Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

London⁠—who’ve found that all the people walking around are just dead folk and to be treated no decenter, who see how bad things are and get their fun out of making it a little worse. Just a mean little bit worse. They don’t dare to destroy in a big way, because they know the machine feeds them and tends them, and because they’re always scared they’d be noticed by gangs like themselves and wiped out. They haven’t the guts to really wreck the whole shebang. But they get a kick out of scribbling their dirty pictures on it, out of meddling and messing with it.

I’ve seen some of their fun, as they call it, sometimes hidden away, sometimes in the open streets.

You’ve seen a clerk dressing a figure in a store window? Well, suppose he slapped its face. Suppose a kid stuck pins in a calico pussycat, or threw pepper in the eyes of a doll.

No decent live man would have anything to do with nickel sadism or dime paranoia like that. He’d either go back to his place in the machine and act out the part set for him, or else he’d hide away like me and live as quiet as he could, not stirring things up. Like a mouse in a dynamo or an ant in an atomics plant.

(The Professor went to the window and opened it, letting the sour old smoke out and the noises of the city in.)

Listen (he said), listen to the great mechanical symphony, the big black combo. The airplanes are the double bass. Have you noticed how you can always hear one nowadays? When one walks out of the sky another walks in.

Presses and pumps round out the bass section. Listen to them rumble and thump! Tonight they’ve got an old steam locomotive helping. Maybe they’re giving a benefit show for the old duffer.

Cars and traffic⁠—they’re the strings. Mostly cellos and violas. They purr and wail and whine and keep trying to get out of their section.

Brasses? To me the steel-on-steel of streetcars and El trains always sounds like trumpets and cornets. Strident, metallic, fiery cold.

Hear that siren way off? It’s a clarinet. The ship horns are tubas, the diesel horn’s an oboe. And that lovely dreadful french horn is an electric saw cutting down the last tree.

But what a percussion section they’ve got! The big stuff, like streetcar bells jangling, is easy to catch, but you have to really listen to get the subtleties⁠—the buzz of a defective neon sign, the click of a stoplight changing.

Sometimes you do get human voices, I’ll admit, but they’re not like they are in Beethoven’s “Ninth” or Holst’s “Planets.”

There’s the real sound of the universe (the Professor concluded, shutting the window). That’s your heavenly choir. That’s the music of the spheres the old alchemists kept listening for⁠—if they’d just stayed around a little longer they’d all have been deafened by it. Oh, to think that Schopenhauer was bothered by the crack of carters’ whips!

And now it’s time for this mouse to tuck himself in his nest in the dynamo. Good night, gentlemen!

The 64-Square Madhouse I

Silently, so as not to shock anyone with illusions about well dressed young women, Sandra Lea Grayling cursed the day she had persuaded the Chicago Space Mirror that there would be all sorts of human interest stories to be picked up at the first international grandmaster chess tournament in which an electronic computing machine was entered.

Not that there weren’t enough humans around, it was the interest that was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses, were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, had Slavic or Scandinavian features, and talked foreign languages.

They yakked interminably. The only ones who didn’t were scurrying individuals with the eager-zombie look of officials.

Chess sets were everywhere⁠—big ones on tables, still bigger diagram-type electric ones on walls, small peg-in sets dragged from side pockets and manipulated rapidly as part of the conversational ritual and still smaller folding sets in which the pieces were the tiny magnetized disks used for playing in free-fall.

There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters: F.I.D.E., W.B.M., U.S.C.F., U.S.S.F., U.S.S.R. and U.N.E.S.C.O. Sandra felt fairly sure about the last three.

The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.

Her last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the first American manned circum-lunar satellite⁠—and the five alternate pairs who hadn’t made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra much further out of the world.

Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English were not particularly helpful. Samples:

“They say the Machine has been programmed to play nothing but pure Barcza System and Indian Defenses⁠—and the Dragon Formation if anyone pushes the King Pawn.”

“Hah! In that case⁠ ⁠…”

“The Russians have come with ten trunkfuls of prepared variations and they’ll gang up on the Machine at adjournments. What can one New Jersey computer do against four Russian grandmasters?”

“I heard the Russians have been programmed⁠—with hypnotic cramming and somno-briefing. Votbinnik had a nervous breakdown.”

“Why, the Machine hasn’t even a Haupturnier or an intercollegiate won. It’ll over its head be playing.”

“Yes, but maybe like Capa at San Sebastian or Morphy or Willie Angler at New York. The Russians will look like potzers.”

“Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and Circum-Terra?”

“Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating.”

Sandra’s chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about the game of chess⁠—a point that she had slid over in conferring with the powers at the Space Mirror, but that now had begun to weigh on her. How wonderful it would be,