Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  Disturbing stuff—and most disturbing of all, the apprehension that his mind might be racked apart and fragmented abroad with all its machinegun thinking, that it already extended by chessic veins from one chess-playing planet to another, to the ends of the universe.

  He was profoundly glad when toward the end of his self-match, his brain began to dull and slow. His last memory was of an attempt to invent a game to be played on the circular board on the watch dial. He thought he was succeeding as his mind at last went spiraling off into unconsciousness.

  Next day he awoke restless, scratchy, and eager—and with the feeling that the three or four dim figures had stood around his couch all night vibrating like strobe lights to the rhythm of the Morphy watch. Coffee heightened his alert nervousness. He rapidly dressed, snapped the Morphy watch to its chain and fob, pocketed the silver pawn, and went out to hunt down the store where he’d purchased the two items.

  In a sense he never found it, though he tramped and minutely scanned Montgomery, Kearny, Grant, Stockton, Clay, Sacramento, California, Pine, Bush, and all the rest.

  What he did find at long last was a store window with a grotesque pattern of dust on it that he was certain was identical with that on the window through which he had first glimpsed the barbarian pawn day before yesterday.

  Only now the display space behind the window was empty and the whole store too, except for a tall, lanky Black with a fabulous Afro hair-do, sweeping up.

  Ritter struck up a conversation with the man as he worked, and slowly winning his confidence, discovered that he was one of three partners opening a store there that would be stocked solely with African imports.

  Finally, after the Black had fetched a great steaming pail of soapy water and a long-handled roller mop and begun to efface forever the map of dust by which Ritter had identified the place, the man at last grew confidential.

  “Yeah,” he said, “there was a queer old character had a secondhand store here until yesterday that had every crazy thing you could dig for sale, some junk, some real fancy. Then he cleared everything out into two big trucks in a great rush, with me breathing down his neck every minute because he’d been supposed to do it the day before.

  “Oh, but he was a fabulous cat, though,for the Black went on with a reminiscent grin as he sloshed away the last peninsulas and archipelagos of the dust map. “One time he said to me, ‘Excuse me while I rest,’ and—you’re not going to believe this—he went into a corner and stood on his head. I’m telling you he did, man. I’d like to bust a gut. I thought he’d have a stroke—and he did get a bit lavender in the face—but after three minutes exact—I timed him—he flipped back onto his feet neat as you could ask and went on with his work twice as fast as before, supervising his carriers out of their skulls. Wow, that was an event.”

  Ritter departed without comment. He had got the final clue he’d been seeking to the identity of the old Balt and likewise the fourth and most shadowy form that had begun to haunt his mental chessboard.

  Casually standing on his head, saying “It threatens to catch your interest”—why, it had to be Aaron Nimzovich, most hyper-eccentric player of them all and Father of Hypermodern Chess, who had been Alekhine’s most dangerous but ever-evaded challenger. Why, the old Balt had even looked exactly like an aged Nimzovich—hence Ritter’s constant sense of a facial familiarity. Of course, Nimzovich had supposedly died in the 1930s in his home city of Riga in the U.S.S.R., but what were life and breath to the forces with which Ritter was now embroiled?

  It seemed to him that there were four dim figures stalking him relentlessly as lions right now in the Chinatown crowds, while despite the noise he could hear and feel the ticking of the Morphy watch on his waist.

  He fled to the Danish Kitchen at the St. Francis Hotel and consumed cup on cup of good coffee and two orders of Eggs Benedict, and had his mental chessboard flashing on and off in his mind like a strobe light, and wondered if he shouldn’t hurl the Morphy watch into the Bay to be rid of the influence racking his mind apart and destroying his sense of reality.

  But then with the approach of evening, the urge toward chess gripped him more and more imperiously and he headed once again for Rimini’s.

  Rasputin and the Czarina were there and also Martinez again, and with the last a distinguished silver-haired man whom Martinez introduced as the South American international master, Pontebello, suggesting that he and Ritter have a quick game.

  The board glowed again with the superimposed mental one, the halos were there once more, and Ritter won as if against a tyro.

  At that, chess fever seized him entirely and he suggested he immediately play four simultaneous blindfold games with the two masters and the Czarina and Rasputin, Pontebello acting also as referee.

  There were incredulous looks aplenty at that, but he had won those two games from Martinez and now the one from Pontebello, so arrangements were quickly made, Ritter insisting on an actual blindfold. All the other players crowded around to observe.

  The simul began. There were now four mental boards glowing in Ritter’s mind. It did not matter now—that there were four dim forms with them, one by each. Ritter played with a practiced brilliance, combinations bubbled, he called out his moves crisply and unerringly. And so he beat the Czarina and Rasputin quickly. Pontebello took a little longer, and he drew with Martinez by perpetual check.

  There was silence as he took off the blindfold to scan a circle of astonished faces and four shadowed ones behind them. He felt the joy of absolute chess mastery. The only sound he heard was the ticking, thunderous to him, of the Morphy watch.

  Pontebello was first to speak. To Ritter, “Do you realize, master, what you’ve just done?” To Martinez,“Have you the scores of all four games?” To Ritter again, “Excuse me, but you look pale, as if you’ve just seen a ghost.” “Four,” Ritter corrected quietly. “Those of Morphy, Steinitz, Alekhine, and Nimzovich.”

  “Under the circumstances, most appropriate,” commented Pontebello, while Ritter sought out again the four shadowed faces in the background. They were still there, though they had shifted their positions and withdrawn a little into the varied darknesses of Rimini’s.

  Amid talk of scheduling another blindfold exhibition and writing a multiple-signed letter describing tonight’s simul to the U.S. Chess Federation—not to mention Pontebello’s searching queries as to Ritter’s chess career—he tore himself away and made for home through the dark streets, certain that four shadowy figures stalked behind him. The call of the mental chess in his own room was not to be denied.

  Ritter forgot no moment of that night, for he did not sleep at all. The glowing board in his mind was an unquenchable beacon, an all-demanding mandala. He replayed all the important games of history, finding new moves. He contested two matches with himself, then one each with Morphy, Steinitz, Alekhine and Nimzovich, winning the first two, drawing the third, and losing the last by a half point. Nimzovich was the only one to speak, saying,“I am both dead and alive, as I’m sure you know. Please don’t smoke, or threaten to.”

  He stacked eight mental boards and played two games of three-dimensional chess, Black winning both. He traveled to the ends of the universe, finding chess everywhere he went, and contesting a long game, more complex than 3-D chess, on which the fate of the universe depended. He drew it.

  And all through the long night the four were with him in the room and the man-eating lion stared in through the window with black-and-white checkered mask and silver mane. While the Morphy watch ticked like a death-march drum. All figures vanished when the dawn came creeping, though the mental board stayed bright and busy into full daylight and showed no signs of vanishing ever. Ritter felt overpoweringly tired, his mind racked to atoms, on the verge of death.

  But he knew what he had to do. He got a small box and packed into it, in cotton wool, the silver barbarian pawn, the old photograph and daguerrotype, and a piece of paper on which he scribbled only:

  Morphy, 1859–1884 de Riviere, 18
84–? Steinitz, ?–1900 Alekhine, ?–1946 Nimzovich, 1946–now Ritter-Rebil, 3 days

  Then he packed the watch in the box too, it stopped ticking, its hands were still at last, and in Ritter’s mind the mental board winked out.

  He took one last devouring gaze at the grotesque, glittering dial. Then he shut the box, wrapped and sealed and corded it, boldly wrote on it in black ink “Chess Champion of the World” and added the proper address.

  He took it to the post office on Van Ness and sent it off by registered mail. Then he went home and slept like the dead.

  Ritter never received a response. But he never got the box back either. Sometimes he wonders if the subsequent strange events in the Champion’s life might have had anything to do with the gift.

  And on even rarer occasions he wonders what would have happened if he had faced the challenge of death and let his mind be racked to bits, if that was what was to happen.

  But on the whole he is content. Questions from Martinez and the others he has put off with purposefully vague remarks.

  He still plays chess at Rimini’s. Once he won another game from Martinez, when the latter was contesting a simul against twenty-three players.

  Belsen Express

  GEORGE SIMISTER WATCHED THE BLUE FLAMES writhe beautifully in the grate, like dancing girls drenched with alcohol and set afire, and congratulated himself on having survived well through the middle of the twentieth century without getting involved in military service, world-saving, or any activities that interfered with the earning and enjoyment of money. Outside rain dripped, a storm snarled at the city from the outskirts, and sudden gusts of wind produced in the chimney a sound like the mourning of doves. Simister shimmied himself a fraction of an inch deeper in his easy chair and took a slow sip of diluted scotch—he was sensitive to most cheaper liquors. Simister’s physiology was on the delicate side; during his childhood certain tastes and odors, playing on an elusive heart weakness, had been known to make him faint.

  The outspread newspaper started to slip from his knee. He detained it, let his glance rove across the next page, noted a headline about an uprising in Prague like that in Hungary in 1956 and murmured, “Damn Slavs,” noted another about border fighting around Israel and muttered, “Damn Jews,” and let the paper go. He took another sip of his drink, yawned, and watched a virginal blue flame flutter frightenedly the length of the log before it turned to a white smoke ghost. There was a sharp knock-knock.

  Simister jumped and then got up and hurried tight lipped to the front door. Lately some of the neighborhood children had been trying to annoy him probably because his was the most respectable and best-kept house on the block. Doorbell ringing, obscene sprayed scrawls, that sort of thing. And hardly children—young rowdies rather, who needed rough handling and a trip to the police station. He was really angry by the time he reached the door and swung it wide. There was nothing but a big wet empty darkness.

  A chilly draft spattered a couple of cold drops on him. Maybe the noise had come from the fire. He shut the door and started back to the living room, but a small pile of books untidily nested in wrapping paper on the hall table caught his eye and he grimaced.

  They constituted a blotchily addressed parcel which the postman had delivered by mistake a few mornings ago. Simister could probably have deciphered the address, for it was clearly on this street, and rectified the postman’s error, but he did not choose to abet the activities of illiterates with leaky pens. And the delivery must have been a mistake for the top book was titled The Scourge of the Swastika and the other two had similar titles, and Simister had an acute distaste for books that insisted on digging up that satisfactorily buried historical incident known as Nazi Germany.

  The reason for this distaste was a deeply hidden fear that George Simister shared with millions, but that he had never revealed even to his wife. It was a quite unrealistic and now completely anachronistic fear of the Gestapo.

  It had begun years before the Second World War, with the first small reports from Germany of minority persecutions and organized hoodlumism—the sense of something reaching out across the dark Atlantic to threaten his life, his security, and his confidence that he would never have to suffer pain except in a hospital.

  Of course it had never got at all close to Simister, but it had exercised an evil tyranny over his imagination. There was one nightmarish series of scenes that had slowly grown in his mind and then had kept bothering him for a long time. It began with a thunderous knocking, of boots and rifle butts rather than fists, and a shouted demand: “Open up! It’s the Gestapo.” Next he would find himself in a stream of frantic people being driven toward a portal where a division was made between those reprieved and those slated for immediate extinction. Last he would be inside a closed motor van jammed so tightly with people that it was impossible to move. After a long time the van would stop, but the motor would keep running, and from the floor, leisurely seeking the crevices between the packed bodies, the entrapped exhaust fumes would begin to mount.

  Now in the shadowy hall the same horrid movie had a belated showing. Simister shook his head sharply, as if he could shake the scenes out, reminding himself that the Gestapo was dead and done with for more than ten years. He felt the angry impulse to throw in the fire the books responsible for the return of his waking nightmare. But he remembered that books are hard to burn. He stared at them uneasily, excited by thoughts of torture and confinement, concentration and death camps, but knowing the nasty aftermath they left in his mind. Again he felt a sudden impulse, this time to bundle the books together and throw them in the trash can. But that would mean getting wet; it could wait until tomorrow. He put the screen in front of the fire, which had died and was smoking like a crematory, and went to bed.

  Some hours later he waked with the memory of a thunderous knocking. He started up, exclaiming, “Those damned kids!” The drawn shades seemed abnormally dark—probably they’d thrown a stone through the street lamp.

  He put one foot on the chilly floor. It was now profoundly still. The storm had gone off like a roving cat. Simister strained his ears. Beside him his wife breathed with irritating evenness. He wanted to wake her and explain about the young delinquents. It was criminal that they were permitted to roam the streets at this hour. Girls with them too, likely as not.

  The knocking was not repeated. Simister listened for footsteps going away, or for the creaking of boards that would betray a lurking presence on the porch.

  After a while he began to wonder if the knocking might not have been part of a dream, or perhaps a final rumble of actual thunder. He lay down and pulled the blankets up to his neck. Eventually his muscles relaxed and he got to sleep.

  At breakfast he told his wife about it.

  “George, it may have been burglars,” she said.

  “Don’t be stupid, Joan. Burglars don’t knock. If it was anything it was those damned kids.”

  “Whatever it was, I wish you’d put a bigger bolt on the front door.” “Nonsense. If I’d known you were going to act this way I wouldn’t have said anything. I told you it was probably just the thunder.”

  But the next night at about the same hour it happened again. This time there could be little question of dreaming. The knocking still reverberated in his ears. And there had been words mixed with it, some sort of yapping in a foreign language. Probably the children of some of those European refugees who had settled in the neighborhood.

  Last night they’d fooled him by keeping perfectly still after banging on the door, but tonight he knew what to do. He tiptoed across the bedroom and went down the stairs rapidly, but quietly because of his bare feet. In the hall he snatched up something to hit them with, then in one motion unlocked and jerked open the door.

  There was no one.

  He stood looking at the darkness. He was puzzled as to how they could have got away so quickly and silently. He shut the door and switched on the light. Then he felt the thing in his hand. It was one of the books. With a feeling of di
sgust he dropped it on the others. He must remember to throw them out first thing tomorrow.

  But he overslept and had to rush. The feeling of disgust or annoyance, or something akin, must have lingered, however, for he found himself sensitive to things he wouldn’t ordinarily have noticed. People especially. The swollen-handed man seemed deliberately surly as he counted Simister’s pennies and handed him the paper. The tight-lipped woman at the gate hesitated suspiciously, as if he were trying to pass off a last month’s ticket.

  And when he was hurrying up the stairs in response to an approaching rumble, he brushed against a little man in an oversize coat and received in return a glance that gave him a positive shock.

  Simister vaguely remembered having seen the little man several times before. He had the thin nose, narrow-set eyes and receding chin that is by a stretch of the imagination described as “rat-faced.” In the movies he’d have played a stool pigeon. The flapping overcoat was rather comic.

  But there seemed to be something at once so venomous and sly, so timebidingly vindictive, in the glance he gave Simister that the latter was taken aback and almost missed the train.

  He just managed to squeeze through the automatically closing door of the smoker after the barest squint at the sign to assure himself that the train was an express. His heart was pounding in a way that another time would have worried him, but now he was immersed in a savage pleasure at having thwarted the man in the oversize coat. The latter hadn’t hurried fast enough and Simister had made no effort to hold open the door for him.

  As a smooth surge of electric power sent them sliding away from the station Simister pushed his way from the vestibule into the car and snagged a strap. From the next one already swayed his chief commuting acquaintance, a beefy, suspiciously red-nosed, irritating man named Holstrom, now reading a folded newspaper one-handed. He shoved a headline in Simister’s face. The latter knew what to expect.