by Gene Wolfe
But he was not the Commissar. He went back into the inn and smoked his pipe until Frau Scheer came down to prepare his breakfast. Then he went to the professor’s room where the machine was kept. Gretchen was already waiting there.
“Now then,” Professor Baumeister said, “I understand that the two of you have it all worked out between you.” And Gretchen nodded solemnly, so that her plump chin looked like a soft little pillow pressed against her throat.
“It is quite simple,” said Lame Hans. “Gretchen does not know how to play, but I have worked out the moves for her and drawn them on a sheet of paper, and we have practiced in my room with a board. We will run through it once here when she is in the machine; then there will be nothing more to do.”
“Is it a short game? It won’t do for her to become confused.”
“She will win in fourteen moves,” Lame Hans promised. “But still it is unusual. I don’t think anyone has done it before. You will see in a moment.”
To Gretchen, Professor Baumeister said: “You’re sure you won’t be mixed up? Everything depends on you.”
The girl shook her head, making her blond braids dance. “No, Herr Professor,” She drew a folded piece of paper from her bosom. “I have it all here, and as my Hans told you, we have practiced in his room, where no one could see us.”
“You aren’t afraid?”
“When I am going to marry Hans, and be mistress of a fine shop? Oh, no, Herr Professor—for that I would do much worse things than to hide in this thing that looks like a stove, and play a game.”
“We are ready, then,” the professor said. “Hans, you still have not explained how it is that a person can hide in there, when the sides can be removed allowing people to look through the machinery. And I confess I still don’t understand how it can be done, or how the pieces are moved.”
“Here,” said Lame Hans, and he pulled out the board as Herr Heitzmann had done in the inn parlor. “Now will you assist me in removing the left side? You should learn the way it comes loose, Professor—someday you may have to do it yourself.” (The truth was that he was not strong enough to handle the big brass sheet by himself, and did not wish to be humiliated before Gretchen.)
“I had forgotten how much empty space there is inside,” Professor Baumeister said when they had it off. “It looks more impossible than ever.”
“It is simple, like all good tricks,” Lame Hans told him. “And it is the sign of a good trick that it is the thing that makes it appear difficult that makes it easy. Here is where the chessboard is, you see, when it is folded up. But when it is unfolded, the panel under it swings out on a hinge to support it, and there are sides, so that a triangular space is formed.”
The professor nodded and said, “I remember thinking when I played you that it looked like a potato bin, with the chessboard laid over the top.”
“Exactly,” Lame Hans continued. “The space is not noticeable when the machine is open, because this circuit is just in front of it. But see here.” And he released a little catch at the top of the circuit card, and pivoted it up to show the empty space behind it. “I am in the machine when it is carried in, but when Heitzmann pulls out the board, I lift this and fit myself under it; then, when the machine is opened for inspection, I am out of view. I can look up through the dark glass of the black squares, and because the pieces are so tall, I can make out their positions. But because it is bright outside, but dim where I am, I cannot be seen.”
“I understand,” said the professor. “But will Gretchen have enough light in there to read her piece of paper?”
“That was why I wanted to hold the match in the street. With the board in sunshine, she will be able to see her paper clearly.”
Gretchen was on her knees, looking at the space behind the circuit card. “It is very small in there,” she said.
“It is big enough,” said Lame Hans. “Do you have the magnet?” And then to the professor: “The pieces are moved by moving a magnet under them. The white pieces are brass, but the black ones are of iron, and the magnet gives them a sliding motion that is very impressive.”
“I know,” said the professor, remembering that he had felt a twinge of uneasiness whenever the machine had shifted a piece. “Gretchen, see if you can get inside.”
The poor girl did the best she could, but encountered the greatest difficulty in wedging herself into the small space under the board. Work in the kitchen of the inn had provided her with many opportunities to snatch a mouthful of pastry or a choice potato dumpling or a half stein of dark beer, and she had availed herself of most of them—with the result that she possessed a lush and blooming figure of the sort that appeals to men like Lame Hans, who, having been withered before birth by the isotopes of the old wars, are themselves thin and small by nature. But though full breasts like ripe melons, and a rounded comfortable stomach and generous hips, may be pleasant things to look at when the moonlight comes in the bedroom window, they are not really well-suited to folding up in a little three-cornered space under a chessboard; and in the end, poor Gretchen was forced to remove her gown, and her shift as well, before she could cram herself, with much gasping and grunting, into it.
An hour later, Willi Schacht the smith’s apprentice and five other men carried the machine out into the street and set it in the space that had been cordoned off for the players, and if they noticed the extra weight, they did not complain of it. And there the good people who had come to see the match looked at the machine, and fanned themselves, and said that they were glad they weren’t in the army on a day like this—because what must it be to serve one of those big guns, which get hot enough to poach an egg after half a dozen shots, even in ordinary weather? And between moppings and fannings they talked about the machine, and the mysterious Herr Zimmer (that was the name Lame Hans had given) who was going to play for two hundred gold kilomarks.
Nine chimes sounded from the old clock in the steeple of Father Karl’s church, and Herr Zimmer did not appear.
Doctor Eckardt, who had been chosen again to hold the stakes, came forward and whispered for some time with Professor Baumeister. The professor (if the truth were known) was beginning to believe that perhaps Lame Hans had decided it was best to forfeit after all—though in fact, if anyone had looked, he would have seen Lame Hans sitting at the bar of the inn at that very moment, having a pleasant nip of plum brandy and then another, while he allowed the suspense to build up as a good showman should.
At last Doctor Eckardt climbed upon a chair and announced: “It is nearly ten. When the bet was made, it was agreed by both parties that if either failed to appear—or appearing, failed to play—the other should be declared the winner. If the worthy stranger, Herr Zimmer, does not make an appearance before ten minutes past ten, I intend to award the money entrusted to me to our respected acquaintance Professor Baumeister.”
There was a murmur of excitement at this, but just when the clock began to strike, Lame Hans called from the door of the inn: “WAIT!” Then hats were thrown into the air, and women stood on tiptoes to see; and fathers lifted their children up as the lame Herr Zimmer made his way down the steps of the inn and took his place in the chair that had been arranged in front of the board.
“Are you ready to begin?” said Doctor Eckardt.
“I am,” said Lame Hans, and opened.
The first five moves were made just as they had been rehearsed. But in the sixth, in which Gretchen was to have slid her queen half across the board, the piece stopped a square short.
Any ordinary player would have been dismayed, but Lame Hans was not. He only put his chin on his hand, and contrived (though wishing he had not drunk the brandy) a series of moves within the frame of the fourteen-move game, by which he should lose despite the queen’s being out of position. He made the first of these moves; and black moved the queen again, this time in a way that was completely different from anything on the paper Hans had given Gretchen. She was deceiving me when she said she did not know how to play, he th
ought to himself. And now she feels she can’t read the paper in there, or perhaps she has decided to surprise me. Naturally she would learn the fundamentals of the game, when it is played in the inn parlor every night. (But he knew that she had not been deceiving him.) Then he saw that this new move of the queen’s was in fact a clever attack, into which he could play and lose.
And then the guns around Kostrzyn, which had been silent since the early hours of the morning, began to boom again. Three times Lame Hans’s hand stretched out to touch his king and make the move that would render it quite impossible for him to escape the queen, and three times it drew back. “You have five minutes in which to move,” Doctor Eckardt said. “I will tell you when only thirty seconds remain, and count the last five.”
The machine was built to play chess, thought Lame Hans. Long ago, and they were warlocks in those days. Could it be that Gretchen, in kicking about … ?
Some motion in the sky made him raise his eyes, looking above the board and over the top of the machine itself. An artillery observation balloon (gray-black, a German balloon then) was outlined against the blue sky. He thought of himself sitting in a dingy little shop full of tobacco all day long, and no one to play chess with—no one he could not checkmate easily.
He moved a pawn, and the black bishop slipped out of the king’s row to tighten the net.
If he won, they would have to pay him. Heitzmann would think everything had gone according to plan, and Professor Baumeister, surely, would hire no assassins. He launched his counterattack: the real attack at the left side of the board, with a false one down the center. Professor Baumeister came to stand beside him, and Doctor Eckardt warned him not to distract the player. There had been seven more than fourteen moves—and there was a trap behind the trap.
He took the black queen’s knight and lost a pawn. He was sweating in the heat, wiping his brow with his sleeve between moves.
A black rook, squat in its iron sandbags, advanced three squares, and he heard the crowd cheer. “That is mate, Herr Zimmer,” Doctor Eckardt announced. He saw the look of relief on Professor Baumeister’s face, and knew that his own was blank. Then over the cheering someone shouted: “Cheat! Cheat!” Gray-black pillbox police caps were forcing their way through the hats and parasols of the spectators.
“There is a man in there! There is someone inside!” It was too clear and too loud—a showman’s voice. A tall stranger was standing on the topmost bench waving Heitzmann’s sweat-stained velvet hat.
A policeman asked: “The machine opens, does it not, Herr Professor? Open it quickly before there is a riot.”
Professor Baumeister said, “I don’t know how.”
“It looks simple enough,” declared the other policeman, and he began to unfasten the catches, wrapping his hand in his handkerchief to protect it from the heat of the brass. “Wait!” ordered Professor Baumeister, but neither one waited; the first policeman went to the aid of the other, and together they lifted away one side of the machine and let it fall against the railing. The movable circuit card had not been allowed to swing back into place, and Gretchen’s plump, naked legs protruded from the cavity beneath the chessboard. The first policeman seized them by the ankles and pulled her out until her half-open eyes stared at the bright sky. Doctor Eckhardt bent over her and flexed her left arm at the elbow. “Rigor is beginning,” he said. “She died of the heat, undoubtedly.”
Lame Hans threw himself on her body weeping.
Such is the story of Lame Hans. The captain of police, in his kindness, has permitted me to push the machine to a position which permits Hans to reach the board through the bars of his cell, and he plays chess there all day long, moving first his own white pieces and then the black ones of the machine, and always losing. Sometimes when he is not quick enough to move the black queen, I see her begin to rock and to slide herself, and the dials and the console lights to glow with impatience; and then Hans must reach out and take her to her new position at once. Do you not think that this is sad for Lame Hans? I have heard that many who have been twisted by the old wars have these psychokinetic abilities without knowing it; and Professor Baumeister, who is in the cell next to his, says that someday a technology may be founded on them.
To the Dark Tower Came
EDGAR: Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still,—Fire, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.
“HE’S SENILE,” Gloucester said.
Kent, who would die that day, shook his head and shrugged. He was standing at the room’s nearest window looking out, his broad shoulders wrapped in an old goatskin cloak.
“Senile,” Gloucester repeated. Hoping to lighten Kent’s mood he added, “I like to think that the first syllable derives from the Anglo-Saxon sendan, meaning ‘to transmit.’ The second from the Latin Nilus, the name of a mythical, northward-flowing river in Africa. This river was supposed to be lined with antique structures; so that transmission to the Nilotic region indicated that a thing was of ancient age.”
Kent said nothing.
“Can you see anything through that ivy? What are you looking at out there?”
“Fog,” Kent said.
Gloucester walked over to the window. The bronze tip of the scabbard hanging from his belt, weighted by the broad blade of the sword within, scraped the stone flags. He peered out. The window was no wider than the length of a man’s forearm, cut in a gray stone wall several times as thick. “Fog my bung, sir,” he said. “Those are clouds. But never mind, we’ll get down, clouds or no.”
“They might be clouds,” Kent answered mildly. “You never can tell.”
“They blasted well are clouds. Throw your dagger out of there, and it would spit an eagle before it struck the ground. There’s no telling how high up we are.”
“I prefer to believe that it is fog,” Kent said. He turned to face Gloucester and seated himself on the clammy windowsill. “I could leave this place at any time, simply by climbing out this window and jumping to the ground. Conversely, if I leave the window unguarded, it is possible that a bear or jaguar or other wild thing might enter.”
“Poor creature,” Gloucester muttered. And then: “So you say it’s fog. All right, sir, climb out. So soon as your feet are on good, solid ground, call to me, and I’ll come too.”
“I prefer not to,” Kent said. His sad, handsome face creased, though only for a second, in a smile. “I believe in intellectual democracy; I know that I am right, but I concede the possibility that you’re right too.”
Gloucester cleared his throat. “Let’s stop amusing ourselves with fancies and look at this logically.” He thrust his hands behind him, under his own tattered cloak, and began to pace up and down. “The king’s senile. I won’t argue definitions with you. You know what I mean, and I know you agree with me, whatever you may say. Now, let’s list the options available to us.”
“We’ve done this before,” Kent said.
“Granted. But let’s do it again. I pride myself, sir, on being a sound sullen scholar; and when there is nothing more to be done, we triple ‘S’ men recast the data—integrate, integrate, integrate, and three pump handles.”
He took a deep breath. “Now then, what is the desired result? What is it we wish? To be away—isn’t that so? To courtier no more? That will do for a beginning. I’d like to leave aside those highflown plans of yours for the time being, and get to something practical.”
“One of my ancestors was supposed to be able to fly,” Kent said. He was craning his neck to look out the window again. “My mother showed me his picture once. The climate must have been warmer then, because his cloak was silk. Red silk. He flew through the air, and it streamed out behind him.”
“A symbolic figure,” Gloucester told him. “He represented the strong man who, ridding himself of the superstitions of the past, devoted himself to improving his own powers and achieving mastery of others. Actually there have been a number of people who’ve tried it, but someone always shoots them.”
&n
bsp; “Bullets ricocheted from his chest,” Kent said dreamily.
There was a beating of vast wings outside the window.
“Listen!”
“Don’t go out there,” Gloucester warned, but Kent had already turned around, and was scrambling on hands and knees through the aperture in the wall until he could thrust his head and shoulders through the curtain of leaves into the faint, free air.
Above his head, and below it, the tower extended until sight failed in white mist. Though Kent knew it to be round, to either side the wall seemed flat—so great was the radius of that mighty curve. (Some, indeed, said that it was infinite.) Vines overgrew the wall; Kent set his foot upon a stout stem, and took another in his right hand; then, drawing his dagger with his left, stepped out, so that he hung suspended in a dark green jungle of foliage over the yawning void.
The wing-wind tugged at his hair and fluttered the fur of the collar at his throat. A vampire flapped systematically up and down the wall, beating the ivy with pinions that were to Kent’s cloak as the cloak to an ivy leaf. There were climbers in the ivy, pale figures Kent knew to be men and women. When the vampire’s wings dislodged them they fell; and the flying horror dove after them until it had them in its claws, then rose again. What it did with them then, Kent could not see—it folded itself in the black membrane of its pinions as though shamed by its own malignancy, hanging in the air, head bowed, like a scud of sooty smoke. When the wings opened again, its victims were gone.
