The Second Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  He replied that he pieces one and all filled him with repugnance—those based on higher life forms usually to a greater degree than the architectural ones. He hated to have to touch or handle them. There was one piece in particular which had an intensely morbid fascination for his dream-self. He identified it as “the archer” because the stylized weapon it bore game the impression of being able to hurt at a distance; but like the rest it was quite inhuman. He described it as representing a kind of intermediate, warped life form which had achieved more than human intellectual power without losing—but rather gaining—in brute cruelty and malignity. It was one of the opposing pieces for which there was no duplicate among his own. The mingled fear and loathing it inspired in him sometimes became so great that they interfered with the strategic grasp of the whole dream-game, and he was afraid his feeling toward it would sometimes rise to such a pitch that he would be forced to capture it just to get it off the board, even though such a capture might compromise his whole position.

  “God knows how my mind ever cooked up such a hideous entity,” he finished, with a quick grin. “Give hundred years ago I’d have said the Devil put it there.”

  “Speaking of the Devil,” I asked, immediately feeling my flippancy was silly, “whom do you play against in your dream?”

  Again he frowned. “I don’t know. the opposing pieces move by themselves. I will have mad a move, and then, after waiting for what seems like an eon, all on edge as in chess, everything still as death, one of the opposing pieces will begin to shake a little and then to wobble back and forth. Gradually the movement increases in extent until the piece gets off balance and begin to rock and careen across the board, like a water tumbler on a pitching ship, until it reaches the proper square. Then, slowly as it began, the movement subsides. I don’t know, but it always makes me think of some huge, invisible, senile creature—crafty, selfish, cruel. You’ve watched that trembly old man at the arcade? The one who always drags the pieces across the board without lifting them, his had constantly shaking? It’s a little like that.”

  I nodded that I got the idea. For that matter, his description made it very vivid. For the first time I began to think of how unpleasant such a dream might be.

  “And it goes on night after night?” I asked.

  “Night after night!” he affirmed with sudden fierceness. “And always the same game. It has been more than a month now, and my forces are just beginning to grapple with the enemy. It’s draining off my mental energy. I with it would stop. I’m getting so I had to go to sleep.” He paused and turned away. “It seems queer,” he said after a moment in a softer voice, smiling apologetically. “It seems queer to get so worked up over a dream. But if you’ve had bad ones, you know how they can cloud your thoughts all day. And I haven;t really managed to get over to you the sort of feeling that grips me while I’m dreaming, and while my brain is working at the game, and plotting move-sequence after move-sequence and weighing a thousand complex possibilities. There’s repugnance, yes, and fear. I’ve told you that. But the dominant feeling is one of responsibility. I must not lose the game. More than my own personal welfare depends upon it. There are some terrible stakes involved, though I am never quite sure what they are.

  “When you were a little child, did you ever worry tremendously about something, with that complete lack of proportion characteristic of childhood? Did you ever feel that everything, literally everything, depended upon your performing some trivial action, some unimportant duty, in just the right way? Well, while I dream, I have the feeling that I’m playing for some stake as big as the fate of mankind. One wrong move may plunge the universe into unending night. Sometimes, in my dream, I feel sure of it.”

  His voice trailed off and he stared at the chessmen. I made some remarks and started to tell about an air-raid nightmare I had just had, but it didn’t seem very important. And I gave him some vague advice about changing his sleeping habits, which did not seem very important either, although he accepted it with good grace. As I started back to my room he said, “Amusing to think, isn’t it, that I’ll be playing the game again as soon as my head hit’s the pillow?” He grinned and added lightly, “Perhaps it will be over sooner than I expect. Lately I’ve had the feeling that my adversary is about to unleash a surprise attack, although he pretends to be on the defensive.” He grinned again and shut the door.

  As I waited for sleep, staring at the wavy churning darkness that is more in the eyes than outside them, I began to wonder whether Moreland did not stand in greater need of psychiatric treatment than most chess players. Certainly a person without family, friends, or proper occupation is liable to mental aberrations. Yet he seemed sane enough. Perhaps the dream was a compensation for his failure to use anything like the full potentialities of his highly talented mind, even at chess-playing. Certainly it was a satisfyingly grandiose vision, with its unearthly background and its implications of stupendous mental skill.

  There floated into my mind the lines from the Rubaiyat about the cosmic chess-player who, “hither and thither moves and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.”

  Then I thought of the emotional atmosphere of his dreams, and the feelings of terror and boundless responsibility, of tremendous duties and cataclysmic consequences—feelings I recognized from my own dreams—and I compared them with the mad, dismal state of the world… I began to see Moreland’s dream as the symbol of a last-ditch, too-late struggle against the implacable forces of fate and chance. And my night thoughts began to revolve around the fancy that some cosmic beings, neither gods nor men, had created human life long ago as a jest or experiment or artistic form, and had now decided to base the fate of their creation on the result of a game of skill played against one of their creatures.

  Suddenly I realized that I was wide awake and that the darkness was no longer restful. I snapped on the light and impulsively decided to see if Moreland was still up.

  The hall was as shadowy and funereal as of most boarding houses late at night, and I tried to minimise the inevitable dry creakings. I waited for a few moments in front of Moreland’s door, but heard nothing, so instead of knocking, I presumed upon our familiarity and edged open the door, quietly, in order not to disturb him if he were asleep.

  It was then that I heard his voice, and so certain was my impression that the sound came from a considerable distance that I immediately waked back to the stair-well and called, “Moreland, are you down there?”

  Only then did I realize what he had said. Perhaps it was the peculiarity of the words that cause them first to resister on my mind as merely a series of sounds.

  The words were, “My spider-thing seizes your armour-bearer. I threaten.”

  It instantly occurred to me that the words were similar in general form to any one of a number of conventional expressions in chess, such as, “My rook captures your bishop. I give check.” But there are no such pieces as “spider-things” or “armour-bearers” in chess or any other game I know of.

  I automatically walked back towards his room, though I still doubted he was there. The voice had sounded much too far away—outside the building or at least in a remote section of it.

  But he was lying on the cot, his upturned face revealed by the light of a distant electric advertisement, which blinked on and off at regular intervals. The traffic sounds, which had been almost inaudible in the hall, made the half-darkness restless and irritably alive. The defective neon sign still buzzed and droned insect like as it had earlier in the evening.

  I tiptoed over and looked down at him. His face, more pale than it should have been because of some quality of the intense concentration—forehead vertically furrowed, muscles around the eye contracted, lips pursed to a line. I wondered if I ought to awaken him. I was acutely aware of the impersonally murmuring city all around us—block on block of shuttling, routine, aloof existence—and the contrast made his sleeping face seem al the more sensitive and vividly individual and unguarded, like some soft though purpose
fully tense organism which has lost its protective shell.

  As I waited uncertainly, the tight lips opened a little without losing any of their tautness. He spoke, and for a second time the impression of distance was so compelling that I involuntarily looked over my shoulder and out the dustily glowing window. Then I began to tremble.

  “My coiled-thing writhes to the thirteenth square of the green ruler’s domain,’ was what he said, but I can only suggest the quality of the voice. Some inconceivable sort of distance had drained it of all richness and throatiness and overtones so that it was hollow and flat and faint and disturbingly mournful, as voices sometimes sound in open country, or from up on a high roof, or when there is a bad telephone connection. I felt I was the victim of some gruesome deception, and yet I knew that ventriloquism is a matter of motionless lips and clever suggestion rather than any really convincing change in the quality of the voice itself. Without volition there rose in my mind visions of infinite space, unending darkness. I felt as if I were being wrenched up and away from the world, so that Manhattan lay below me like a black asymmetric spearhead outlined by leaden waters, and then still farther outward at increasing speed until earth and sun and stars and galaxies were all lost and I was beyond the universe. To such a degree did the quality of Moreland’s voice affect me.

  I do not know how long I stood there waiting for him to speak again, with the noises of Manhattan flowing around yet not quite touching me, and the electric sign blinking on and off unalterably like the ticking of a clock. I could only think about the game that was being played, and wonder whether Moreland’s adversary had yet made an answering move, and whether things were going for or against Moreland. There was no telling from his face; its intensity of concentration did not change. During those moments or minutes I stood there, I believed implicitly in the reality of the game. As if I myself were somehow dreaming, I could not question the rationality of my belief or break the spell which bound me.

  When finally his lips parted a little and I experienced again that impression of impossible, eerie ventriloquism—the words this time being, “My horned-creature vaults over the twisted tower, challenging the archer”—my fear broke loose from whatever controlled it and I stumbled toward the door.

  Then came what was, in an oblique way, the strangest part of the whole episode. In the time it took me to walk the length of the corridor back to my room, most of my fear and most of the feeling of complete alienage and other-worldliness which had dominated me while I was watching Moreland’s face, receded so swiftly that I even forgot, for that time being, how great they had been. I do not know why that happened. Perhaps it was because the unwholesome realm of Moreland’s dream was so grotesquely dissimilar to anything in the real world. Whatever the cause by the time I opened the door to my room I was thinking, “such nightmares can’t be wholesome. Perhaps he should see a psychiatrist. Yet its only a dream,” and so on. I felt tired and stupid. Very soon I was asleep.

  But some wraith of the original emotions must have lingered, for I awoke next morning with the fear that something had happened to Moreland. Dressing hurriedly, I knocked at his door, but found the room empty, the bedclothes still rumpled. I inquired of the landlady, and she said he had gone out at eight fifteen as usual. The bald statement did not quite satisfy my vague anxiety. But since my job-hunting that day happened to lie in the direction of the arcade, I had an excuse to wander in. Moreland was stolidly pushing pieces around with an abstracted, tousled-haired fellow of Slavic features, and casually conducting two rapid-fire checker games on the side. Reassured, I went on without bothering him.

  That evening we had a long talk about dreams in general, and I found him surprisingly well-read on the subject and scientifically cautious is his attitudes. Rather to my chagrin, it was I who introduced such dubious topics as clairvoyance, mental telepathy, and the possibility of strange telescoping and other distortions of time and space during dream states. Some foolish reticence about admitting I had pushed my way into his room last night kept me from telling him what I had heard and seen, but he freely told me he had had another installment of the usual dream. He seemed to take a more philosophical attitude now that he had shared his experiences with someone. Together we speculated as to the possible day time sources of his dream. It was after twelve when we said goodnight.

  I went away with the feeling of having been let down—vaguely unsatisfied. I think the fear I had experienced the previous night and then almost forgotten must have been gnawing at me obscurely.

  And the following evening it found an avenue of return. Thinking Moreland must be tired of talking about dreams, I coaxed him into a game of chess. But in the middle of the game he put back a piece he was about to move, and said, “You know, that damned dream of mine is getting very bothersome,”

  It turned out that his dream adversary had finally loosed the long-threatened attack, and that the dream itself had turned into a kind of nightmare. “Its very much like what happens to you in a game of chess,” he explained “You go along confident that you have a strong position and that the game is taking the right direction. Every move your opponent makes is one you have foreseen. You get to feeling almost omniscient. Suddenly he makes a totally unexpected attacking move. For a moment you think it must be a stupid blunder on his part. Then you look a little more closely and realize that you have totally overlooked something and that his attack is a sound one. Then you begin to sweat.

  “Of course, I’ve always experienced fear and anxiety and a sense of overpowering responsibility during the dream. But my pieces were like a wall, protecting me. Now I can see only the cracks in that wall. At any one of a hundred weak points it might conceivably be broken. Whenever one of the opposing pieces begins to wobble and shake, I wonder whether, when its move is completed, there will flash into my mind the unalterable and unavoidable combination of moves leading to my defeat. Last night I thought I saw such a move, and the terror was so great that everything swirled and I seemed to drop through millions of miles of emptiness in an instant. Yet just in that instant of waking I realized I had miscalculated, and that my position, though perilous, was still secure. It was so vivid that I almost carried with me into my waking thoughts the reason why, but then some of the steps in the train of dream-reasoning dropped out, as if my waking mind were not big enough to hold them all.”

  He also told me that his fixation on “the archer” was becoming increasingly troublesome. It filled him with a special kind of terror, different in quality, but perhaps higher in pitch than that engendered in him by the dream as a whole: a crazy morbid terror, characterized by intense repugnance, nerve-twisting exasperation, and reckless suicidal impulses.

  “I can’t get rid of the feeling,” he said, “that the beastly thing will in some unfair and underhanded manner be the means of my defeat.”

  He looked very tired to me, although his face was of the compact, tough-skinned sort that does not readily show fatigue, and I felt concern for his physical and nervous welfare. I suggested that he consult a doctor (I did not like to say psychiatrist) and pointed out that sleeping tablets might be of some help.

  “But in a deeper sleep the dream might be even more vivid and real,” he answered, grimacing sardonically. “No I’d rather play out the game under the present conditions.”

  I was glad to find that he still viewed the dream as an interesting and temporary psychological phenomenon (what else he could have viewed it as, I did not stop to analyze). Even while admitting to me the exceptional intensity of his emotions, he maintained something of a jesting air. Once he compared his dream to a paranoid’s delusions of persecution, and asked whether I didn’t think it was good enough to get him admitted to an asylum.

  “Then I could forget the arcade and devote all my time to dream-chess,” he said, laughing sharply as soon as he saw I was beginning to wonder whether he had not meant the remark half-seriously.

  But some part of my mind was not convinced by his protestations, and when later I
tossed in the dark, my imagination perversely kept picturing the universe as a great arena in which each creature is doomed to engage in a losing game of skill against demoniac mentalities which, however long they may play cat and mouse, are always assured of final mastery—or almost assured, so that it would be a miracle if they were beaten.

  COMING ATTRACTION

  Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950.

  The coupe with the fishhooks welded to the fender shouldered up over the curb like the nose of a nightmare. The girl in its path stood frozen, her face probably stiff with fright under her mask. For once my reflexes weren’t shy. I took a fast step toward her, grabbed her elbow, yanked her back. Her black skirt swirled out.

  The big coupe shot by, its turbine humming. I glimpsed three faces. Something ripped. I felt the hot exhaust on my ankles as the big coupe swerved back into the street. A thick cloud like a black flower blossomed from its jouncing rear end, while from the fishhooks flew a black shimmering rag.

  “Did they get you?” I asked the girl.

  She had twisted around to look where the side of her skirt was torn away. She was wearing nylon tights.

  “The hooks didn’t touch me,” she said shakily. “I guess I’m lucky.”

  I heard voices around us:

  “Those kids! What’ll they think up next?”

  “They’re a menace. They ought to be arrested.”

  Sirens screamed at a rising pitch as two motor-police, their rocket-assist jets full on, came whizzing toward us after the coupe. But the black flower had become a thick fog obscuring the whole street. The motor-police switched from rocket assists to rocket brakes and swerved to a stop near the smoke cloud.

  “Are you English?” the girl asked me. “You have an English accent.”

  Her voice came shudderingly from behind the sleek black satin mask. I fancied her teeth must be chattering. Eyes that were perhaps blue searched my face from behind the black gauze covering the eyeholes of the mask. I told her she’d guessed right. She stood close to me. “Will you come to my place tonight?” she asked rapidly. “I can’t thank you now. And there’s something you can help me about.”