Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  Ritter cleared a space beside one of them and set in its center the box and packet. After a brief pause—as if for propitiatory prayer, he told himself sardonically—he gingerly took out the Morphy watch and centered it for inspection with the unwrapped silver pawn behind it.

  Then, wiping and adjusting his glasses and from time to time employing a large magnifying glass, he examined both treasures exhaustively.

  The outer edge of the dial was circled with a ring or wheel of twentyfour squares, twelve pale and twelve dark alternating. On the pale squares were the figures of chessmen indicating the hours, placed in the order the old Balt had described. The Black pieces went from midnight to five and were of silver set with tiny emeralds or bright jade, as his magnifying glass confirmed. The White pieces went from six to eleven and were of gold set with minute rubies or amethysts. He recalled that descriptions of the watch always mentioned the figures as being colored.

  Inside that came a second circle of twenty-four pale and dark squares.

  Finally, inside that, there was a two-thirds circle of sixteen squares below the center of the dial.

  In the corresponding space above the center was the little window showing P.M.

  The hands on the dial were stopped at 11:57—three minutes to midnight.

  With a paperknife he carefully pried open the hinged back of the watch, on which were floridly engraved the initials PM—which he suddenly realized also stood for Paul Morphy.

  On the inner golden back covering the works was engraved “France H&H”—the old Balt was right again—while scratched in very tiny—he used his magnifier once more—were a half-dozen sets of numbers, most of the sevens having the French slash. Pawnbrokers’ marks. Had Arnous de Riviere pawned the treasure? Or later European owners? Oh well, chess players were an impecunious lot. There was also a hole by which the watch could be wound with its hexagonal key. He carefully wound it but of course nothing happened.

  He closed the back and brooded on the dial. The sixty-four squares— twenty-four plus twenty-four plus sixteen—made a fantastic circular board. One of the many variants of chess he had played once or twice was cylindrical.

  “Les échecs fantasques.” he quoted. “It’s a cynical madman’s allegory with its doddering monarch, vampire queen, gangster knights, double-faced bishops, ramming rooks and inane pawns, whose supreme ambition is to change their sex and share the dodderer’s bed.”

  With a sigh of regret he tore his gaze away from the watch and took up the pawn behind it. Here was a grim little fighter, he thought, bringing the tarnished silver figure close to his glasses. Naked longsword clasped against his chest, point down, iron skullcap low on forehead, face merciless as Death’s. What did the golden legionaries look like?

  Then Ritter’s expression grew grim too, as he decided to do something he’d had in mind ever since glimpsing the barbarian pawn in the window. Making a long arm, he slid out a file drawer and after flipping a few tabs drew out a folder marked “Death of Alekhine.” The light was getting bad. He switched on a big desk lamp against the night.

  Soon he was studying a singularly empty photograph. It was of an unoccupied old armchair with a peg-in chess set open on one of the flat wooden arms. Behind the chess set stood a tiny figure. Bringing the magnifying glass once more into play, he confirmed what he had expected: that it was a precise mate to the barbarian pawn he had bought today.

  He glanced through another item from the folder—an old letter on onionskin paper in a foreign script with cedillas under half the “C’s” and tildes over half the “A’s.”

  It was from his Portuguese friend, explaining that the photo was a reproduction of one in the Lisbon police files.

  The photo was of the chair in which Alexander Alekhine had been found dead of a heart attack on the top floor of a cheap Lisbon rooming house in 1946.

  Alekhine had won the World’s Chess Championship from Capablanca in 1927. He had held the world’s record for the greatest number of games played simultaneously and blindfolded—thirty-two. In 1946 he was preparing for an official match with the Russian champion Botvinnik, although he had played chess for the Axis in World War II. Though at times close to psychosis, he was considered the profoundest and most brilliant attacking player who had ever lived.

  Had he also, Ritter asked himself, been one of the players to own the Morphy silver-and-gold chess set and the Morphy watch?

  He reached for another file folder labeled “Death of Steinitz.” This time he found a brownish daguerreotype showing an empty, narrow, old-fashioned hospital bed with a chessboard and set on a small table beside it. Among the chess pieces, Ritter’s magnifier located another one of the unmistakable barbarian pawns.

  Wilhelm Steinitz, called the Father of Modern Chess, who had held the world’s championship for twenty-eight years, until his defeat by Emanuel Lasker in 1894. Steinitz, who had had two psychotic episodes and been hospitalized for them in the last years of his life, during the second of which he had believed he could move the chess pieces by electricity and challenged God to a match, offering God the odds of Pawn and Move. It was after the second episode that the daguerreotype had been taken which Ritter had acquired many years ago from the aged Emanuel Lasker.

  Ritter leaned back wearily from the table, took off his glasses and knuckled his tired eyes. It was later than he’d imagined.

  He thought about Paul Morphy retiring from chess at the age of twentyone after beating every important player in the world and issuing a challenge, never accepted, to take on any master at the odds of Pawn and Move. After that contemptuous gesture in 1859 he had brooded for twenty-five years, mostly a recluse in his family home in New Orleans, emerging only fastidiously dressed and becaped for an afternoon promenade and regular attendance at the opera. He suffered paranoid episodes during which he believed his relatives were trying to steal his fortune and, of all things, his clothes. And he never spoke of chess or played it, except for an occasional game with his friend Maurian at the odds of Knight and Move.

  Twenty-five years of brooding in solitude without the solace of playing chess, but with the Morphy chess set and the Morphy watch in the same room, testimonials to his world mastery.

  Ritter wondered if those circumstances—with Morphy constantly thinking of chess, he felt sure—were not ideal for the transmission of the vibrations of thought and feeling into inanimate objects, in this case the golden Morphy set and watch.

  Material objects intangibly vibrating with twenty-five years of the greatest chess thought and then by strange chance (chance alone?) falling into the hands of two other periodically psychotic chess champions, as the photographs of the pawns hinted.

  An absurd fancy, Ritter told himself. And yet one to the pursuit of which he had devoted no small part of his life.

  And now the richly vibrant objects were in his hands. What would be the effect of that on his game?

  But to speculate in that direction was doubly absurd.

  A wave of tiredness went through him. It was close to midnight.

  He heated a small supper for himself, consumed it, drew the heavy window drapes tight, and undressed.

  He turned back the cover of the big couch next to the table, switched off the light, and inserted himself into bed.

  It was Ritter’s trick to put himself to sleep by playing through a chess opening in his thoughts. Like any talented player, he could readily contest one blindfold game, though he could not quite visualize the entire board and often had to count moves square by square, especially with the bishops. He selected Breyer’s Gambit, an old favorite of his.

  He made a half-dozen moves.

  Then suddenly the board was brightly illuminated in his mind, as if a light had been turned on there. He had to stare around to assure himself that the room was still dark as pitch. There was only the bright board inside his head.

  His sense of awe was lost in luxuriant delight. He moved the mental pieces rapidly, yet saw deep into the possibilities of each position.
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  Far in the background he heard a church clock on Franklin boom out the dozen strokes of midnight. After a short while he announced mate in five by White. Black studied the position for perhaps a minute, then resigned.

  Lying flat on his back he took several deep breaths. Never before had he played such a brilliant blindfold game—or game with sight even. That it was a game with himself didn’t seem to matter—his personality had split neatly into two players.

  He studied the final position for a last time, returned the pieces to their starting positions in his head, and rested a bit before beginning another game.

  It was then he heard the ticking, a nervous sound five times as fast as the distant clock had knelled. He lifted his wristwatch to his ear. Yes, it was ticking rapidly too, but this was another ticking, louder.

  He sat up silently in bed, leaned over the table, switched on the light.

  The Morphy watch. That was where the louder ticks were coming from. The hands stood at twelve ten and the small window showed A.M.

  For a long while he held that position—mute, motionless, aghast, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

  Let’s see, Edgar Allan Poe had died when Morphy was twelve years old and beating his uncle, Ernest Morphy, then chess king of New Orleans. It seemed impossible that a stopped watch with works well over one hundred years old should begin to run. Doubly impossible that it should begin to run at approximately the right time—his wristwatch and the Morphy watch were no more than a minute apart.

  Yet the works might be in better shape than either he or the old Balt had guessed; watches did capriciously start and stop running. Coincidences were only coincidences. Yet he felt profoundly uneasy. He pinched himself and went through the other childish tests.

  He said aloud,“I am Stirf Ritter-Rebil, an old man who lives in San Francisco and plays chess, and who yesterday discovered an unusual curio. But really, everything is perfectly normal…”

  Nevertheless, he suddenly got the feeling of “A man-eating lion is a-prowl.” It was the childish form terror still took for him on rare occasions. For a minute or so everything seemed too still, despite the ticking. The stirring of the heavy drapes at the window gave him a shiver, and the walls seemed thin, their protective power nil.

  Gradually the sense of a killer lion moving outside them faded and his nerves calmed.

  He switched off the light, the bright mental board returned, and the ticking became reassuring rather than otherwise. He began another game with himself, playing for Black the Classical Defense to the Ruy Lopez, another of his favorites.

  This game proceeded as brilliantly and vividly as the first. There was the sense of a slim, man-shaped glow standing beside the bright board in the mental dark. After a while the shape grew amorphous and less bright, then split into three. However, it bothered him little, and when he at last announced mate in three for Black, he felt great satisfaction and profound fatigue.

  Next day he was in exceptionally good spirits. Sunlight banished all night’s terrors as he went about his ordinary business and writing chores. From time to time he reassured himself that he could still visualize a mental chessboard very clearly, and he thought now and again about the historical chess mystery he was in the midst of solving. The ticking of the Morphy watch carried an exciting, eager note. Toward the end of the afternoon he realized he was keenly anticipating visiting Rimini’s to show off his newfound skill.

  He got out an old gold watch chain and fob, snapped it to the Morphy watch, which he carefully wound again, pocketed them securely in his vest, and set out for Rimini’s. It was a grand day—cool, brightly sunlit and a little windy. His steps were brisk. He wasn’t thinking of all the strange happenings but of chess. It’s been said that a man can lose his wife one day and forget her that night, playing chess.

  Rimini’s was a good, dark, garlic-smelling restaurant with an annex devoted to drinks, substantial free pasta appetizers and, for the nonce, chess. As he drifted into the long L-shaped room, Ritter became pleasantly aware of the row of boards, chessmen, and the intent, mostly young, faces bent above them.

  Then Rasputin was grinning at him calculatedly and yapping at him cheerfully. They were due to play their tournament game. They checked out a set and were soon at it. Beside them the Czarina also contested a crucial game, her moody face askew almost as if her neck were broken, her bent wrists near her chin, her long fingers pointing rapidly at her pieces as she calculated combinations, like a sorceress putting a spell on them.

  Ritter was aware of her, but only peripherally. For last night’s bright mental board had returned, only now it was superimposed on the actual board before him. Complex combinations sprang to mind effortlessly. He beat Rasputin like a child. The Czarina caught the win from the corner of her eye and growled faintly in approval. She was winning her own game; Ritter beating Rasputin bumped her into first place. Rasputin was silent for once.

  A youngish man with a black mustache was sharply inspecting Ritter’s win. He was the California state champion, Martinez, who had recently played a simultaneous at Rimini’s, winning fifteen games, losing none, drawing only with the Czarina. He now suggested a casual game to Ritter, who nodded somewhat abstractedly.

  They contested two very hairy games—a Sicilian Defense by Martinez in which Ritter advanced all his pawns in front of his castled king in a wildlooking attack, and a Ruy Lopez by Martinez that Ritter answered with the Classical Defense, going to great lengths to preserve his powerful king’s bishop. The mental board stayed superimposed, and it almost seemed to Ritter that there was a small faint halo over the piece he must next move or capture. To his mild astonishment he won both games.

  A small group of chess-playing onlookers had gathered around their board. Martinez was looking at him speculatively, as if to ask, “Now just where did you spring from, old man, with your power game? I don’t recall ever hearing of you.”

  Ritter’s contentment would have been complete, except that among the kibitzers, toward the back, there was a slim young man whose face was always shadowed when Ritter glimpsed it. Ritter saw him in three different places, though never in movement and never for more than an instant. Somehow he seemed one onlooker too many. This disturbed Ritter obscurely, and his face had a thoughtful, abstracted expression when he finally quit Rimini’s for the faintly drizzling evening streets. After a block he looked around, but so far as he could tell, he wasn’t being followed. This time he walked the whole way to his apartment, passing several landmarks of Dashiell Hammett, Sam Spade, and The Maltese Falcon.

  Gradually, under the benison of the foggy droplets, his mood changed to one of exaltation. He had just now played some beautiful chess, he was in the midst of an amazing historic chess mystery he’d always yearned to penetrate, and somehow the Morphy watch was working for him—he could actually hear its muffled ticking in the street, coming up from his waist to his ear.

  Tonight his room was a most welcome retreat,his place, like an extension of his mind. He fed himself. Then he reviewed, with a Sherlock Holmes smile, what he found himself calling “The Curious Case of the Morphy Timepiece.” He wished he had a Dr. Watson to hear him expound. First, the appearance of the watch after Morphy returned to New York on the Persia in 1859. Over paranoid years Morphy had imbued it with psychic energy and vast chessic wisdom. Or else—mark this, Doctor—he had set up the conditions whereby subsequent owners of the watch would think he had done such, for the supernatural is not our bailiwick, Watson. Next (after de Riviere) great Steinitz had come into possession of it and challenged God and died mad. Then, after a gap, paranoid Alekhine had owned it and devised diabolically brilliant, hyper-Morphian strategies of attack, and died all alone after a thousand treacheries in a miserable Lisbon flat with a peg-in chess set and the telltale barbarian pawn next to his corpse. Finally, after a hiatus of almost thirty years (Where had the watch and set been then? Who’d had their custody? Who was the old Balt?) the timepiece and
a pawn had come into his own possession. A unique case, Doctor. There isn’t even a parallel in Prague in 1863.

  The nighted fog pressed against the windowpane and now and again a little rain pattered. San Francisco was a London City and had its own resident great detective. One of Dashiell Hammett’s hobbies had been chess, even though there was no record of Spade having played the game.

  From time to time Ritter studied the Morphy watch as it glowed and ticked on the table space he’d cleared. P.M. once more, he noted. The time: White Queen, ruby glittering, past Black King, microscopically emerald studded—I mean five minutes past midnight, Doctor. The witching hour, as the superstitiously minded would have it.

  But to bed, to bed, Watson. We have much to do tomorrow—and, paradoxically, tonight.

  Seriously, Ritter was glad when the golden glow winked out on the watch face, though the strident ticking kept on, and he wriggled himself into his couch-bed and arranged himself for thought. The mental board flashed on once more and he began to play. First he reviewed all the best games he’d ever played in his life—there weren’t very many—discovering variations he’d never dreamed of before. Then he played through all his favorite games in the history of chess, from McDonnell-La Bourdonnais to Fischer-Spassky, not forgetting Steinitz-Zukertort and Alekhine-Bogolyubov. They were richer masterpieces than ever before—the mental board saw very deep. Finally he split his mind again and challenged himself to an eight-game blindfold match, Black against White. Against all expectation, Black won with three wins, two losses, and three draws.

  But the night was not all imaginative and ratiocinative delight. Twice there came periods of eerie silence, which the ticking of the watch in the dark made only more complete, and two spells of the man-eating lion a-prowl that raised his hair at the roots. Once again there loomed the slim, faint, man-shaped glow beside the mental board and he wouldn’t go away. Worse, he was joined by two other man-shaped glows, one short and stocky, with a limp, the other fairly tall, stocky too, and restless. These inner intruders bothered Ritter increasingly—who were they? And wasn’t there beginning to be a faint fourth? He recalled the slim young elusive watcher with shadowed face of his games with Martinez and wondered if there was a connection.