The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage

by Robert Sheckley

  Horsepower two thousand? I stopped and reread the plaque. Yes, Virginia, there is a horsepower two thousand. All of that horsepower is contained within your lively Rolls Royce Merlin engine. It is the very same engine, you may remember, that was used during World War II to power the Mosquito fighter-bomber. …

  “What homicidal maniac,” I asked, keeping my voice low and level, “procured this bomb for us?”

  “You are speaking about the boat? Guesci found it, of course.”

  “Then let Guesci drive it.”

  “A boat is a boat,” Karinovsky said sharply.

  “The hell it is,” I told him. “This is no boat. This is an unlimited hydroplane. Do you know what that means?”

  “I suppose it means that she is very fast.”

  “She’s fast, all right. She’s fast enough to kill us and save Forster the trouble.”

  Karinovsky looked interested. “What speed will she attain?”

  “She might have done 170 or 180 when she was new. But in her present beat-up condition, I doubt if she’ll do much better than 130 or so.”

  “Kilometers or miles?”

  “Miles per hour. In the dead of night with an Albanian chart across a bathtub-sized lagoon with more sandbars than water.”

  “I know nothing about boats,” Karinovsky announced airily. “Besides—do we have any choice?”

  We didn’t, of course. Not really. Karinovsky was in no shape to swim across the Lagoon. There was no time to find another boat, and land transport was out. We were stuck with this shark-headed beast of a hydroplane. I would just have to take it slow and easy, and hope that I could manage without blowing it up or flipping it over, or grounding in the middle of the lagoon.

  “All right,” I said. “Cast off the line.”

  Karinovsky untied the boat and pushed it away from the dock. I turned on the ignition switch and kicked the starter.

  The engine whined, then caught. The twelve pistons of the modified Merlin rumbled like an avalanche, and the exhaust sounded like a runaway machine gun.

  “Can’t you make it any quieter?” Karinovsky shouted. “We’ll wake up the whole damned city.”

  “She’s just idling now,” I shouted back. “Hang on!”

  And so it was that Agent X—demon driver of the world’s fastest machines—settled back firmly against the headrest. There was a hard tight smile on his tanned hawk features, and his blunt skillful powerful hands rested lightly on the controls. With the delicacy of a surgeon he engaged the clutch and applied a touch of throttle.

  The hydroplane responded with a roar that could probably be heard in Switzerland. The rpm indicator jumped to three thousand. The hydroplane shot forward like a shell from a cannon, and Agent X held on for dear life.

  18

  Several things were going wrong simultaneously. The hydroplane was traveling much too fast, and her bow was swinging hard to the left. I turned the steering wheel and the boat swung instantly to the right. Her starboard rail dipped, and the bow tried to dig itself into the water.

  “Slow down!” Karinovsky screamed at me.

  That was just what I was trying to do. I had taken my foot off the throttle, but it seemed to be jammed, we were still gaining speed. The tachometer had gone to 3,700. The boat, swinging again to the left, apparently was trying to run itself up on the causeway.

  Again I turned the wheel to the right. Again the bow dug in, and the stern began to lift. It kept on lifting, and I threw in the clutch. The engine, spinning without any load, sounded as if it were flying apart. Then the throttle popped up, and the engine quieted down to an ear-shattering rumble. The boat settled down and grudgingly began to lose speed.

  “What were you trying to do?” Karinovsky asked.

  “The throttle jammed,” I told him. “Also there’s something wrong with the trim or something. She pulls to the left and tries to put her nose under on the right.”

  Karinovsky sighed and rubbed his face. “Perhaps I can operate the throttle for you.”

  “No, I need you to navigate. Where am I supposed to go?”

  Karinovsky consulted the chart. “Straight down the main channel.”

  “But where in hell is the main channel?” I shouted.

  “Don’t get so nervous,” Karinovsky said. “I think we follow that row of stakes over there.”

  “They look like fishing stakes.”

  “Quite possibly. … In that case, we steer by that big triangular thing over to the right.”

  “OK,” I said. “Keep looking for more like it.” I touched the throttle gently. Nothing happened. I applied a slow and even pressure. The throttle suddenly plunged to the floor and the hydroplane spurted ahead. I got my toe under the throttle and lifted. It returned to idling position and the boat eased down. We had already passed the marker, and another was coming up fast.

  I repeated the operation, putting the throttle in and pulling it out with my toe. It sounded as if I were firing an 88-millimeter cannon. If they couldn’t hear me in Switzerland, it was only because they weren’t paying any attention. The hydroplane jumped forward in a series of nervous bows and curtsies, like a spastic Morris dancer. I could feel the drive shaft buckle and moan under the torque. I expected it to come apart any time at all.

  “And now,” Karinovsky said, “I believe we turn to the right.”

  The lights of the airport dock were bright in front of us. “Where to the right?” I asked.

  “Just right, along the channel to Mazzorbo.”

  “What channel, you idiot? Where is it?”

  “I believe you follow those stakes,” Karinovsky said with dignity.

  He pointed, and I saw a veritable forest of stakes to the right.” Some of them might have been channel markers; the rest probably marked fishing areas, sandbars, crab traps or even buried treasure. I had no way of telling one type of stake from another. I would have to charge blindly through them, and hope that the tide was still high enough to get us over the sandbars.

  I kept the engine idling and let the boat drift gently into the stakes. I picked a careful route among the larger stakes, passed as near them as possible, and hoped for the best.

  I promptly ran aground.

  “What do we do now?” Karinovsky asked.

  “We get out and push,” I told him.

  “I hope it doesn’t take long,” Karinovsky said, following me over the side into waist-deep water. “We seem to have company coming.”

  I looked back toward Venice. One light low against the shoreline had detached itself and was moving towards us.

  “Maybe it’s a police launch,” I said.

  “Would you care to bet on it?”

  “No, thanks. Get your shoulder under the bow. Lift when I do.”

  We strained against the heavy hull, our feet sinking ankle-deep into the mud. The detached light had started moving near the Ospitale Umberto I. It was not traveling very fast—ten to fifteen miles an hour, I estimated—but it was coming steadily toward us.

  The bow came free and the hydroplane slid backwards into four feet of water. We scrambled aboard. I looked around hastily for anything resembling a channel, found nothing, and put in the clutch and throttle. We thundered away to the east. Working the throttle carefully, I got us past San Michele and Murano, gaining distance easily on our pursuer. We were almost parallel to San Giacomo in Palude before we ran aground again.

  It took longer to slide the hydroplane off this time. Our pursuer became visible as a low-powered launch of extremely shallow draft, coming for us across the flats. He closed the gap to about fifty yards, and I heard shots as I put in the throttle.

  Then we thundered away again, throwing up a great curtain of white spray between us and our pursuer and making enough noise to scare the guards on the Yugoslav border. I bobbed and weaved through the stakes, knocking down any that didn’t get out of my way fast enough, and praying that I wouldn’t take a chunk of wood in the propeller.

  We approached Mazzorbo, gaining easily
on the launch, and Karinovsky hit me on the arm and shouted for a left turn. I followed instructions and ran aground again.

  “It’s hopeless,” Karinovsky said. “We’d better swim to Mazzorbo.”

  “Wade, you mean. Anyhow, we’d never make it.”

  The launch was closing the distance; its occupants had begun firing again. I said, “Get up on the stern.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Either back her off or blow her up,” I told him. He nodded sadly and scrambled onto the stern. I climbed into the cockpit and put the clutch into reverse. Karinovsky’s weight might lift the bow enough to get us off. Or it might not. I stamped on the throttle.

  The Rolls-Royce engine howled like a wounded dinosaur. A ton of water was sucked up by the propeller and spewed into the air. The operator of the motor launch might have thought we were blowing up; I thought so myself. He sheered off abruptly, slowed, and lost way for a few moments before turning back toward us. I couldn’t hear their guns above the engine, but I saw two starred holes appear in the safety glass of the windshield. Another bullet smashed into the instrument panel, obliterating the fuel gauge. The tachometer was still working, showing 5,000 rpms with the needle deep in the red. It was probably a matter of seconds before the engine tore off its mounts and exploded through the cowling.

  Then the hydroplane slid off the bar and began to pick up speed backwards. Karinovsky, hanging on to a cleat with his good hand, was nearly thrown off. I shifted to neutral, dragged him into the cockpit, and shifted again.

  There was no time for anything fancy. The next sandbar was going to be our last, anyhow. I put the throttle to the floor and pointed the hydroplane at Palude del Monte.

  It wasn’t a bad way to go, if you really had to go. The supercharger screamed, and the heavy pistons tried to punch through their cylinders. The hydroplane climbed out of the water, balancing on her two sponsons and the bottom edge of her propeller. The bow trembled, trying to go airborne. I saw the long, hazy edge of a sandbar ahead. I drove straight into it, and the hydroplane hurdled the bar and flew like a bird. The propeller chewed on nothing, and the tachometer tried to bend itself around the limit peg. Then we hit water, bounced into the air again, hit and bounced, and then leveled off. We had made it. The shore was dead ahead of us, and I tried to get my foot under the accelerator.

  I wasn’t fast enough.

  The supercharger chose that moment to come unglued. Spinning six times faster than the engine’s crankshaft, the impeller simply disintegrated. The quill shaft between engine and supercharger flew apart, and the main shaft followed. The engine, spinning free, began to throw pistons, punching them through the engine. Chunks of ragged metal exploded through the cowling. The propeller joined in the fun and began shedding blades.

  The hydroplane continued to move at a barely diminished speed.

  We left the water and drove onto a marshy beach. The hydroplane didn’t seem to notice that we were on land. It continued to race across the gray mud, discarding parts of its engine as it went. It ran out of beach and slid across a narrow road and into a grassy meadow. It was still bouncing and sliding at breakneck speed when it came to an unplowed field.

  Without hesitation it pointed itself at a clump of trees. A big cedar struck it on the side, sending it into a flat spin. The hydroplane began to lose heart. It covered another twenty yards. A stretch of rock tore out what was left of its bottom, and it scored its final triumph by knocking over a medium-sized willow. Then it faltered and came to a final and unequivocal stop.

  19

  “We made it,” I said, for want of anything better to say. Karinovsky did not reply. His eyes were closed, and his head was rolled back at an unnatural angle. I was struck by the terrible fear that all my brilliant aquabatics had been in vain. The operation had been a success, but the patient had died.

  I lifted Karinovsky’s head. Carefully, with a thumb and forefinger, I peeled back an eyelid.

  “Will you kindly get your thumb out of my eye?” Karinovsky said.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Even dead, I would not wish to be blinded,” Karinovsky said. He raised himself and gazed thoughtfully at the Lagoon, some fifty or so yards behind us. Then he looked at the solid ground on all sides of our hydroplane. “Nye,” he said, “I have suspected that you were a genius. But my words are pallid beside the splendor of your deed.”

  “It wasn’t anything much,” I told him. “Any psychotic could have done it.”

  “Perhaps. But you did it, my friend. You snatched us out of the closing jaws of the enemy. I hope now that you will reserve your modesty for those gullible enough to believe it.”

  “All right,” I said. “But I could have saved us a hell of a lot easier in a rowboat.”

  “To be sure, Guesci might have chosen a more suitable craft. But a rowboat would have offended his artistic soul.”

  “Anyhow, we’ve made it to the mainland.”

  “Yes. But we are not out of reach of the enemy just yet.”

  “I suppose not. That launch must have landed by now.”

  “Also, there are Forster’s land units to consider,” Karinovsky said. “We must leave this coast as quickly as possible.”

  I had a vision of an eternal chase, endlessly protracted. We had come free of the labyrinth of Venice only to enter the great maze of the world. We were toy figures, doomed to keep our fixed positions in this particular dance of destiny, our bodies strained into conventional postures of flight.

  “When will we be safe?” I asked.

  “Soon,” Karinovsky said, “when we have reached San Stefano di Cadore.”

  “Where in hell is that?”

  “In the north of the Veneto, near Austria’s Carinthian border, in the foothills of the Carnic Alps.”

  “Spare me geography,” I said. “How far away is it?”

  “A little less than a hundred kilometers.”

  “And how do we propose to get there?”

  “Guesci has arranged it.”

  “Like he arranged the hydroplane? Listen, I don’t—”

  “Wait. Someone is coming.”

  I could make out a dark figure running silently toward us from the far side of the field. I plunged into the hydroplane’s cockpit and found Karinovsky’s revolver. Crouching, I rested the barrel against my left forearm, leading the target slightly. There was no wind.

  Karinovsky put a hand on my wrist. “Don’t be so impetuous,” he said. “An attacker would not come so openly.”

  I held fire, but I kept the gun ready. After a boat-ride like this one I had just had, I wanted no trouble from anyone. I was prepared to go to considerable lengths to make my position clear.

  The figure reached the side of our smashed hydroplane. There was an odor of sweat and garlic. Two hands reached out and gripped my shoulders.

  “You were magnificent!” Guesci cried.

  Dressed in a dark suit, with a black silk scarf knotted carelessly around his neck, and black kidskin gloves on his hands, Marcantonio Guesci clasped me to his breast and breathed heavy waves of appreciation in my face.

  “I watched everything!” Guesci said. “From the moment you left the Sacca di San Girolamo I had you fixed in my binoculars.”

  “That helped a lot,” I said, disengaging myself.

  “Ah, but you needed no help. The speed at which you crossed the Lagoon—”

  “—was inadvertent,” I said. “But I don’t suppose you had much trouble finding us.”

  “About as much trouble as I would have in locating a forest fire,” Guesci said. “One might wish that you had made a little less noise in your approach.”

  “One didn’t have time to install a muffler,” I told him.

  “It was a noisy boat,” Guesci admitted. “But all of that is behind us now. You and Mr. Karinovsky are practically safe.”

  “Practically?”

  “Well, of course, we must still extricate ourselves from the Veneto coast. But that is
a mere technical consideration. We have outfoxed Forster at every turn, and we shall outfox him now for the final time. Come, we go this way.”

  I was worried about Karinovsky. His arm had taken a considerable beating in the boat, and the wound had reopened. A slow trickle of blood was beginning to drip from his fingers. We had to support him as we moved away from the boat. I didn’t think he was up to much more helling around.

  “How are we going to outfox Forster this time?” I asked.

  “We are going to do it—magnificently!” Guesci said. “To appreciate the plan, you must first consider our position.”

  “I’ve already considered it.”

  “Not fully. You know of the motor launch which is moving in behind us. But perhaps you do not know of Forster’s other dispositions.”

  I knew not, neither did I care. But there was no avoiding a majestic flow of extraneous information. We trudged through wet grass while Guesci (heir to the Borgias, poor man’s Fu Manchu) outlined the position.

  “Forster had to assume that you might escape from Venice; it was the only practical assumption to make with a man of your calibre. Therefore he set up a secondary line of defense, centering it on the Venezia-Mestre Causeway. His deployment to the south of the causeway, along the line Chioggia-Mestre, does not concern us; we are no longer in that theatre of war, so to speak. But on the northern front, tangential to the line Mestre-San Dona di Piave, our war is very active indeed. Consider, if you will, the main topographical features of our battlefield—”

  “Guesci,” I asked, “couldn’t we skip all of this until later?” But my plea went unnoticed. General Guesci was showing his staff that amazing grasp of terrain so necessary in an intuitive and unorthodox commander of fighting men.