Charles DeVett & Katherine MacLean

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Charles DeVett & Katherine MacLean Page 4

by Cosmic Checkmate


  By early morning Trobt could no longer contain his impatience. For the past hour he had been watching with his legs spread wide and his face expressionless. However, his hands showed his mounting frustration—toward the end they were always closed into fists, or spread wide open. Finally he walked to where I sat.

  “We’re going to learn one thing,” he said, and his voice was harsh. “Why did you come here?”

  “To learn all that I could about you,” I answered.

  “You came to find a way to whip us!”

  It was not a question and I had no necessity to answer.

  “Have you found the way?”

  “No.”

  “If you do, and you are able, will you use that knowledge to kill us?”

  “No”,

  Trobt’s eyebrows raised. “No?” he repeated. “Then why do you want it?”

  “I hope to find a solution that will not harm either side.” “But if you find that a solution is not possible, you will use your knowledge to defeat us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if it meant that you had to exterminate us—man, woman, and child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Are you so certain that you are right, that you walk with God, and that we are knaves?”

  “If the necessity to destroy one civilization or the other arose and the decision were mine to make, I would rule against you because of the number of sentient beings involved.”

  Trobt cut the argument out from under me. “What if the situation were reversed, and your side was in the minority? Would you chose to let them die?”

  I bowed my head as I gave him the truthful answer. “I would choose for my own side, no matter what the circumstances.”

  “I knew so.” The interrogation was over.

  On the drive to his home Trobt was once again the courteous, considerate captor. There was no trace in his tone and manner of the harshness during the interrogation. He talked much, and asked some questions, but they were— apparently—prompted only by friendly curiosity.

  “How did you learn to play the Game so well?” he asked. “I’m a player of the Human game called chess. Considered an adept.”

  “I know,” Trobt said. “You explained that under the drugs.” For the first time then I realized that I did not have complete recall of everything I had said at the questioning. I had a moment of acute unease. However, it did not last. Whatever I had said, I was certain that my resolve to give them nothing of value had held firm throughout. And Trobt’s manner indicated that I was right.

  Not that it was an attitude of defeat. Rather that more was to come.

  By his time I was dead tired, and barely able to keep my eyes open. I would not be able to stay awake much longer. I realized with a start of surprise that Trobt was still talking. “… that a man with ability enough to be a Games— chess—master of nine planets is given no authority over his people, but merely consulted on occasional abstract questions of tactics.”

  “It is the nature of the problem.” I caught the gist of his comment from his last words and did my best to answer it. I wanted nothing less than to engage in conversation, but I realized that the interest he was showing now was just the kind I had tried to guide him to, earlier in the evening. If I could get him to understand us better, our motivations and ideals, perhaps even our frailities, there would be more hope of a compatible meeting of minds. “Among peoples of such mixed natures, such diverse histories and philosophies, and different ways of life, most administrative problems are problems of a choice of whims, of changing and conflicting goals; not how to do what a people want done, but what they want done, and whether their next generation will want it enough to make work on it, now, worthwhile.”

  “They sound insane,” Trobt said. “Are your administrators supposed to serve the flickering goals of demented minds?” “We must weigh values. What is considered good may be a matter of viewpoint, and may change from place to place, from generation to generation. In determining what people feel and what their unvoiced wants are, a talent of strategy, and an impatience with the illogic of others, are not qualifications.”

  “The good is good, how can it change?” Trobt asked. “I do not understand.”

  I saw that truly he could not understand, since he had seen nothing of die clash of philosophies among a mixed people. I tried to think of ways it could be explained; how to show him that a people who let their emotions control them more than their logic, would unavoidably do many things they could not justify or take pride in—but that that emotional predominance was what had enabled them to grow, and spread throughout their part of the galaxy—and be, in the main, happy.

  I was tired, achingly tired. More, the events of the long day, and Velda’s heavier gravity had taken me to the last stages of exhaustion. Yet I wanted to keep that weakness from Trobt. It was possible -that he, and the other Veldians, would judge the Humans by what they observed in me.

  Trobt’s attention was on his driving and he did not notice that I followed his conversation only with difficulty. “Have you had only the two weeks of practice in the Game, since you came?” he asked.

  I kept my eyes open with an effort and breathed deeply. Velda’s one continent, capping the planet on its upper third, merely touched what would have been a temperate zone. During its short summer its mean temperature hung in the low sixties. At night it dropped to near freezing. The cold night air bit into my lungs and drove, the fog of exhaustion from my brain.

  “No,” I answered Trobt’s question, “I learned it before I came. A chess adept wrote me, in answer to an article on chess, that a man from one of the outworlds had shown him a game of greater richness and flexibility than chess, with much the same feeling to the player, and had beaten him in three games of chess after only two games to leam it, and had said that on his own planet this chess-like game was the basis for the amount of authority with which a man is invested. The stranger would not name his planet.

  “I hired an investigating agency to leam the whereabouts of this planet. There was none in the Ten Thousand Worlds. That means that the man had been a very ingenious liar, or—that he had come from Velda.”

  “It was I, of course,” Trobt acknowledged.

  “I realized that from your conversation. The sender of the letter,” I resumed, “was known to me as a chess champion of two Worlds. The matter tantalized my thoughts for weeks, and finally I decided to visit Velda. If you had this game, I wanted to try myself against your skilled ones.”

  “I understand that desire very well,” Trobt said. “The same temptation caused me to be indiscreet when I visited your Worlds. I have seldom been able to resist the opportunity for an intellectual gambit.

  “Even if you came intending to challenge, you had little enough time to learn to play as you have—against men who have spent lifetimes learning. I’d like to try you again soon, if I may.”

  “Certainly.” I was in little mood or condition to welcome any further polite conversation. And I did not appreciate the irony of his request—to the best of my knowledge I was still under a sentence of early death.

  Trobt must have caught the bleakness of my reply for he glanced quickly over his shoulder at me. “There will be time,” he said, gently for him. “Several days at least. You will be my guest.” I knew he was doing his best to be kind. His decision that I must die was not prompted by any meanness of nature. To him it was only—inevitable.

  I could tell that Trobt had more to say, but he paused, as though slightly embarrassed. “You and I are much alike in our natures,” he said, carefully selecting each word. “In different circumstances I am certain we would have been friends. I wish that we could be friends now.”

  I was surprised to find myself feeling the same.

  The household had retired when we arrived at Trobt’s home, but he served me from dishes which had been left heated, and ate at the same table with me, and in all ways treated me as a guest.

  I was too weary to respond well to
Trobt’s conversation and after a short time he showed me to a bedroom, where I slept on a pallet raised high from the floor, as were all their beds.

  V

  The next day I expected Trobt to bring up my request for meeting the other members of the Council, or at least to question me further, but instead he led me to a side room of his home and showed me his recreation room. It was beautifully laid out with murals of Veldian wild life on the walls, and swords and glaives crossed between them. The dominating evidence of recreation in the room was the Game board, and large value boards on each end wall. They were electrically wired in such a way that the squares occupied on the play board showed in colored lights—with a different color for each contestant.

  “If you are willing, I would like another try at beating you,” Trobt said in his invariably polite manner.

  “I am quite willing.” There was undoubtedly more to the request than the desire to defeat me. He had a deeper motive, and I thought I knew what it was. For a time I debated whether or not it might be wise to let him win, but decided against it.

  I took a seat at one end of the Games table—I assumed he wanted to play—but Trobt seemed in no hurry to begin. He leaned against the wall to my left. He had his arms folded across his chest and his weight rested on one leg. He was making a deliberate attempt to appear casual—and I would have been convinced that he was—except that at his first words the annotator in the back of my brain warned me to be cautious. His questions would not be as casual as he wanted them to seem.

  “Having a like nature I can well understand the impulse that brought you here,” he said. “The supreme gamble. Playing—with your life the stake in the game. Nothing you’ve ever experienced can compare with it. And even now—when you have lost, and will die—you do not regret it, I’m certain.”

  “I’m afraid you’re overestimating my courage and underestimating my intentions,” I told him, feeling instinctively that this would be a good time to again present my arguments. “I came because I hoped we could reach a better understanding. We feel that an absolutely unnecessary war, with its resulting death and destruction, would be foolhardy. And I fail to see your viewpoint. Much of it strikes me as stupid racial pride.”

  It took him only a minute to see through what I was trying to do: To throw him on the defensive, to make him angry and upset the plan of interrogation he had probably prepared. For a moment I thought I had succeeded. At my last words he straightened and let his arms drop to his sides. His lips made a slight change, growing narrower, and his eyes became bleak. But his self-control was too rigid to allow a break. He walked to the seat opposite me at the Game board and sat down. He began arranging his pieces on their starting squares.

  “The news of your coming is the first topic of conversation in the City,” he said, disregarding my taunt and going doggedly ahead with his original conversation. “The clans understand that you have come to challenge; one man against a nation. They greatly admire your audacity. Many are wagering that you will go farther in the Final Game than any Veldian has done. It is a great compliment.”

  “Look,” I said, becoming angry and slipping into Earthian. “I don’t know whether you consider me a fool or not. But if you think I came here expecting to die; that I’m looking forward to it with pleasure—”

  He stopped me with an idle gesture of one hand. “You deceive yourself if you believe what you say,” he commented. “Tell me this, would you have stayed away if you had known just how great the risk was to be?”

  I was surprised to find that I did not have a ready answer to his question.

  “Shall we play?” Trobt asked.

  We played three games; Trobt with great skill, employing diversified and ingenious attacks. But he still had that bit too much audacity in his execution.

  I could hardly call it a weakness. In most circumstances it would serve him as a weapon in routing players of lesser or almost equal skill—or less courage. However, my being aware of his impulsiveness as a potential weakness—and deliberately playing to bring it out—set him at a disadvantage. I won each time.

  “You’re undoubtedly a Master,” Trobt said at the end of the third game. “But that isn’t all of it. Would you like me to tell you why I can’t beat you?”

  “Can you?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “I wanted to try against you again and again, because each time it did not seem that you had defeated me, but only that I had played badly, made childish blunders, and that I lost each game before we ever came to grips. Yet when I entered the duel against you a further time, I’d begin to blunder again.”

  He shoved his hands more deeply under his weapons belt, leaning back and observing me with his direct inspection. “My blundering then has to do with you, rather than myself,” he said. “Your play is excellent, of course, but there is more beneath the surface than above. This is your talent: you lose the first game to see an opponent’s weakness—and play it against him.”

  I could not deny it. But neither would I concede it. Any small advantage I might hold would be sorely needed.

  “I understand Humans a little,” Trobt said. “Enough to know that very few of them would come to challenge us without some other purpose. They have no taste for death, with glory or without.” His gaze was penetrating.

  Again I did not reply.

  “I believe,” Trobt said, “that you came here to challenge in your own way, which is to find any weakness we might have, either in our military, or in some odd way, in our very selves.”

  Once again—with a minimum of help from me—he had arrived in his reasoning at a correct answer. From here on— against this man—I would have to walk a narrow line.

  “I think,” Trobt said more slowly, glancing down at the board between us, then back at my expression, “that this may be the First Game, and that you are more dangerous than you seem, that you are accepting the humiliation of allowing yourself to be thought of as weaker than you are, in actuality. You intend to find our weakness, and you expect somehow to tell your states what you find.”

  I looked across at him without moving. “What weakness do you fear I’ve seen?” I countered.

  Trobt placed his hands carefully on the board in front of him and rose to his feet. Before he could say what he intended a small boy pulling something like a toy riding horse behind him came into the game room and grabbed Trobt’s trouser leg. He was the first blond child I had seen on Velda.

  The boy pointed at the swords on the wall. “Da,” he said beseechingly, making reaching motions. “Da.”

  Trobt kept his attention on me. After a moment a faint humorless smile moved his lips. He seemed to grow taller, with the impression a strong man gives when he remembers his strength. “You will find no weakness,” he said. He sat down again and placed the child on his lap.

  The boy grabbed immediately at the abacus hanging on Trobt’s belt and began playing with it, while Trobt stroked his hair. All the Veldians dearly loved children, I had noticed.

  “Do you have any idea how many of our ships were used to wipe out your fleet,” Trobt asked abruptly.

  As I allowed myself to show the interest I felt he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and leaned forward. “One,” he said.

  I very nearly called Trobt a liar—one ship obliterating a thousand—before I remembered that Veldians were not liars, and that Trobt obviously was not lying. Somehow this small underpopulated planet had developed a science of weapons that vastly surpassed that of the Ten Thousand Worlds.

  I had thought that perhaps my vacation on this Games-mad planet would result in some mutual information that would bring quick negotiation, or conciliation, that players of a chess-like game would be easy enough to approach, that I would meet men intelligent enough to see the absurdity of such an ill-fated war against the overwhelming odds of the

  Ten Thousand Worlds Federation—intelligent enough to foresee the disaster that would result from such a fight. It began to look as if the disaster might be to
the Ten Thousand and not to the One.

  Thinking, I walked alone in Trobt’s roof garden.

  Walking in Velda’s heavy gravity took more energy than I cared to expend, but too long a period without exercise brought a dull ache to the muscles of my shoulders and at the base of my neck.

  This was my third evening in the house. I had slept at least ten hours each night since I arrived, and found myself exhausted at day’s end, unless I was able to take a nap Or lie down during the afternoon.

  The flowers and shrubbery in the garden seemed to feel the weight of gravity also, for most of them grew low, and many sent creepers out along the ground. Overhead strange formations of stars clustered thickly and shed a glow on the garden very like Earth’s moonlight.

  I was just beginning to feel the heavy drag in my legs tendons when a woman’s voice said, “Why don’t you rest a while?” It spun me around and I looked for the source of the voice.

  I found her in a nook in the bushes, seated on a contour chair that allowed her to stretch out in a half-reclining position. She must have weighed near to two hundred— Earth-weight—pounds.

  But the thing that had startled me more than the sound of her voice was that she had spoken in the universal language of the Ten Thousand Worlds. And without accent!

  “You’re … ?” I started to ask.

  “Human,” she finished for me.

  “How did you get here?” I inquired eagerly.

  “With my husband.” She was obviously enjoying my astonishment. She was a beautiful woman, in a gentle bovine way, and very friendly. Her blond hair was done up in tight ringlets.

  “You mean—Trobt?” I asked.

  “Yes.” As I stood trying to phrase my wonderment into

  more questions she asked, “You’re the Earthman, aren’t you?”

  I podded. “Where did you learn to speak our language?”

  “It’s my native tongue.” I knew a quick delight when she gave the answer I had expected.

 

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