Charles DeVett & Katherine MacLean

by Cosmic Checkmate

He raised his hand to stop me when he thought I would speak. “Oh, I know. You have not lost yet. But you will. Yondtl will beat you!”

  It was not a subject I cared to debate. “What is Yondtl?” I asked. “An idiot savantP”

  Trobt shook his head. “Yondtl is the most intelligent man on Velda.”

  “How does it happen that he still lives?” I asked. “If I understand your ways, he should have been smothered in his cradle.”

  Trobt was on his feet by the time I’d finished speaking. But he seemed to change his , mind in mid-rising, and poured himself a second goblet of liquor.

  He was more sober now and I could tell by his short clipped speech that he was feeling some emotion that would have been anger against anyone else. But we two had by this time arrived at such an understanding of each other that anger was unknown.

  “Do you remember when I stopped in the park with you and explained why you would die?” he asked. “It is very unusual for me to do. If you recall I spoke low. I did not want the others to hear me. They would not have understood.” His sentences came out sharp and direct. “On Velda it is an insult to ask a man his reasons. He does what he believes right. He will never explain his actions. If you question them you are impunging his Honor. I did something very disagreeable for me. I wanted you to see us as we are. To not think us savages. What you ask me now is that kind of insult.”

  This was a part of their nature I still did not understand. “But why?” I asked. “It was a matter of mere curiosity. You know I meant no offense. Why should you object to answering?”

  “What you say is true. But it is …” He hesitated. “What is your word for it? Indelicate! That is it.”

  He saw that the explanation meant little to me.

  “Wait. One minute,” he said. “I understand your ways even less than you do ours, but I should be able to find some situation of your Worlds to demonstrate what I mean.

  “Here,” he resumed after a minute. “You visit a friend when he returns from his first marriage journey. Perhaps there are other friends there. You are introduced to his mate, and admire her beauty. You ask, ‘And did you find her a virgin?”

  “You mean no harm. You are not unduly curious. You are certain that he did find her such, and will be happy to tell you.” He paused. “Do you see the indelicacy of it, the insult, even though he may recognize your good intentions?

  “Are you surprised then,” Trobt went on, “when he does

  not tell you, joyfully, that she was a virgin? Or that he does not explain, that while she was not a virgin, there had been only two others, whereas the average …”

  The laughter I could not hold back halted him. He looked at me in surprise. Even when I realized that he wasn’t joking, by his nature couldn’t be joking, I was unable to stop.

  “I am convinced,” I said finally.

  “Now.” Truly Trobt felt like talking tonight. “You ask why Yondtl still lives. I will tell you.

  “Yondtl is my shame. Others’ also—but mine more. And I , do not know how to erase the shame.

  “You are correct in believing that he should have been removed at birth. But his mother loved him too much. She hid him and we never heard of his inception. For years she fed and cared for him, and kept her secret.

  “As Yondtl grew older his need for intellectual stimulation led him to make a few friends, with whom he conversed and played the Game. The circle of those who knew of him grew as his genius evidenced itself. Eventually the knowledge reached the Council.

  “I went down with several guardians to take him to a place of painless sleep. It was a disagreeable task, but I could not shirk it because of that.

  “When I arrived, and the guardians made ready to take him, his old mother—you saw her—fell on her knees and clutched my cloak, begging me not to do it.

  “Can you picture it?’ Trobt was visibly moved. “This old woman, on her knees, groveling at my feet, kissing my boots, deliberately debasing herself, weeping and begging me not to take her son?

  “The embarrassment of it, the humiliation I felt because of what I was forced to watch her do. Can you imagine my emotions? My shame? What was I to do? Could I push this miserable old wretch aside, tear her hands from my cloak, and carry the only thing she loved from her house?

  “I ran, actually ran, out into the street.” When he had finished Trobt sat with head bent.

  “You did right,” I said softly.

  “Right?” He was indignant. “Could I let him live, and not be forced in conscience to allow every miserable misfit on Velda to live also? In a few generations the strength of our clansmen would be dissipated by my folly!”

  I reached to touch his shoulder. He jerked away and strode from the room. He would do no more talking that night.

  This time I understood him. Completely. Yondtl was Trobt’s scarlet letter.

  After Trobt left I dropped quickly to sleep. I awoke at daylight, however, with all my senses alert. I had much thinking to do before evening came. Trobt had told me, on the ride back the night before, that to the best of his knowledge, Yondtl had never lost a Game. This only confirmed my earlier conviction that our next meeting would be the ultimate test of my ability. I would have to plan my stratagems as fully and well as I was able before I met him again. And they must be excellent. Anything less than my very best would not be good enough.

  I considered first what Yondtl’s weakness might be. It has always been my conviction that every man has at least one. In my mind I reviewed all our play, re-enacting the gambits he had used, mine, and the means he had employed to foil them. I tried to find moves he had made that might have been done better. My eventual conclusion was that if he had a weakness, he had not yet revealed it. I was almost ready to believe he had none.

  Next I made a balance sheet in my mind and weighed our assets.

  For Yondtl I put down a brilliant mind, cold logic, innate power of concentration, mental stamina, and faultless execution. A formidable array.

  On my side I conceded equal logic and adeptness of execution. I had, in addition, my gift of perception—my ability to spot an opponent’s weakness. This to a greater degree than Yondtl—perhaps. But of what aid would it be to me against a player who gave no evidence of. ever making a mistake?

  Finally, though Yondtl had shown no weakness, I had! And this was my first knowledge of it. Yet I could see the fault very plainly, now that it had been exposed. My mind was too inquisitive—too eager to leam all it could about everything it saw—for the kind of competition I now had to engage. In the Game it robbed me of just a fraction of the concentration I needed when I played Yondtl. There was the consolation, that having recognized the weakness I would be doubly careful to guard against it.

  Also, there was the annotator. Its inquisitiveness might spoil my concentration if I allowed it, but to balance that, it should be my greatest strength. It had seldom failed me before.

  In addition to the above I felt keen. My reflexes were primed, sharp and ready for the coming encounter. Having given the problem the best I had, I was satisfied. I lay on my pallet and slept soundly until Trobt aroused me in the evening.

  When we began our game I found that I had made one other decision. Playing the way I had I would never beat Yondtl. A stand-off was the best I could hope for. Therefore the time had come for more consummate action. I would engage him in a triple decoy gambit!

  I had no illusion that I could handle it—in the manner it should be handled. I doubt that any man, Human or Veldian, could. But at least I would play it’ with the greatest skill I had, giving my best to every move, and push the game up the scale of reason and involution—up and up—until either Yondtl or I became lost in its innumerable complexities, and fell.

  As I attacked, the complexes and complications would grow gradually more numerous, become more and more difficult, until they embraced a span greater than one of us had the capacity to encompass, and the other would win.

  The Game began and I forced it into the patte
rn I had planned. Each play, each maneuver, became all-important, demanding the greatest skill I could command. Each pulled at the core of my brain, dragging out the last iota of sentient stuff that writhed there. Yondtl stayed with me, complex gambit through complex gambit.

  When the strain became too great I forced my mind to pause, to rest, and to be ready for the next clash. At the first break I searched the annotator. It was working steadily, with an almost smooth throb of efficiency, keeping the position of each pukt, and its value, strong in the forefront of visualization.

  But something was missing!

  A minute went by before I spotted the fault. The move of each pukt involved so many possibilities, so many avenues of choice, that no exact answer was predictable on any one. The number and variation of gambits open on every play, each subject to the multitude of Yondtl’s counter-moves, stretched the possibilities beyond prediction. The annotator was a harmonizing, perceptive force, but not a creative, initiating one.

  It was like an Earth computer, given a problem of the time a space ship would need to travel from one planet to another. It had the weight, Volume, and fuel potentialities of the vessel, the drag of the planets’ gravities, the course, and all other relevant factors, everything it needed. Except the distance between the planets.

  The annotator, and the computer, operated in a statistical manner, and could not perform effectively where a crucial factor or factors were unknown, or concealed, as they were here.

  My greatest asset was negated.

  At the end of the third hour I began to feel a steady pain in my temples, as though a tight metal band pressed against my forehead and squeezed it inward. The only reaction I could discern in Yondtl was that the blue glint in his eyes had become brighter. All his happiness seemed gathered there.

  Soon my pauses became more frequent. Great waves of brain weariness had to be allowed to subside before I could play again.

  And at last it came.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Yondtl threw a pukt across the board and took my second decoy—and there was no way for me to retaliate!

  I felt a kind of calm dismay. My shoulders sagged and I pushed the board away from me and slumped in my chair.

  I had been beaten.

  X

  The next two days were very quiet. Trobt made no effort to seek me out—I presume in deference to how I must feel.

  I had my meals in my room, and skipped my evening walks.

  I suppose it could have been said that I was sulking. But I had good reason. Not only had I lost to Yondtl, but I had a feeling of drowning, of becoming ever more entangled in the mesh of the trap into which I had gotten myself. I was able to do nothing to help the Ten Thousand Worlds, and my own crisis had but one predictable end.

  Predictable because by now I understood quite well the culture that had ensnared me. This was a warrior nation, with warrior ethics. They would pass on to their captives and enemies the strain most familiar to them. The endurance test. The test where a man is expected to go to his breaking point, and beyond. I had not even the consolation that I would refuse to fight that long. I knew that I would. For myself, and for the pride of the race from which I had sprung. Those two days were dreary.

  The evening of the second day Trobt woke me.

  “I know you do not fear this,” he said without preliminary, “but I wish I could spare you.”

  Something in his constrained manner brought me to my feet. “The Final Game?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. Tonight we must question you again.”

  “What do you think you will learn that you could not before?^

  “We have given it much thought. I think we will leam more.”

  “The truth serum has its limitations,” I said. I do not know why I argued. I knew it was useless. But my resistance had been so battered that I think I talked only to gain time, to postpone what must come.

  “We will try our own methods this time,” Trobt answered.

  “Torture?”

  “I doubt that that will be necessary. But if it is, we will use it. In the end you will talk.”

  The cloak I put about my shoulders covered a far heavier garment.

  “I can give you this assurance,” Trobt said as we left, “we will harm you no more than we must. We would be cheating both ourselves and you if we made you unfit to die like a man.

  I was not alone with the two men who questioned me. Through a glass wall at the end of the room another dozen watched. I was certain they would have means of hearing us also. Trobt was among them.

  I had only one fatalistic thought. One resolution. This would be a better time to die than later. At least it would be for a cause. I had come into the room prepared to be carried from it.

  My questioners made no pretense of gentleness. They were rough-voiced, and evidently prepared to be roughhanded, if necessary. At the beginning their questions were much the same as under the serum drugging: the power and war potentials of the Ten Thousand Worlds. They threw their questions rapidly, unmercifully, beating at my brain with repetition, going over and over the same ground, hour after hour, asking the same questions, rephrasing and asking them again. I doubt if they learned much th6re. I was not influenced by the drag this time, and they still lacked the background for proper understanding of the answers I gave to mislead them.

  They forced me to stand during the ordeal. At first when I tired they gave me brief rests and a cool drink—I was answering the questions they asked. But as it became apparent that they were learning little they gave me no more breaks. They kept me standing and pounded on and on with their questions.

  By midnight I was near the end of my endurance. “I need rest,” I said.

  “Stand!” one of my interrogators barked. He was a broad, big-bellied man with a scar that smeared the line of his left eyebrow.

  I felt the strength flow from my legs.

  The big-bellied man slapped my face savagely with both hands. The wall against my back held me up for a moment, as I brushed at his hands, and he drove his fist into my stomach.

  I reached for the last ragged threads of my vitality and hit him on the side of the head and he staggered back and fell to the floor. From the comer of my eye I saw the other inquisitor swing a padded weapon at my head—and I had my rest at last.

  When consciousness returned I found that I was still on my feet. The inquisitors each held one arm and supported me against the wall. The questions resumed. This time they were different. Perhaps my questioners had been waiting for the sign of weakness I had shown.

  “What did you learn in the eight days you were free in Hearth?” Now they were asking questions about their own side. They would understand the answers I gave.

  I shook my head.

  The short man released his hold on my arm and hit me on the cheekbone. “Will we win our war against the Ten Thousand Worlds?”

  I shrugged.

  He struck me twice more. Brutally. “Did you find a weakness?”

  I would gladly have given my life if I could have avoided answering that. I struggled so hard to be silent that my brain sagged with my body. They jerked me upright. “Did you find a weakness?”

  I heard the answer that came as objectively as though someone else had spoken it.

  Yes.

  “Ah…r

  I noted then a frightening fact. The annotator—the thing in my mind that was a part of me, and yet apart from me— had assumed control. It had made its motion to take command at the moment when I had been beaten into small resistance, and it found little opposition.

  And I knew the reason it had made its play. It was not concerned with matters of emotion; with sentiments of patriotism, loyalty, honor, and self-respect. It was interested only in my—and its own—survival. Its logic told it that unless I gave the answers my tormentors wanted they would beat me until I did. Until I died, if necessary. And that it had set out to prevent.

  I made one last desperate effort to stop that other part of my mind
from retaining control—and sank lower into my physical and mental impotence.

  “What is our weakness?”

  Waves of sound coming from within the head itself blurred my hearing and I could barely make out the question. But I heard the answer very clearly.

  Your society is doomed.

  The annotator had answered again as I stood helpless. And with the answer I understood that I had known it all the while, but that I had never quite put the thought into concrete form.

  “Why?” The questions went on as I stood with eyes tightly closed.

  There are many reasons.

  “Give one.”

  Your culture is based on a need to struggle, for combat. When there is no one to fight it must fall.

  My questioners were shrewd. They knew the questions to ask now. They were dealing with a familiar culture.

  “Explain that.”

  I could exercise no restraint—as I had when there was only the truth serum to fight. Now I had a pent-up flood of knowledge within that would no longer be held back.

  Your culture is based on its impetuous need to battle-it is armed and set against dangers and the expectation of danger—fostering the pride of courage under stress—There is no danger now—nothing to fight, no place to spend your over-aggressiveness, except against each other in personal duels. Already your decline is about to enter the bloody circus and religion stage, already crumbling in the heart while expanding at the outside. And this is your first civilization—you have no experience of a fall in your history before to have recourse to—no cushion of philosophy to accept it.

  For a time I sensed a puzzled silence In my tormentors. I doubted that they had the intelligence, or the depth of understanding, to accept -the truth and significance of what they heard. But they were competent men in their job. One of them went over to the glass wall and through a doorway in its side. He returned a few minutes later.

  “Is there no solution?” he asked.

  Only a temporary one. Now it was coming.

  “Explain.”

  War with the Ten Thousand Worlds. I tasted the rusty tang of blood in my mouth where my teeth had bitten into my tongue.