RECESSIONAL
The King my liege lord is a discouraged man.
We understand and do not blame him, for the war has been long and bitter and there are so pathetically few of us left, yet we wish that it were not so. We sympathize with him for having lost his Queen, and we too all loved her—but since the Queen of the Blacks died with her, her loss does not mean the loss of the war. Yet our King, he who should be a tower of strength, smiles weakly and his words of attempted encouragement to us ring false in our ears because we hear in his voice the undertones of fear and defeat. Yet we love him and we die for him, one by one.
One by one we die in his defense, here upon this blooded bitter field, churned muddy by the horses of the Knights while they lived; they are dead now, both ours and the Black ones—and will there be an end, a victory?
We can only have faith, and never become cynics and heretics, like my poor fellow Bishop Tibault. «We fight and die; we know not why,» he once whispered to me, earlier in the war at a time when we stood side by side defending our King while the battle raged in a far corner of the field.
But that was only the beginning of his heresy. He had stopped believing in a God and had come to believe in gods, gods who play a game with us and care nothing for us as persons. Worse, he believed that our moves are not our own, that we are but puppets fighting in a useless war. Still worse—and how absurd!—that White is not necessarily good and Black is not necessarily evil, that on the cosmic scale it does not matter who wins the war!
Of course it was only to me, and only in whispers, that he said these things. He knew his duties as a bishop. He fought bravely. And died bravely, that very day, impaled upon the lance of a Black Knight. I prayed for him:
God, rest his soul and grant him peace; he meant not what he said.
Without faith we are nothing. How could Tibault have been so wrong? White must win. Victory is the only thing that can save us. Without victory our companions who have died, those who here upon this embattled field have given their lives that we may live, shall have died in vain.
Et tu, Tibault.
And you were wrong, so wrong. There is a God, and so great a God that He will forgive your heresy, because there was no evil in you, Tibault, except as doubt—no, doubt is error but it is not evil.
Without faith we are noth—
But something is happening! Our Rook, he who was on the Queen’s side of the field in the Beginning, swoops toward the evil Black King, our enemy. The villainous one is under attack—and cannot escape. We have won! We have won!
A voice in the sky says calmly, «Checkmate.»
We have won! The war, this bitter stricken field, was not in vain. Tibault, you were wrong, you were—
But what is happening now? The very Earth tilts; one side of the battlefield rises and we are sliding—White and Black alike—into—
—into a monstrous box and I see that it is a mass coffin in which already lie dead—
IT IS NOT FAIR; WE WON! GOD, WAS TIBAULT RIGHT? IT IS NOT JUST; WE WON!
The King, my liege lord, is sliding too across the squares—
IT IS NOT JUST; IT IS NOT RIGHT; IT IS NOT…
HOBBYIST
«I heard a rumor,» Sangstrom said, «to the effect that you—» He turned his head and looked about him to make absolutely sure that he and the druggist were alone in the tiny prescription pharmacy. The druggist was a gnomelike gnarled little man who could have been any age from fifty to a hundred. They were alone, but Sangstrom dropped his voice just the same. «—to the effect that you have a completely undetectable poison.»
The druggist nodded. He came around the counter and locked the front door of the shop, then walked toward a doorway behind the counter. «I was about to take a coffee break,» he said. «Come with me and have a cup.»
Sangstrom followed him around the counter and through the doorway to a back room ringed by shelves of bottles from floor to ceiling. The druggist plugged in an electric percolator, found two cups and put them on a table that had a chair on either side of it. He motioned Sangstrom to one of the chairs and took the other himself. «Now,» he said. «Tell me. Whom do you want to kill, and why?»
«Does it matter?» Sangstrom asked. «Isn’t it enough that I pay for—»
The druggist interrupted him with an upraised hand. «Yes, it matters. I must be convinced that you deserve what I can give you. Otherwise—» He shrugged.
«All right,» Sangstrom said. «The whom is my wife. The why—» He started the long story. Before he had quite finished the percolator had finished its task and the druggist briefly interrupted to get the coffee for them. Sangstrom finished his story.
The little druggist nodded. «Yes, I occasionally dispense an undetectable poison. I do so freely; I do not charge for it, if I think the case is deserving. I have helped many murderers.»
«Fine,» Sangstrom said. «Please give it to me, then.»
The druggist smiled at him. «I already have. By the time the coffee was ready I had decided that you deserved it. It was, as I said, free. But there is a price for the antidote.»
Sangstrom turned pale. But he had anticipated—not this, but the possibility of a double-cross or some form of blackmail. He pulled a pistol from his pocket.
The little druggist chuckled. «You daren’t use that. Can you find the antidote»—he waved at the shelves—«among those thousands of bottles? Or would you find a faster, more virulent poison? Or if you think I’m bluffing, that you are not really poisoned, go ahead and shoot. You’ll know the answer within three hours when the poison starts to work.»
«How much for the antidote?» Sangstrom growled.
«Quite reasonable. A thousand dollars. After all, a man must live. Even if his hobby is preventing murders, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t make money at it, is there?»
Sangstrom growled and put the pistol down, but within reach, and took out his wallet. Maybe after he had the antidote, he’d still use that pistol. He counted out a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and put it on the table.
The druggist made no immediate move to pick it up. He said: «And one other thing—for your wife’s safety and mine. You will write a confession of your intention—your former intention, I trust—to murder your wife. Then you will wait till I go out and mail it to a friend of mine on the homicide detail. He’ll keep it as evidence in case you ever do decide to kill your wife. Or me, for that matter.
«When that is in the mail it will be safe for me to return here and give you the antidote. I’ll get you paper and pen…
«Oh, one other thing—although I do not absolutely insist on it. Please help spread the word about my undetectable poison, will you? One never knows, Mr. Sangstrom. The life you save, if you have any enemies, just might be your own.»
THE RING OF HANS CARVEL
(retold and somewhat modernized from the works of Rabelais)
Once upon a time there lived in France a prosperous but somewhat aging jeweler named Hans Carvel. Besides being a studious and learned man, he was a likable man. And a man who liked women and although he had not lived a celibate life, or missed anything, had happened to remain a bachelor until he was—well, let’s call his age as pushing sixty and not mention from which direction he was pushing it.
At that age he fell in love with a bailiff’s daughter—a young and a beautiful girl, spirited and vivacious, a dish to set before a king.