Eric Russell: Now Inhale

“Sit,” ordered Palamin, spitting it out.

Taylor sat.

“Now, Marnikot, you tell him.”

The squat one showed belated awareness of being on Gombar, said pedantically to Taylor, “I rarely look at the video. It is suitable only for the masses with nothing better to do.”

“Get to the point,” urged Palamin.

“But having heard that you were about to break an ages-old record,” continued Marnikot, undisturbed, “I watched the video last night.” He made a brief gesture to show that he could identify a foul smell at first sniff. “It was immediately obvious to me that to finish your game would require a minimum number of moves of the order of two to the sixty-fourth power minus one.” He took flight into momentary dreamland, came back and added mildly, “That is a large number.”

“Large!” said Palamin. He let go a snort that rocked the pegs.

“Let us suppose,” Marnikot went on, “that you were to transfer these disks one at a time as fast as you could go, morning, noon and night without pause for meals or sleep, do you know how long it would take to complete the game?”

“Nearly six billion Terran centuries,” said Taylor as if talking about next Thursday week.

“I have no knowledge of Terran time-terms. But I can tell you that neither you nor a thousand generations of your successors could live long enough to see the end of it. Correct?”

“Correct,” Taylor admitted.

“Yet you say that this is a Terran game?”

“I do.”

Marnikot spread hands helplessly to show that as far as he was concerned there was nothing more to be said.

Wearing a forbidding scowl, Palamin now took over. “A game cannot be defined as a genuine one unless it is actually played. Do you claim that this so-called game really is played on Terra?”

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“By priests in the Temple of Benares.”

“And how long have they been playing it?” he asked.

“About two thousand years.”

“Generation after generation?”

“That’s right.”

“Each player contributing to the end of his days without hope of seeing the result?”

“Yes.”

Palamin fumed a bit. “Then why do they play it?”

“It’s part of their religious faith. They believe that the moment the last disk is placed the entire universe will go bang.”

“Are they crazy?”

“No more so than people who have played alizik for equally as long and to just as little purpose.”

“We have played alizik as a series of separate games and not as one never-ending game. A rigmarole without possible end cannot be called a game by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Arky-malarkey is not endless. It has a conclusive finish.” Taylor appealed to Marnikot as the indisputed authority. “Hasn’t it?”

“It is definitely finite,” pronounced Marnikot, unable to deny the fact.

“So!” exclaimed Palamin, going a note higher. “You think you are very clever, don’t you?”

“I get by,” said Taylor, seriously doubting it.

“But we are cleverer,” insisted Palamin, using his nastiest manner. “You have tricked us and now we shall trick you. The game is finite. It can be concluded. Therefore it will continue until it reaches its natural end. You will go on playing it days, weeks, months, years until eventually you expire of old age and chronic frustration. There will be times when the very sight of these disks will drive you crazy and you will beg for merciful death. But we shall not grant that favor—and you will continue to play.” He waved a hand in triumphant dismissal. “Take him away.”

Taylor returned to his cell.

When supper came the warder offered, “I am told that play will go on regularly as from tomorrow morning. I don’t understand why they messed it up today.”

“They’ve decided that I’m to suffer a fate worse than death,” Taylor informed.

The warder stared at him.

“I have been very naughty,” said Taylor.

Rat-eyes evidently had been advised of the new setup because he donned the armor of philosophical acceptance and played steadily but without interest. All the same, long sessions of repetitive motions ate corrosively into the armor and gradually found its way through.

In the early afternoon of the fifty-second day Rat-eyes found himself faced with the prospect of returning most of the disks to the first peg, one by one. He took off the clompers he used for boots. Then he ran barefooted four times around the room, bleating like a sheep. Potbelly got a crick in the neck watching him. Two guards led Rat-eyes away still bleating. They forgot to take his clompers with them.

By the table Taylor sat gazing at the disks while he strove to suppress his inward alarm. What would happen now? If Rat-eyes had given up for keeps it could be argued that he had lost, the game had concluded and the time had come to play okey-chokey with a piece of cord. It could be said with equal truth that an unfinished game remains an unfinished game even though one of the players is in a mental home giving his hair a molasses shampoo.

If the authorities took the former view his only defense was to assert the latter one. He’d have to maintain with all the energy at his command that since he had not won or lost his time could not possibly have come. It wouldn’t be easy if he had to make his protest while being dragged by the heels to his doom. His chief hope lay in Gombarian unwillingness to outrage an ancient convention. Millions of video viewers would take a poor look at officialdom mauling a pet superstition. Yes, man, there were times when the Idiot’s Lantern had its uses.

He need not have worried. Having decided that to keep die game going would be a highly refined form of hell, the Gombarians had already prepared a roster of relief players drawn from the ranks of minor offenders whose ambitions never rose high enough to earn a strangling. So aft r a short time another opponent appeared.

The newcomer was a shifty character with a long face and hanging dewlaps. He resembled an especially dopey bloodhound and looked barely capable of articulating three words, to wit, “Ain’t talking, copper.” It must have taken at least a month to teach him that he must move only one disk at a time and never, never, never place it upon a smaller one. But somehow he had learned. The game went on.

Dopey lasted a week. He played slowly and doggedly as if in fear of punishment for making a mistake. Often he was irritated by the video cabinet which emitted ticking noises at brief but regular intervals. These sounds indicated the short times they were on the air.

For reasons best known to himself Dopey detested having his face broadcasted all over the planet and near the end of the seventh day he’d had enough. Without warning he left his seat, faced the cabinet and made a number of swift and peculiar gestures at the lenses. The signs meant nothing to the onlooking Taylor. But Potbelly almost fell off his chair. The guards sprang forward, grabbed Dopey and frogmarched him through the door.

He was replaced by a huge-jowled, truculent character who dumped himself into the chair, glared at Taylor and wiggled his hairy ears. Taylor, who regarded this feat as one of his own accomplishments, promptly wiggled his own ears back. The other then looked fit to burst a blood vessel.

“This Terran sneak,” he roared at Potbelly, “is throwing dirt at me. Do I have to put up with that?”

“You will cease to throw dirt,” ordered Potbelly.

“I only wiggled my ears,” said Taylor.

“That is the same thing as throwing dirt,” Potbelly said mysteriously. “You will refrain from doing it and you will concentrate upon the game.”