Programmed for Peril by Cambray C. K

Author:Cambray, C. K. [Cambray, C. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

NICHOLAS MOVED A KNIGHT, PUNCHED THE CHESS clock, and wrote his move down on the score sheet. Move 17. He adjusted his left earphone. Roland Kirk riffed, two reed mouthpieces jammed into his jaw. Blow wild and crazy, Rahsaan! The game’s initiative hung in the balance. Playing the black pieces, he edged toward equality. He had trotted out that old vexer, the Petroff Defense, in the face of white’s king’s pawn opening. White was one of those seventeen-year-old hotshots. Nicholas knew how to handle them: steady, steady play. Seize the initiative and grind, grind, grind. Pimply lads such as the one sitting across from him hadn’t enough tournament experience; they always blundered or crumbled.

He had won all three games Saturday. This Sunday morning he liked his game. If there was a secret to winning at chess—besides raw talent, preparation, and experience— it was concentration. Getting the game into your teeth and, like a rat terrier, shaking the life out of the opponent. “I like to watch ’em squirm,” Bobby Fischer said. Yes!

Rahsaan was playing two saxes at once. The desperate haste of his play hinted at his instinctive knowledge of oncoming stroke and death. Nicholas gripped Kirk’s line and black’s best chessboard variation and steadied himself to grind....

Yet, this weekend something was different. Into the impregnable keep of the castle of his concentration glided... Trish Morley and her problems. What had she become if not his white queen? White jumpsuits, black hair, white and black like the sixty-four squares. Just as queens ruled the game, she was the most powerful piece on the board of his life. Long live the queen! For so long he had been the subject of a black queen—Lois, Sweetest Sister. Trish had played queen-take-queen and now swept unopposed into the warming chambers of his heart. As she entered there his concentration wavered and wobbled. In the tournament’s third game he had made an atypical oversight, then had to call on ail his creative chess powers to extricate himself from difficulties.

At that moment he broke a personal rule: Rather than study only the board, he looked at his opponent during a game. The lad’s cheeks and forehead were sprinkled with acne, purplish lumps, some ruptured to scabheads. His nose was large, his lips heavy and pressed together. From deep in his chest came a stream of barely audible grunts, Unh-unh-unh-unh, as though within worked some steady engine adjacent to the left ventricle. Nicholas thought of him as Gruntman.

What did his smile mean?

He should be analyzing on Gruntman’s clock, not letting his mind wander. Fifty moves in two hours, a total of four available to play the game to its end. How precious those last few minutes could be! Now was the time to hoard seconds, yet...

The weekend had brought with it an undercurrent of excitement for Nicholas. Friday he had pulled out all stops, arrayed his most sophisticated equipment, and taken it to PC-Pros. He needed the best part of daylight to get a fix on the transmissions from the bugs and clearly identify the angle and degree of the signals.

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