “And it is the sign of a good trick that it is the thing that makes it appear difficult that makes it easy. Here is where the chessboard is, you see, when it is folded up. But when it is unfolded, the panel under it swings out on a hinge to support it, and there are sides, so that a triangular space is formed.”
The professor nodded and said, “I remember thinking when I played you that it looked like a potato bin, with the chessboard laid over the top.”
“Exactly,” Lame Hans continued. “The space is not noticeable when the machine is open, because this circuit is just in front of it. But see here.” And he released a little catch at the top of the circuit card, and pivoted it up to show the empty space behind it. “I am in the machine when it is carried in, but when Heitzmann pulls out the board, I lift this and fit myself under it; then, w
hen the machine is opened for inspection, I am out of view. I can look up through the dark glass of the black squares, and because the pieces are so tall, I can make out their positions. But because it is bright outside, but dim where I am, I cannot be seen.”
“I understand,” said the professor. “But will Gretchen have enough light in there to read her piece of paper?”
“That was why I wanted to hold the match in the street. With the board in sunshine, she will be able to see her paper clearly.”
Gretchen was on her knees, looking at the space behind the circuit card. “It is very small in there,” she said.
“It is big enough,” said Lame Hans. “Do you have the magnet?” And then to the professor: “The pieces are moved by moving a magnet under them. The white pieces are brass, but the black ones are of iron, and the magnet gives them a sliding motion that is very impressive.”
“I know,” said the professor, remembering that he had felt a twinge of uneasiness whenever the machine had shifted a piece. “Gretchen, see if you can get inside.”
The poor girl did the best she could, but encountered the greatest difficulty in wedging herself into the small space under the board. Work in the kitchen of the inn had provided her with many opportunities to snatch a mouthful of pastry or a choice potato dumpling or a half stein of dark beer, and she had availed herself of most of them—with the result that she possessed a lush and blooming figure of the sort that appeals to men like Lame Hans, who, having been withered before birth by the isotopes of the old wars, are themselves thin and small by nature. But though full breasts like ripe melons, and a rounded comfortable stomach and generous hips, may be pleasant things to look at when the moonlight comes in the bedroom window, they are not really well suited to folding up in a little three-cornered space under a chessboard, and in the end, poor Gretchen was forced to remove her gown, and her shift as well, before she could cram herself, with much gasping and grunting, into it.
An hour later, Willi Schacht the smith’s apprentice and five other men carried the machine out into the street and set it in the space that had been cordoned off for the players, and if they noticed the extra weight, they did not complain of it. And there the good people who had come to see the match looked at the machine, and fanned themselves, and said that they were glad they weren’t in the army on a day like this—because what must it be to serve one of those big guns, which get hot enough to poach an egg after half a dozen shots, even in ordinary weather? And between moppings and fannings they talked about the machine, and the mysterious Herr Zimmer (that was the name Lame Hans had given) who was going to play for two hundred gold kilomarks.