Charles DeVett & Katherine MacLean Read online

and a third, up beside the first—spaced three squares apart. The pattern began to form.

  The formation he had drawn up was almost unique—an intricate variation of the diversified decoy gambit. I knew then that I would have to give my best to win. And my best might not be good enough!

  I had learned the greater part of what I knew of the Game in the stalls of the market place. Most of the players there had been quite average, but better players made frequent visits in search of a contest, and I had learned much from them. They had often discussed the various systems of play, and the one most discussed had been that of the decoy gambits. But they had been single decoy gambits. These were intricate enough to take the normal player to the limits of his ability.

  Double decoy gambits had been mentioned in passing but they had not been gone into deeply. Their ramifications were too involved to be employed by any other than the Masters, and then only after years of expert supervision—and backed by great mental perspective.

  They involved the use of abstract and negative reasoning that reminded me of the old Earth puzzler of the red and green circles painted on the foreheads of the three wise men.

  Yet Trobt was presenting a triple decoy gambit. The involvements of threat and counter threat, action and counteraction; the permutations of thrust and reply—and counter reply—were so numerous that it was impossible for me to conceive of a mind that could evaluate, control, and select the moves to employ it properly. In my experience I was certain no Human on the Ten Thousand Worlds could have effectively deployed such a gambit. Was it possible that these non-Humans could?

  It would be foolhardy, I decided, to plunge ahead of an unverified assumption. I held back, grouping my side pukts into two wedges—facing oblique—in what I had privately named my Rock-of-Gibralter defense. With this there was very little flexibility: a single pukt, operating at the mouth formed by the wedges, was my only mobile unit of offense.

  But as a defense it was very nearly impregnable—except perhaps to a triple decoy gambit.

  Trobt made several further moves before he abruptly shifted the formation of his forces and assumed another pattern. I saw immediately then that what I had suspected earlier was true. His center decoy had been a blind. His actual play would be made around the two outside points. The triple decoy attack with which it seemed I had been threatened had been a trap within a trap.

  Only then did I allow myself to think of tactics and replies. If I had responded to his first ruse, taking the triple decoy formation seriously, I would by this time have been weltering in half-begun, wasted, formations of defense. It had taken self-restraint to wait, and make no reply to the first threat, but my caution had been vindicated.

  I flattened out my right peak and moved my side pukts up to a position from which they could maneuver, or attack.

  My first moves were entirely passive. Alertly passive. If I had judged correctly the character of the big man opposite me, I had only to ignore the bait he offered to draw me out, to disregard his openings and apparent—too apparent—errors, until he became convinced that I was unshakably cautious, and not to be tempted into making the first thrusts. For this was his weakness as I had guessed it: that his was a gambling temperament—that when he saw an opportunity he would strike—without the caution necessary to insure safety.

  Pretending to move with timidity, and pausing with great deliberation over even the most obvious plays, I maneuvered only to defend. Each time Trobt shifted to a new position of attack I covered—until finally I detected the use of slightly more arm force than necessary when he moved a pukt. It was the only sign of impatience he gave, but I knew it was there.

  Then it was that I left one—thin—opening.

  Trobt streaked a pukt through and cut out one of my middle defenders.

  Instead of making the obvious counter of taking his piece I played a pukt far removed from his invading man. He frowned in concentration, lifted his arm—and his hand hung suspended over the board.

  Suddenly his eyes widened. His glance swept upward to my face and what he saw there caused his expression to change to one of mingled dismay and astonishment. There was but one move he could make. When he made it his entire left flank would be exposed. He had lost the game.

  Abruptly he reached forward, touched his index finger to the tip of my nose and pressed gently.

  After a minute during which neither of us spoke, I said, “You know?”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “You’re a Human.”

  There was a stir and rustle of motion around me. The ring of spectators had leaned forward a little as they heard his words. I looked up and saw that they were smiling, inspecting me with curiosity and something that could have been called admiration. In the dusk the clearest view was the ring of teeth, gleaming—the view a rabbit might get of a circle of grinning foxes. Foxes might feel friendly toward rabbits, and admire a good big one. Why not?

  I suppressed an ineffectual impulse to deny what I was. The time was past for that. “How did you find out?” I asked Trobt.

  “Your Game. No one could play like that and not be well known. And now your nose.”

  “My nose?” I repeated.

  “Only one physical difference between a Human and a Veldian is apparent on the surface. The nose cartilage. Yours is split—mine is single.” He rose to his feet. “Will you come with me, please?”

  It was not a request.

  My guards walked singly and in couples, sometimes passing Trobt and myself, sometimes letting us pass them, and sometimes lingering at a booth, like any other walkers, and yet, unobtrusively they held me encircled, always in the center of the group. I had already learned enough of the Veldian personality to realize that this was simply a habit of tact. Tact to prevent an arrest from being conspicuous, so as not to add the gaze of his fellows to whatever punishment would be decided for a culprit’s offense. Apparently they considered humiliation too deep a punishment to use indiscriminately.

  At first thought it seemed incongruous that a race which I had found to be excessively proud, warlike, merciless in conflict, and often downright irascible should be so courteous. However, the answer was obvious with a bit more consideration. On Velda, unless one deliberately sought lethal contention, he was wise to make certain that his manners were irreproachable. And this consideration for others had by now become a part of their natures. We had had similar periods of high courtesy in our Earth history. Gallantry and courteous behavior were never greater than when dueling had been the fashion in ancient France and England.

  The Veldians had an almost dogmatic insistence on the rigid observance of social rites and customs. And there lay perhaps my greatest danger. My eidetic memory could be of exceptional aid to me in learning another race’s language, and in many other ways here, but unless a person has lived in and with a culture for many years he can never understand all its nuances and inflections. A dozen times a day in the past two weeks I had used words or expressions that caused my listeners to raise their eyebrows. Probably the only reason I had gotten by was that they were not expecting to find anyone such as myself among them—and marked my speech to ‘mere idiosyncrasy.

  At the edge of the Fair grounds some of the watchers bunched around me while others went to get the tricars. I stood and looked across the park to the City. That was what it was called. The City, The Citadel, The Hearthplace, the homeplace where one’s family is kept safe, the sanctuary whose walls have never been pierced. All these connotations had been in the name and use of the name; in the voices of those who spoke it. Sometimes they called it The Hearth, and sometimes The Market, always The as if it were the only one. Yet the speakers lived in other places and named them as the homes of their ancestors.

  It was a puzzle.

  Some part of it I did understand. Most Veldians were born here. Their history was colored, I might say even shaped, by their long era of struggle with the dleeth, a four-footed, hairy carnivore, physically little different from the big cats of Earth, but intelligen
t. They had battled the Veldians in a struggle for survival from the Veldians’ earliest memories until a couple centuries before my visit. Now the last few surviving dleeth had found refuge in the frigid region of the north pole. With their physical superiority they probably would have won the struggle against the Veldians, except that they had no hands and could not develop technology. Also their instincts had been purely predatory, while the Veldians had fought with a pride in their race, and its ultimate future, that had always been their first consideration.

  The City had been the one strong point that the dleeth had never been able to breach. It had been held by one of the stronger clans, and there was seldom unity among the tribes, yet any family about to bear a child was given sanctuary within its walls.

  The clans were nomads—made so by the aggression of the dleeth—but they always made every effort to reach The City when childbirth was imminent. This explained, at least partly, why even strangers from foreign areas regarded The City as their homeplace.

  They had a saying about it—“all roads take you to Cha-Dan,” which sounds like a saying used in an early stage of Earth history, and it had meant something important to them, although its precise emotional meaning was not something I had heard explained.

  Standing there I absently used the twitch code in my tissues to make a note of it on tape. If it were reported to an anthropologist, he might learn something from the similarity. ‘

  I could see the Games building from where I stood. In the walled city called Hearth it was the highest point. Big and red, it towered above the others, and the city around it rose to it like a wave, its consort of surrounding smaller buildings matched to each other in size and shape in concentric rings. Around each building wound the ramps of elevator runways, harmonious and useful, each of different colored stone, blending beautifully with background and surroundings, lending variety and warmth. Nowhere was there a clash of either proportion or color. Sometimes I wondered if the Veldians did not build more for the joy of creating symmetry, than for utility.

  I climbed into Trobt’s three-wheeled car as it stopped before me, and the minute I settled into the bucket seat and gripped the bracing handles, Trobt spun the car and it dived into the highway and rushed toward the city. The vehicle seemed unstable, being about the width of a motor bike, with side car in front, and having nothing behind except a metal box that must have housed a powerful battery, and a shaft with the rear wheel that did the steering. It was an arrangement that made possible sudden wrenching turns that were battering to any passenger as unused to it as I. To my conditioning it seemed that the Veldians on the highway drove like madmen; the traffic rules were incomprehensible or nonexistent, and all drivers seemed determined to drive only in gull-like sweeping lines, giving no obvious change of course for other such cars, brushing by tricars from the opposite direction with an inch or less of clearance.

  Apparently the maneuverability of the cars and the skill of the drivers were enough to prevent accidents, and I had to force my totally illogical driver’s reflexes to-relax and stop tensing against the nonexistent peril.

  I watched Trobt’s hands moving, on the controls, empathizing with him as he drove, letting the technique and co-ordination of steering the three-wheeled vehicle imprint itself on my memory where I might soon find a use for it.

  I studied Trobt as he drove, noting the casual way he held the wheel, and the assurance in the set of his shoulders. I tried to form a picture in my mind of the kind of man he was, and just what were the motivations that would move or drive him. Knowing that would be more important than learning to drive the tricar.

  Physically he was a long-faced man, with a smooth muscular symmetry, and an Asiatic cast to his eyes. I was certain that he excelled at whatever job he held. In fact I was prepared to believe that he would excel at anything he tried. He was undoubtedly one of those amazing men for whom the exceptional was mere routine. If he were to be cast in the role of my opponent, be the person in whom the opposition of this race would be actualized—as I now anticipated—I would not have wanted to bet against him.

  The big skilled man was silent for several minutes, weaving the tricar with smooth swerves through a three-way tangle at an intersection, but twice he glanced at my expression with evident curiosity. Finally, as a man would state an obvious fact he said, “I presume you know you will be executed.”

  III

  Trobt’s face reflected surprise at the shock he must have read in mine. I had known the risk I would be taking in coming here, of course, and of the very real danger that it might end in my death. But this had come up on me too fast. I had not realized that the affair had progressed to the point where my death was already assured. I had thought that there would be negotiations, consultations, and perhaps ultimatums. But only if they failed did I believe that the repercussions might carry me along to my death.

  However, there was the possibility, I reasoned, that Trobt was merely testing my courage, perhaps even toying with me to watch my reactions. During the last few days I had prepared several arguments to use when needed—the time might never be more appropriate.

  “No,” I said. “I do not expect to be executed.”

  Trobt raised his eyebrows and slowed, presumably to gain more time to talk. With sudden decision he swung the tricar from the road into one of the small parks spread at regular intervals along the roadway.

  “Surely you don’t think we would let you live? There’s a state of war between Velda and your Ten Thousand Worlds. You admit you’re Human, and obviously you are here to spy. Yet when you’re captured, you do not expect to be executed?”

  “Was I captured?” I asked, emphasizing the last word.

  He pondered on that a moment, but apparently did not come up with an answer that satisfied him. “I presume your question means something,” he said.

  “If I had wanted to keep my presence here a secret, would I have set up a booth at the Fair and invited inspection?” I asked.

  He waved one hand irritably, as though to brush aside a picayune argument. “Obviously you did it to test yourself against us, to draw the great under your eye, and perhaps become a friend, treated as an equal with access to knowledge of our plans and weapons. Certainly! Your tactics drew two members of the Council into your net before it was understood. If we had accepted you as a previously unknown Great, you would have won. You are a gambling man, and you played a gambler’s hand. You lost.”

  Partly he was right. I had hoped that—but I hadn’t expected it. I glanced at the road to the side of us, at Trobt’s hands resting on the steering shaft, wondering if it might not be better to seize control of the tricar and escape. But the Veldian was big, and catlike in motion, and not weakened by an unaccustomed weight of gravity as I was. There was also the question of how quickly I would be picked up by a city-wide or planet-wide search. Even as I rejected the temptation to run I wondered idly—was there a criminal minority here among whom I could lose myself?

  “My deliberate purpose was to reach you,” I said, “or someone else with sufficient authority to listen to what I have to say.”

  Trobt pulled the vehicle deeper into the park. He watched the cars of our escort settling to rest before and behind us. I detected a slight unease and rigidity in his stillness as he said, “Speak then. I will listen.”

  “I’ve come to negotiate,” I told him.

  Something like a flash of puzzlement crossed his features before they returned to tighter immobility. Unexpectedly he spoke in Earthian, my own language!

  “Then why did you chose this method? Would it not have been better simply to announce yourself?”

  Earthian. The implications rushed through me and plucked at my nerves. We Humans had supposed that there had been no contact between Velda and the Ten Thousand Worlds federation. Then how had Trobt learned our language? Very apparently we had based our premise on a false assumption. This forced-feeding of understanding left me with the necessity of realigning my strategy. The next steps I
took must all be different from what I had planned.

  Doing my best to hide my reaction to his change of language, I replied, still speaking Veldian, “Would it have been that simple? Or would some minor official, on capturing me, perhaps have had me imprisoned, or tortured to extract information?”

  Again the suppressed puzzlement in the shift of position as he looked at me. “They would have treated you as an envoy, representing your Ten Thousand Worlds. You could have spoken to the Council immediately.” He spoke in Veldian now.

  “I did not know that,” I said. “You refused our fleet; why should I expect you to accept me any more readily?”

  The brief play of motion on his face was something I wanted desperately to be able to interpret. If I knew what emotion it was reflecting I could guide my next words by his response to the first. I suspected he might be suppressing anger, but I was not certain, nor did I know the reason. However, I knew it was nothing shallow.

  Trobt started to speak, made himself calm, and turned in his seat to regard me levelly and steadily, his expression unreadable. “Tell me what you have to say then. I will judge whether or not the Council will listen.”

  “To begin …” I looked away from the expressionless eyes, out the windshield, down the vistas of brown short trees that grew between each small park and the next. “Until an exploring party of ours found signs of extensive mining operations on a small, metal-rich planet, we knew nothing of your existence. We were not even aware that another race in the Galaxy had discovered faster than light space travel. But after that first clue we were alert for other signs, and found them. Our discovery of your planet was bound to come. However, we did not expect to be met on our first visit with an attack of such hostility as you displayed.”

  “When we learned that you had found us,” Trobt said, without expression, “we sent a message to your Ten Thousand Worlds, warning that we wanted no contact with you. Yet you sent a fleet of spaceships against us.”

  I hesitated before answering. “That phrase, ‘sent against us,’ is hardly the correct one,” I said. “The fleet was sent for a diplomatic visit, and was ,not meant as an aggressive action.” I thought, But obviously the display of force was intended “diplomatically” to frighten you people into being polite. In diplomacy the smile, the extended hand—and the big stick visible in the other hand—had obviated many a war, by giving the stranger a chance to choose a hand, in full understanding of the alternative. We showed our muscle to your little planet—you showed your muscle. And now we are ready to be polite.