The Change War

by Fritz Leiber

  The rattling returned with me—at once and peremptorily, as if something were growing impatient.

  I couldn’t focus on the print any more. I picked up a cracker and put it down. I touched the cold milk carton and my throat constricted and I drew my fingers away.

  I looked at my typewriter and then I thought of the blank sheet of green paper and the explanation for Max’s strange act suddenly seemed clear to me. Whatever happened to him tonight, he wanted me to be able to type a message over his signature that would exonerate me. A suicide note, say. Whatever happened to him…

  The window beside me shook violently, as if at a terrific gust.

  It occurred to me that while I must not look out the window as if expecting to see something (that would be the sort of give-away against which Max warned me) I could safely let my gaze slide across it—say, if I turned to look at the clock behind me. Only, I told myself, I mustn’t pause or react if I saw anything.

  I nerved myself. After all, I told myself, there was the blessed possibility that I would see nothing outside the taut pane but darkness.

  I turned my head to look at the clock.

  I saw it twice, going and coming back, and although my gaze did not pause or falter, my blood and my thoughts started to pound as if my heart and mind would burst.

  It was about two feet outside the window—a face or mask or muzzle of a more gleaming black than the darkness around it. The face was at the same time the face of a hound, a panther, a giant bat, and a man—in between those four. A pitiless, hopeless man-animal face alive with knowledge but dead with a monstrous melancholy and a monstrous malice. There was the sheen of needlelike white teeth against black lips or dewlaps. There was the dull pulsing glow of eyes like red coals.

  My gaze didn’t pause or falter or go back—yes—and my heart and mind didn’t burst, but I stood up then and stepped jerkily to the typewriter and sat down at it and started to pound the keys. After a while my gaze stopped blurring and I started to see what I was typing. The first thing I’d typed was:

  the quick red fox jumped over the crazy black dog…

  I kept on typing. It was better than reading. Typing I was doing something, I could discharge. I typed a flood of fragments: “Now is the time for all good men—”, the first words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Winston Commercial, six lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” without punctuation, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Mary had a big black—”

  In the middle of it all the face of the electric clock that I’d looked at sprang into my mind. My mental image of it had been blanked out until then. The hands were at quarter to twelve.

  Whipping in a fresh yellow sheet, I typed the first stanza of Poe’s “Raven,” the Oath of Allegiance to the American Flag, the lost-ghost lines from Thomas Wolfe, the Creed and the Lord’s prayer, “Beauty is truth; truth, blackness—”

  The rattling made a swift circuit of the windows—though I heard nothing from the bedroom, nothing at all—and finally the rattling settled on the kitchen door. There was a creaking of wood and metal under pressure.

  I thought: You are standing guard. You are standing guard for yourself and for Max. And then the second thought came: If you open the door, if you welcome it in, if you open the kitchen door and then the bedroom door, it will spare you, it will not hurt you.

  Over and over again I fought down that second thought and the urge that went with it. It didn’t seem to be coming from my mind, but from the outside. I typed Ford, Buick, the named of all the automobiles I could remember, Overland Moon, I typed all the four-letter words, I typed the alphabet, lower case and capitals. I typed the numerals and punctuation marks, I typed the keys of the keyboard in order from left to right, top to bottom, then in from each side alternately. I filled the last yellow sheet I was on and it fell out and I kept pounding mechanically, making shiny black marks on the dull black platen.

  But then the urge became something I could not resist. I stood up and in the sudden silence I walked through the hall to the back door, looking down at the floor and resisting, dragging each step as much as I could.

  My hands touched the knob and the long-handled key in the lock. My body pressed the door, which seemed to surge against me, so that I felt it was only my counter-pressure that kept it from bursting open in a shower of splintered glass and wood.

  Far off, as if it were something happening in another universe, I heard the University clock tolling One…two…

  And then, because I could resist no longer, I turned the key and the knob.

  The lights all went out.

  In the darkness the door pushed open against me and something came in past me like a gust of cold black wind with streaks of heat in it.

  I heard the bedroom door swing open.

  The clock completed its strokes. Eleven…twelve…

  And then…

  Nothing…nothing at all. All pressures lifted from me. I was aware only of being alone, utterly alone, I knew it, deep down.

  After some…minutes, I think, I shut and locked the door and I went over and opened a drawer and rummaged out a candle, lit it, and went through the apartment and into the bedroom.

  Max wasn’t there. I’d known he wouldn’t be. I didn’t know how badly I’d failed him. I lay down on the bed and after a while I began to sob and, after another while, I slept.

  Next day I told the janitor about the lights. He gave me a funny look.

  “I know,” he said. “I just put in a new fuse this morning. I never saw one blown like that before. The window in the fuse was gone and there was a metal sprayed all over the inside of the box.”

  That afternoon I got Max’s message. I’d gone for a walk in the park and was sitting on a bench beside the lagoon, watching the water ripple in the breeze when I felt something burning against my chest. For a moment I thought I’d dropped my cigarette butt inside my windbreaker. I reached in and touched something hot in my pocket and jerked it out. It was the sheet of green paper Max had given me. Tiny threads of smoke were rising from it.

  I flipped it open and read, in a scrawl that smoked and grew blacker instant by instant:

  Thought you’d like to know I got through okay. Just in time. I’m back with my outfit. It’s not too bad. Thanks for the rearguard action.

  The handwriting (thought-writing?) of the blackening scrawl was identical with the salutation above and the signature below.

  And then the sheet burst into flame. I flipped it away from me. Two boys launching a model sailboat looked at the paper flaming, blackening, whitening, disintegrating…

  I know enough chemistry to know that paper smeared with wet white phosphorus will burst into flame when it dries completely. And I know there are kinds of invisible writing that are brought out by heat. There are those general sorts of possibility. Chemical writing.

  And then there’s thoughtwriting, which is nothing but a word I’ve coined. Writing from a distance—a literal telegram.

  And there may be a combination of the two—chemical writing activated by thought from a distance…from a great distance.

  I don’t know. I simply don’t know. When I remember that last night with Max, there are parts of it I doubt. But there’s one part I never doubt.

  When the gang asks me, “Where’s Max?” I just shrug.

  But when they get to talking about withdrawals they’ve covered; rearguard actions they’ve been in, I remember mine. I’ve never told them about it, but I never doubt that it took place.

  Knight to Move

  THE tall, long-haired girl in the trim olive uniform with the black spiral insignia was tapping very lightly in a dash-dot-dot rhythm on the gallery’s golden rail where her elbows rested.

  It was her one concession to nervousness. Though Rule Number One of her training had been that even a single such concession can get you killed.

  The beautiful hawk face hooded by black bangs searched the golden hall below, where a thousand intelligent beasts from half
as many planets were playing chess. The pieces were being moved and the buttons of the time-clocks pressed oftener by tendrils, crablike pincers, and prosthetic devices than by fingers. Dark-clad referees and ushers silently walked on tentacle tips or soft-shod hooves—or feet—between the tables and among the spectators packed in the stands to either side.

  Just an interstellar chess tournament, Swiss system, twenty-four rounds, being conducted on the fifth planet of the star 61 Cygni in the year 5037 A. D., old Earth Time.

  Yet inside the girl’s mind a muffled alarm bell was ringing, barely in the conscious area.

  While outside, a faint whining buzz somewhere far off in the hall reminded her of a wasp in the rafters of the huge dark barn behind the Minnesota farmhouse where she’d been raised. She wondered briefly about the insect life of 61 Cygni 5, then slapped off that train of thought.

  First things first!—meaning the alarm bell.

  She glanced around the almost empty gallery. At the head of the ramp down to the hall were two robots with a stretcher and a yellow-beaked nurse from a planet of Tau Ceti, who bobbed her red topknot and ruffled her feathers under her white smock. The girl almost smiled—surely chess wasn’t that dangerous a game! Still, when a thousand hearts, some old, were pounding with tension…

  Only her green eyes moved as she searched out the two players who not only looked human but actually were from Earth—a man and a woman, one currently in thirty-seventh place, still with a chance to end in the money. She felt a small flame of sympathy, but instantly extinguished it.

  An agent of the Snakes should never feel sympathy.

  Her nervous tapping speeded up as she searched her tidy mind for the cause of her alarm. It did not seem to involve any of the silent, furiously thinking beasts, humanoid or inhuman.

  Could it be connected with the game of chess itself? With the coming of star-flight, chess had been discovered to exist with almost identical rules on at least half of all intelligent planets, spread by forgotten star-traders, perhaps. There was something about one of the moves in chess—

  Under her uniform and lingerie, between her breasts, she felt a large spider moving. No mistaking that quick clingy tread on her naked skin.

  She did not flinch. The prickly footsteps were pulses on a narrow metal plate pressing against that sensitive area of her body—pulses which warned of the approach of the body or projection of a friend, a neutral, an unknown, or—in this case—an enemy.

  It was a rather common device. For that matter, the being approaching her felt the scaly gliding of a snake high on the inside of his thigh, and he reacted as little.

  The girl instantly stopped her dash-dot-dot tapping, although it had been soundless and her other arm had concealed her black-gloved fingers. While watching in the polished black leather of her gauntlet the casual approach of the being along the golden rail, she yawned delicately and tapped her lips with the Cordova-scented back of her other glove. She knew it was corny, but she loved doing it to enemy agents.

  The man stopped a few inches away. He looked twice her age, but fit and youthful. His gray-flecked hair was cut close to his skull. He wore a sharp black uniform with silver insignia that were eight-legged asterisks. He had three times as many silver decorations on his chest as she had black iron ones. To most girls he would have seemed a shining silver knight.

  This one ignored his presence. He studied her shoulder-length, gleaming hair, then rested his own arms on the golden rail and gazed down at the chessplayers too. Man and girl were the same height.

  “The beasts beat out their brains for an empty title,” he murmured. “It makes me feel delightfully lazy, Erica, sister mine.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t trade on the similarity of our first names, Colonel von Hohenwald,” she replied softly.

  He shrugged. “Erich von Hohenwald and Erica Weaver—it has always seemed to me a charming coincidence…er—” He smiled at her. “…Major. When we meet in the open, in uniform, on a peaceful mission, it seems to me both agreeable and courteous to fraternize. Or sororize? Geschwisterize? No matter how much throat-cutting in the dark we must do the rest of the time. Now how about a drink?”

  “Between Snake and Spider,” she answered fiercely, yet still softly and still without looking at him, “there can be nothing but armed truce—with eyes wide open and finger on the trigger!”

  The Spiders and the Snakes were the two great warring undergrounds of the Milky Way galaxy. They warred in time, seeking to change the past and future to their advantage, but also in space. Most intelligent planets were infiltrated predominantly by one force or the other, though on some planets, like Earth, they struck a balance and the Unending War was hotter. 61 Cygni 5 was a neutral planet, resembling an open city. Like racketeers turned respectable, the Spiders and Snakes operated here openly—by a mutual agreement which neither side really trusted. Behind the mask of amity, they were competing for such planets; on them the silver asterisk of the Spider and the black spiral of the Snake were recognized, respected, and shunned.

  Each underground recruited agents from all times and races—agents who seldom knew the identity of more than a few comrades, a scatter of underlings, and one superior officer. Erica and Erich, though on opposite sides, had both been recruited from Twentieth Century Earth. It was a common experience for an agent to find himself five thousand or many more years in the future, or past. Some agents hated their work, but punishment came swiftly to the traitor or slacker. Others gloried in it.

  “Teufelrot!—what a murderous slim Amazon you are!” the Spider Colonel commented.

  “The Amazons cut off their right breasts to be able to pull their bows to the fullest bend,” the Snake Major retorted evenly. “I would do the same if—”

  “But—Gott sei dank!—you haven’t,” he cut in. “Erica, they’re magnificent! And did they not tauten a trifle when my insignia walked between them? That’s where you wear your warning plate, do you not?”

  “I hope yours bites you!”

  “Don’t say it!” he protested. “Then I wouldn’t be able to appreciate you with any gusto. Erica, must you hate twenty-four hours a day? It hasn’t injured your loveliness yet, not quite, but—”

  He laid a scarred hand against her black-gloved one. She snatched it away and sharply slapped his fingers, her face still bland and looking out.

  “Verdammt!” he cursed lightly, but there was pleasure in his voice. “My dear green serpent with black fangs, you’re much too serious for trace-times. To begin with, you wear too many medals. If I were you, I’d throw away that Ophidian Order of Merit. In fact, if we weren’t being watched, I’d rip it off you myself.”

  “And you with your silver chestload? Just try it,” she breathed, her body poised, her black fingertips hovering on the gold rail.

  The other looked oddly, almost worriedly, at her profile, then went on, now banteringly, “My dear Major, how does a firebrand like you—a puritan, yes, but a firebrand also—manage, without going crazy from boredom, to endure this?” He spread the fingers of one hand toward the floor below. Played at fifteen moves an hour, chess is a slow game. Not a piece was grasped—by tentacle or other member—not a button was pressed while his fingers stayed outspread. “And it goes on for a month!” he finished. Then his voice became elaborately sardonic. “For refreshment do you perhaps visit the Rose Hall, where the great bridge tournament is in progress? Or do you recruit your patience in the Black Hall, where they endlessly play that peculiarly intricate Centaurian backgammon?”

  “I dislike bridge, I can barely tolerate chess, backgammon I despise,” she lied flatly. She was still searching for the thought about chess that his arrival—only a coincidence?—had chased away.

  “Perhaps you go too far in undervaluing games,” he said, seeming now to shrug off all feeling and become philosophical. “To begin with our own planet and time of recruitment, who can say how much the shared passion for chess had to do with healing the differences between Russia and the West, o
r how long the whist mind and bridge mentality maintained British might—or what k’ta’hra did for Alpha Centaurus Two?”

  She lifted, dropped her shoulders. The alarm bell was still dinning faintly. She must search again, thoroughly, before the elusive thought dived back forever into her deep unconscious.

  And the wasp was still faintly whining somewhere, as if in endless search.

  The enemy Colonel lectured on: “The games played at the three tournaments here at 61 Cygni 5 represent the three basic types found in the known universe. First, the track games like backgammon and k’ta’hra and parcheesi and dominoes and an American money-fraught monstrosity I remember was called Monopoly. In those games there is a one-dimensional track or trail along which pieces move according to the throws of dice or their equivalents. No matter how much the track curves, or even knots, it remains one-dimensional.

  “Second, there are the board games like chess and checkers and Go and Martian jetan—two-dimensional.”

  Erica put in, frowning slightly, “It’s odd that most intelligent planets should be addicted chiefly either to board games or track games. On most planets where chess flourishes, k’ta’hra languishes. And vice versa. I wonder why?”

  He shrugged. “Finally, there are the card games, where the essential element is the masked counter, the piece of unknown value, whether it be a card or a hinged Barnardian egg or a bamboo-and-ivory Mah-Jongg block. Hearts, pinochle, skat, and the emperor of them all, contract bridge.

  “Then there are the mixed types. Cribbage to some degree mates the card game with the track game, while I recall one named Spy—our game, eh?—in which pieces of masked value are moved on a board. But in the aggregate—”

  At that instant the whining buzz grew louder. And louder.

  Coming straight at Erica across the hall, increasing in speed every instant, was what looked like a rather large wasp.

  The Spider Colonel grabbed at her, but she had moved like a snake away from him down the rail.

  The insect shifted its aim, still driving straight at her.