THE GAME

Khees rarely looked at the overseers' towers without seeing in them a fanciful resemblance to chess rooks. Instead of four, there were six great rooks here, each one standing on its own corner of a vast patchwork territory of lifeless land; and the patched land, busy with friendly machines, still obscured here and there by blotches of poison mist borne in the thinned and ruined air, was not divided into regular squares; some kind of fairy chess instead of the regular variety. His imaginative thoughts about the towers had not, in the six months he had been on planet Maximus, ever got much farther than this point. Chess was not Khees' great game, and he knew little of its history.

Today he was conducting an informal tour of the rehabilitation project for Adrienne, who had just arrived on-world, and whom he had not seen in over two standard years. At the moment they were outside, wearing dust-repellent jackets and special breathing masks.

"Actually the capital stood more than a thousand kilometers from here, before the attack. But this will be a finer site in several ways for the new city, so we decided to put the monument here as well."

"That was a good idea. Yours?" It was marvelously flattering, and more than that, the attention that Adrienne was giving him today.

He chuckled. "I'm not sure. We talk things over a great deal." Khees and twenty other people had been here for half a year, overseeing an army of machines employed in starting to undo the devastation wrought by the raiding-berserker fleet in an hour or so, a little more than a standard year ago. "Let's go inside again. In here we have the first of our new atmosphere."

They passed through an airlock into a great, inflated, transparent structure, where they could remove the masks that had protected them against the poison residues of the attack, which still maintained an uncanny lifelessness across the open atmosphere. It was not only human life against which the berserkers fought; the commands built into those unliving killers by their ancient and unknown programmers decreed that all life must be destroyed. For many thousands of years the berserkers had ranged the galaxy, replicating themselves, designing new machines as needed, always methodically killing. And now, for a thousand years and more, Earth-descended humanity, dispersed on more than a hundred worlds, had fought against them.

Inside, Adrienne tossed her mask into a rack and looked about, shaking out long hair of fiery red with a brisk twisting of her slender neck. "Enormous," she remarked. The inflated dome of clear plastic, that from outside had seemed so tall, looked flat when seen from inside, so long and broad was it in relation to its height. Almost a kilometer away, beyond a pleasant view of green-fringed paths and ponds, the half-finished monument rose, remaining truncated at the top until the atmosphere had been restored and the confining plastic dome could be removed. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF, words said across the monument's front, and then a blankness. Khees, whose job mostly involved other matters, didn't know just how it was going to look when finished. Half a million dead, all the citizens of Maximus who had stayed behind to fight, would provide an impressive number of names to fit in, even if not all of them were known.

"And beautiful," Adrienne concluded, completing her first look round the place. "You're doing a fine job here, Khees."

"This will be the central park of the new capital someday. It isn't my project, though. The machines I oversee are working thirty and forty kilometers away."

"I meant all of you who work here," said Adrienne quickly. Was there just a little regret in her voice, as if she wished she could credit him with the park?

She took his arm and they walked along a path. A few Earthbirds, singing, flew overhead. In the distance a pair of Space Marine officers were approaching from the direction of the monument, uniforms immaculate, weapons slung on shoulders as required for full-dress ceremonies.

Adrienne said: "So, down there at the other end is obviously where the Chief is going to lay the wreath. Where will he enter the dome, though? From here it would be too long a walk. We want to control the time factor as much as possible." She was thinking aloud, asking herself the question; it was one of the problems that she, as a member of the advance landing party charged with seeing that the planned ceremony ran smoothly, was going to have to answer.

Khees ran a nervous hand through his own curly black hair. "So, how is it working for the great man?"

"The Chief? He really is, you know."

"I don't suppose you can be elected to lead the Ten Planets without some ability. The war has certainly gone better since he's been in office."

"Oh, he has leadership ability, of course. But I meant humanly great. I suppose the two often go together. He really does care about people. These wreath-laying trips of his to all the battle sites are not just for show. He had tears in his eyes at the last ceremony; I saw them. But how is it with your job, Khees?"

"All right." He shrugged. "A lot of people are a lot worse off. I'm not out in the front line fighting berserkers."

"Still, I don't suppose you get much chance to do what you like best."

Now he looked at her carefully. "No. Actually, no chance at all."

"One of the Marine officers who came in the advance party with me has a minor master's rating. When he found out that I knew you-he already knew you were here-he begged me to see if I could get you to play a game."

"A minor master? Who?"

Adrienne sighed faintly. "I thought that'd catch your interest. His name's Barkro. I didn't ask his numerical rating-I suppose I should have realized you'd want to take that into consideration."

He had-as so often in the past-the feeling that the more he talked with Adrienne, the farther apart the two of them got. "Oh, I'll give him a game. That is, if we can come up with six players-I doubt he'd be interested in any lesser variations. Are you going to play, too?"

She smiled and took his hand. "Why not? I won't have much work to do. And an old boyfriend of mine once taught me how. He even claimed that I had the potential to be pretty good at it someday."

"If you practiced enough, I said. And if you could eliminate a little psychological block or two." Now he was holding both her hands and smiling back at her. On first seeing her an hour ago it had hit him, how much he'd really missed her. And now minute by minute the feeling was growing stronger.

"Well sir, I didn't think my psychological block was all that terrible."

"There was something about it rather nice, from my own point of view."

And shortly they were walking on again. She said: "I haven't had the time for any practice at The Game… speaking of time, though, are we even going to have enough of it to play? I mean, all of us in the Chief's party are going to be lifting off again just about twelve hours from now."

He calculated. "Let's see-LeBon and Narret will play, I'm sure. One more-Jon Via, probably. Trouble is, most of us who will want to play are going to be at least nominally on duty much of the time. We do six hour shifts, alone in the towers, as a rule… what time will the Chief's shuttle land?"

"About ten hours from now."

"Once he lands we'll all be busy-no way out of that."

"Can't you trade shifts with non-players?"

Khees grimaced mildly. "I don't think so. We're short-handed right now, with a bunch of people out on the frontier with our boss, and they won't be back until just about the time the Chief comes down. No real reason we can't play while we're on duty in the towers, though. It's not that demanding a job most of the time. Only reason the towers have to be manned at all is that early on here we had a couple of accidents, and now the Boss insists on having permanent observation posts where human eyes can get a direct overall view of the project, at least a good part of the time."

"What do you do on the night shift?"

He grinned. "The best we can."

"Your machines are not as self-sufficient as they could be, I gather."

"It's the old problem." With the example of the berserkers constantly in mind, human beings on all worlds were afraid to give their own machines, however benignly programmed, nearly as much in the way of general intelligence and self-sufficiency as technology allowed.

"In the Game, will we use the honor system as regards computer help?"

"Of course." Khees felt a little disappointed, almost injured, by the question. If you were serious enough about the Game to play it well, you weren't going to cheat, certainly not in that crude a sense. Would an athlete tie servolifters to his wrists, and then take pride in winning a weight contest?

"Silly of me to ask…"

"It's all right. Look, Ade, I've got to get back up in my tower. The Boss just might call in checking up; he takes his overseers' duties rather seriously."

"Then he Won't approve of a Game during duty hours."

"What he doesn't know won't hurt him."

"What if he tunes in his radio later and hears us playing?"

"We'll use light-beam communication, tower to tower. I'll start getting things set up for play. Want to come along? That'll be against regulations also, but…"

"Love to, but I have a thing or two I must get done myself before we start frittering our time. Where am I going to be when we play?"

"Best thing will be to put you in an unused tower… we can manage that. Be talking to you soon."

The Game had different names in different human languages. To Khees, in his innermost thoughts, it often had no name at all. Do fish have names for water? Anyway, very few people on his home world had been game-minded, and there it had a name that translated into English bluntly as War-Without-Blood. Since he had come to know The Game, Khees had always preferred it to the "real" world, in which the elder members of his family (he had grown up in that kind of reality) assigned jobs to the younger, himself included.

"Oh, I'm not afraid of work, Uncle. And I can see it's my duty as a citizen and all that to help out. But I really don't want ten million people looking to me for answers every day."

"You could have even more people than that looking up to you." (Which perhaps Khees had already, counting all the Game fans across the Earth-colonized corner of the Galaxy. But on his homeworld, none of that was ever completely real.) "You have a brilliant mind, my boy, and it beats me how you can be content to use it for nothing more than… than…"

"Well sir, how can you be content to use your own intelligence at nothing more than shuffling matter around? Who cares if the population of Toxx can build their houses fifteen meters tall next year or only ten?"

That earned Khees a stern avuncular glare. "Well, the population of Toxx might care! In fact, most of them do. Housing construction is something… something very worthwhile. Rewarding."

"For you. Not me. I just don't care. I couldn't."

And this was after they had sent him to a fine engineering school. The old man glared harder. Then he found a stronger move to make. "Maybe you can find it in you to care how deep people are able to dig their shelters, against the day when the berserkers come again. Now there's a real problem for you. Hey?"

"Other people are just as smart as I am about that kind of problem, and a lot more anxious to tackle it. Putting someone like me in charge of any military matters would not be a wise move."

"If only it were part of some game, Khees, you'd solve it brilliantly." His uncle coughed morosely. As long as, his unstated theory ran, real people's lives were not involved.

"Are you saying, then, that every brilliant person must be a fortifications expert? Why not a strategist?"

"Now, there's another-"

"Why not a doctor? Then we could always be ready to treat each other's wounds, in case of sudden attack or accident."

Why not a lawyer? He could certainly play the game of argument, varying tactics to suit opponents, sending most of them retreating in confusion. Opponent must totter two spaces backward, according to the Argument Results Calculator. Even if Opponent had started out with what looked like a real advantage in his logic. Logic was only one part of even the most logical of human games.

But eventually Khees wearied of the arguing, and so did they. A compromise was reached; and here he was now, doing a real-world job, and even a job that carried a fair amount of status in society. The family politicians had, among them, seen to that.

The elevator opened silently. Ahead, the door to the overseer's room atop Khees' own chess rook stood ajar as usual, and he walked in. Great sealed windows viewed the patchwork land two hundred meters down, the thin-aired, purple sky, the five other towers that stood no more than a kilometer or two away, heads just level with the misty flatness of horizon.

"Anything going on, Kara?"

"Booby traps again." The woman he was relieving looked up from her panels with a brief smile. "Double one, this time." In one sense, Maximus had not yet been completely reconquered from the berserkers. "The second went off and did some damage to the engineer machines while they were clearing out the first."

Khees stood beside her, scanning the printouts and the panels. "Haven't had booby traps for a while. Doesn't look too bad, though, hey? Anything else?"

"No." Like everyone else in the permanent party, Kara was anxious to have her chance to socialize with the visitors in the brief time they were on-world.

"Well, this doesn't look too hard to handle. Go on, take off."

Kara was hardly out the door before a communicator chimed. Radio brought in the voice of the robot foreman on Khees' sector of the distant frontier of work. The robot was evidently speaking from the scene of the latest accident.

"Overseer, I request that an aircar be sent out here immediately from Central." Its mechanical voice was deep and pleasant, as unlike as it could be made from the voices that berserkers usually took to themselves when they put on the habit of human speech.

"An aircar. What for?"

"Part JS-828 in the forward limb assembly of a workrobot Type Six is broken. The workrobot is otherwise essentially undamaged, and can be speedily returned to duty if a replacement part is sent out."

Khees was already punching at his computer console to get a look at the inventory of spare parts. He thought he knew what he would find, and he was right. A similar part had been broken in a freak accident ten days ago, and the stock of replacements was now down to zero. He so informed his foreman. "We'll bring in the damaged piece, then, and the shop can decide whether to try to fix it, or produce a new one, or wait and hope we get another on the next shipment in."

"Is then the aircar to be sent?"

Khees, on the verge of turning his mind to something else, paused. The video screen was blank, since the Boss believed that screens were distracting when not absolutely necessary, but he stared at it anyway. "No, a groundcar will come, as usual for repairs. Perhaps the mobile repair machine can fix the workrobot on the spot."

"It appears to me that it will not." The robot foreman's permanently jovial tones made the announcement of bad news sound impertinent. Maybe it was only that, but Khees thought the damned thing sounded odd today.

"You're not qualified to judge," he told it. "The groundcar's coming." Good roads had been laid as far as that work area; the difference in time between ground transport and air would be minimal. "Meanwhile proceed with the programmed job as best you can."

"Orders understood. Proceeding."

Khees switched off that communicator, and turned to another, the tight light-beam that could be used for private talk among the towers.

And now, he thought. The Game.

It was certainly not chess, though its inventor had been one of the great chess masters of the very late twentieth century. Like any other board game, it could be played by a computer, and its inventor had in fact used one of the most advanced computer systems of his day to help design it. He had sought to create a game that could be played by a computer but not analyzed by one; not for The Game were the endless labyrinths of opening theory that now made learning chess more of a burden than a joy.

Having six players helped make The Game resistant to analysis, and was no longer much of a drawback to practical play. By the close of the twentieth century there were on old Earth a lot of bright people with a lot of spare time and a taste for games. But what really foiled computer analysis, outside of actual play, was the sophisticated addition of chance to the Game; whatever moves a computer came up with for a particular contest would probably be useless in any other. Openings tended to be wild; it was proverbial that you had to be either good or lucky to survive the opening at all, and it was much better to be both. Khees had not failed to survive an opening in serious play since his first tournament, a startling (to him) number of years ago.

The players were in place in their several towers, and the preliminaries were over; play began. Adrienne and Barkro had been installed in towers otherwise unused at the moment. Jon Via, LeBon, and Narret all signalled ready, their light-beams winking dully from the horizon.

Play was shown on the large video screen normally reserved for emergencies; the pictured board was a simulation of a space war, stylized to the point of complete unrealism, the six fleets showing as points or bars of different colors. In the opening moves, Khees played conservatively, content to survive the buffetings of chance. He parried deadly threats when they appeared, and otherwise tried nothing more ambitious than a small improvement of position here, the mobilization of a new squadron there, saving his efforts for the middle game, when chance would be less important. Barkro justified Adrienne's estimate of his skill by adopting the same general course. Adrienne herself, a basically good player but not of master strength, was given advantage by luck in the early moves, and seemed daringly determined to make the most of it. She was off at once on a flashy, agressive campaign, threatening Khees, threatening Via. If her good luck held for another half-dozen moves she might have a won game before the opening was fairly over. She was a brilliant woman in most fields of mental endeavor; and if it were not for a certain little quirk or two, she could learn to be brilliant in this as well…

The other players performed generally like the strong amateurs they were. LeBon launched a well-planned though premature attack on Adrienne, thinking evidently that if he waited she was only going to get stronger, and no doubt expecting he would get support from Khees. Open diplomacy was not part of The Game, but tacit agreements and understandings were.

Khees moved in turn, without having to take much thought. He had plenty of time between moves to go through the undemanding routine of an overseer's watch, observing what he could of his distant machinery with binoculars, eyeing the panels and printers that brought more precise information in from the frontier. He would not have cared to enter a championship tournament in his present rusty and unpracticed state; years had now passed since he had played against serious opposition. But in this game he thought himself in more danger of boredom than of losing-except for Barkro, of course, they didn't give out master's ratings, even low ones, lightly. Barkro was the one to watch, and to really play against.

A good thing, too, that he could manage without perfect concentration, for this was turning out to be a day of oddities on the job. Here, for example, came the groundcar back from the frontier, presumably carrying the damaged part-and it stopped and hesitated and made false starts after entering the Central complex, as if its directing computer could have somehow become confused about which tunnel-mouth of the underground works would lead it to the proper repair shop.

Could someone have set up a ploy involving robots and groundcars to distract him from the Game by making him think that something regarding the work in his sector was really going wrong? He began to watch his panels very carefully.

On the game board, through the next few turns, Adrienne's power was still augmented by moderately good luck. Luck would mean less and less, though, as the Game progressed. LeBon, pounced on from behind, was all but out. Could LeBon be the one to gimmick groundcars? No. And Ad-rienne and Barkro were visitors, lacking the expertise. Jon Via was serious enough about winning, and knowledgable enough. But…

Another round of moves, another, and now an expert stranger would have been convinced that Adrienne was going to win. Barkro's forces were still mainly intact, but he was beaten. Khees had suddenly struck at him instead of at Adrienne. The visiting master was doubtless a bit stunned, unable to believe that Khees was going to throw the game so blatantly to his old girl friend-which of course was not what Khees had in mind at all. On a Game board, Khees would have smashed his own mother into a corner just as soon as the best chance came to do it. If you want to be nice, and sociable, play something else…

Now they were all waiting for Adrienne's next move, which was quite slow in coming. Khees smiled a little to himself.

"Adrienne? We're waiting for your move." That voice on the light-beam net among the towers was Barkro's, sounding half impatient, half sulky with the way he thought the Game was going.

Shortly her move came on the board. Coldly logical, completely crushing.

Khees' smile vanished. Wrong… impulsively he opened the microphone before him. "Adrienne…"

"What?" Her answering voice was cold, too, and he thought it had a distracted sound. A day for unusual voices, among its other oddities.

And on the panel to his right, three indicators showed minor troubles out on his section of the frontier. Things that the foreman should be taking care of. Maybe the foreman would get to them soon, he told himself.

Khees and the other players moved through the round, and Adrienne moved again. With sudden clarity Khees understood. He felt a weakness in the knees, not unlike that he had known in some tournaments, but more intense. He faced certain and utter defeat.

Or almost. Logic said loss, but there were still intangibles. There might be one, just one, more chance for the right move…

The sound of the opening of the door of her tower room, soft though it was, startled Adrienne. Why would anyone come up here now-?

She turned. Before there was time for fear the silent speed-blurred rush of something vaguely manlike in size and shape, but embodying a flow of metal and power that could not possibly be human, culminated in cold grippers touching her throat and then each of her limbs in turn.

By the time she would have screamed it was too late. She could not talk, could barely breathe; something small but weighty clung to her throat after the machine had set her down in a corner, propped in an angle of wall. She could move her head, enough to look down at herself. To each of her paralyzed arms and legs a thing that looked like a small metal leech was now attached.

Berserker…

When screaming failed, she willed herself to faint. That failed also.

The man-sized thing, ignoring her now, began a quick scanning of the tower's instruments, of which only the Game board screen and the light-beam communicator were functioning. In seconds it had completed this inspection. With a snapping sound it now opened its own torso, and brought out a small stand which unfolded to support a tube filled with a weighty something. This assembly the berserker erected on a ledge below one of the great windows, adjusting the tube to point downwards at an angle, in the direction of…

The monument was down there, at that end of the great plastic dome.

The Chief was on his way…

"Adrienne?" The voice coming through the communicator startled her so her half-deadened body almost jumped against the supporting walls. "We're waiting for your move."

If the berserker had been startled too (if in its own electronic way it could be startled), it did not jump, but went at once to the Game-screen. Adrienne had a wild hope that it would not know what The Game was, but her hope was doomed. After five seconds' study it reached out a metal arm to the controls, and moved for her.

Another man's voice, Khees' voice, said into the small room: "Adrienne…"

To her absolute horror, what seemed to be her own voice now issued from the metal creature's throat. "What?"

There was a small pause. "Oh, nothing," Khees replied, dejectedly. And that, it seemed, was that…

… she looked up from a blur of faintness to find the thing crouched down beside her. Glassy scanners that were not shaped or spaced like human eyes were studying her face.

"Now," it said when she looked up. (And this was surely its preferred voice, this screech that somehow formed itself in distinct words.) "Now you are to provide me with complete details on the itinerary of the visit here of the life-unit which you call the Chief, which serves as Premier of the Ten Planets. If you cooperate you will be spared. If you do not-" Another click, and in one metal hand it showed a small container. "This is nerve acid. One drop instantly penetrates the surface of human skin. It has affinity for living tissues of the sensory system, and it produces in them pain beyond any-"

So silent were the towers' elevators that even the berserker had evidenly not heard this one's functioning outside the room's closed door. But now someone was gently, with seeming casual-ness, trying that door and finding that it was locked.

"Who is it?" It was Adrienne's voice again. And with a swiftness almost unbelievable the machine had crossed the room, was standing just to one side of that closed door. Small projections like gun-muzzles had appeared upon its chest and shoulders, and it poised like a praying mantis, ready to strike with arms of steel.

"Who is it?"

"Message for Adrienne Britton." Some male voice she did not recognize.

"I'm busy."

"Look, lady, do you want this note or do I have to hike all the way back there and tell him you won't take it? It's something about some damn game you're supposed to be playing; he's all upset. Didn't want anyone else to see this or hear it."

"All right. Just hand it in."

Pounding her head against the metal wall, about the only movement she could make, was not going to create enough sound to serve as warning-

The berserker unlocked and opened the door part way. And in the same motion, faster than any human could possibly act or react, it reached forward and outward in a swift grabbing blur-

-and was hurled back, lifted from its feet and flung across the room, held skewered upon a lance of pounding flame. The small room roared with a continuous concussion. The metal body was smashed into the window, where tough plastic cracked and broke but would not yield entirely, and now the chamber filled with outward-rushing fog. Air pressure dropped. Three human figures, masked, in partial armor, tensely crouching, cleared the door. Two of them seemed to be pulled forward by the flaring, jerking weapons in their arms. The third one came for her. The last thing Adrienne saw before the thinning air blanked out her brain was Khees' eyes above a breathing mask…

"So some of the Marines' small arms have kinetic sensors now," Khees was saying, walking with her in the park, helping her work out some of the stiffness left in her legs after the metal leeches had been removed. "One of my escort had his weapon set to trigger at anything moving extraordinarily fast-like a berserker's grabbing arm. Whammo, locks on target and keeps firing until the operator turns it off."

Adrienne shuddered, and squeezed his arm. "You knew it was a berserker," she said, regarding him. "And yet you came for me."

"Walking between two Space Marines. Even so my knees were shaking."

"It might have fired through the door at you, not grabbed."

"We figured that it wanted to be quiet, until the Chief came down and it could get a shot at him. It was a special assassin-machine, of course. They must have thought it a good bet that sooner or later the Chief would show up on Maximus to do his wreath-laying as he has so many other places. So before their raiders left they planted one extra-special booby trap; it must have been monitoring our local radio chatter and it knew when he was coming."

"You knew it was a berserker and yet you came for me. But-how'd you know?"

"Well. There were some strange things going on, with the work machines. Too much of a coincidence, just when the Chief was due. It hit me that an assassin-machine could have taken the place of my foreman, and then come back here to Central in a groundcar I sent out. And where else would it go, to get a good shot at the Chief, but up in one of the towers overlooking the monument? So I hooked up my own computer to play a few moves of the Game for me, and…"

"But how did you know that it was in my tower?"

"How do you think?" Smiling at her.

Adrienne was smiling too, and at the same time trying not to cry. "My little psychological block. You knew I could never in all my life have brought myself to beat you in The Game."

As life may transmit evil, so machines of great power may hand on good.

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