The Best of Gene Wolfe

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 Dr. 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 thought 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,” Dr. 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. Lame Hans 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 Dr. Eckardt warned him not to distract the player. There had been seven more than fourteen moves—and there was a trap behind the trap.

Lame Hans 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,” Dr. Eckardt announced. Lame Hans 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.

Dr. 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.

 S

uch 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.

AFTERWORD

Most games do not inspire the human imagination. A few—a very few—do. Or so it seems to me. There may be a good football story, but I have never come across it. My guess is that there are some good cricket stories, but I couldn’t name even one. Ditto for soccer stories. But baseball! We could start with Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings, then go down a whole list of Ring Lardner short stories—see his collection You Know Me Al. I’ve even committed a baseball story myself, “The On-Deck Circle.”

Chess is like that. Can anybody name a checkers story? I can’t. Monopoly? Dominoes? But chess! Through the Looking-Glass alone would make my point; and there’s Rex Stout’s chess mystery, Gambit, and a whole host of short stories, including this one. One of these days I want to write a chess story that returns chess to its origin, a story in which the rooks are war elephants, the knights chariots, the bishops cavalry, the queens viziers commanding elite corps, and the kings rajas with their bodyguards. If you don’t play chess, you should learn; and then, perhaps, you will see the tall swordsmen we call pawns, nearly naked behind their big rhinoceros-hide shields, see the chariots charging—then wheeling like a flock of birds to rain javelins and arrows upon the enemy’s line.