Unsound Variations

By George R. R. Martin

After they swung off the interstate, the road became a narrow two-lane that wound a tortuous path through the mountains in a series of switchbacks, each steeper than the last. Peaks rose all around them, pine-covered and crowned by snow and ice, while swift cold waterfalls flashed by, barely seen, on either side. The sky was a bright and brilliant blue. It was exhilarating scenery, but it did nothing to lighten Peter’s mood. He concentrated blindly on the road, losing himself in the mindless reflexes of driving.

As the mountains grew higher, the radio reception grew poorer, stations fading in and out with every twist in the road, until at last they could get nothing at all. Kathy went from one end of the band to the other, searching, and then back again. Finally she snapped off the radio in disgust. ‘I guess you’ll just have to talk to me,’ she said.

Peter didn’t need to look at her to hear the sharpness in her tone, the bitter edge of sarcasm that had long ago replaced fondness in her voice. She was looking for an argument, he knew. She was angry about the radio, and she resented him dragging her on this trip, and most of all she resented being married to him. At times, when he was feeling very sorry for himself, he did not even blame her. He had not turned out to be much of a bargain as a husband; a failed writer, failed journalist, failing businessman, depressed and depressing. He was still a lively sparring partner, however. Perhaps that was why she tried to provoke fights so often. After all the blood had been let, one or both of them would start crying, and then they would usually make love, and life would be pleasant for an hour or two. It was about all they had left.

Not today, though. Peter lacked the energy, and his mind was on other things. ‘What do you want to talk about?’ he asked her. He kept his tone amicable and his eyes on the road.

‘Tell me about these clowns we’re going to visit,’ she said.

‘I did. They were my teammates on the chess team, back when I was at Northwestern.’

‘Since when is chess a team sport anyway?’ Kathy said. ‘What’d you do, vote on each move?’

‘No. In chess, a team match is really a bunch of individual matches. Usually four or five boards, at least in college play. There’s no consultation or anything. The team that wins the most individual games wins the match point. The way it works—’

‘I get it,’ she said sharply. ‘I may not be a chess player, but I’m not stupid. So you and these other three were the Northwestern team?’

‘Yes and no,’ Peter said. The Toyota was straining; it wasn’t used to grades this steep, and it hadn’t been adjusted for altitude before they took off from Chicago. He drove carefully. They were up high enough now to come across icy patches, and snow drifting across the road.

‘Yes and no,’ Kathy said sarcastically. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Northwestern had a big chess club back then. We played in a lot of tournaments - local, state, national. Sometimes we fielded more than one team, so the line-up was a bit different every tournament. It depended on who could play and who couldn’t, who had a midterm, who’d played in the last match - lots of things. We four were Northwestern’s B team in the North American Intercollegiate Team Championships, ten years ago this week. Northwestern hosted that tournament, and I ran it, as well as playing.’

‘What do you mean B team?’

Peter cleared his throat and eased the Toyota around a sharp curve, gravel rattling against the underside of the car as one wheel brushed the shoulder. ‘A school wasn’t limited to just one team,’ he said. ‘If you had the money and a lot of people who wanted to play, you could enter several. Your best four players would make up your A team, the real contender. The second four would be the B team, and so on.’ He paused briefly, and continued with a faint note of pride in his voice. ‘The nationals at Northwestern were the biggest ever held, up to that time, although of course that record has since been broken. We set a second record, though, that still stands. Since the tournament was on our home grounds, we had lots of players on hand. We entered six teams. No other school has ever had more than four in the nationals, before or after.’ The record still brought a smile to his face. Maybe it wasn’t much of a record, but it was the only one he had, and it was his. Some people lived and died without ever setting a record of any kind, he reflected silently. Maybe he ought to tell Kathy to put his on his tombstone: HERE LIES PETER K. NORTEN. HE FIELDED SIX TEAMS. He chuckled.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Nothing.’

She didn’t pursue it. ‘So you ran this tournament, you say?’

‘I was the club president and the chairman of the local committee. I didn’t direct, but I put together the bid that brought the nationals to Evanston, made all the preliminary arrangements. And I organized all six of our teams, decided who would play on each one, appointed the team captains. But during the tournament itself I was only the captain of the B team.’

She laughed. ‘So you were a big deal on the second-string. It figures. The story of your life.’

Peter bit back a sharp reply, and said nothing. The Toyota swerved around another hairpin, and a vast Colorado mountain panorama opened up in front of them. It left him strangely unmoved.

After a while Kathy said, ‘When did you stop playing chess?’

‘I sort of gave it up after college. Not a conscious decision, really. I just kind of drifted out of it. I haven’t played a game of tournament chess in almost nine years. I’m probably pretty rusty by now. But back then I was fairly good.’

‘How good is fairly good?’

‘I was rated as a Class A player, like everyone else on our B team.’

“What does that mean?’

‘It means my USCF rating was substantially higher than that of the vast majority of tournament chess players in the country,’ he said. ‘And the tournament players are generally much better than the unrated wood-pushers you encounter in bars and coffeehouses. The ratings went all the way down to Class E. Above Class A you had Experts, and Masters, and Senior Masters at the top, but there weren’t many of them.’

‘Three classes above you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you might say, at your very best, you were a fourth-class chess player.’

At that Peter did look over at her. She was leaning back in her seat, a faint smirk on her face. ‘Bitch,’ he said. He was suddenly angry.

‘Keep your eyes on the road!’ Kathy snapped.

He wrenched the car around the next turn hard as he could, and pressed down on the gas. She hated it when he drove fast. ‘I don’t know why the hell I try to talk to you,’ he said.

‘My husband, the big deal,’ she said. She laughed. ‘A fourth-class chess player playing on the junior varsity team. And a fifth-rate driver too.’

‘Shut up,’ Peter said furiously. ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Maybe we were only the B team, but we were good. We finished better than anyone had any right to expect, only a half-point behind Northwestern A. And we almost scored one of the biggest upsets in history.’

‘Do tell.’

Peter hesitated, already regretting his words. The memory was important to him, almost as important as his silly little record. He knew what it meant, how close they had come. But she’d never understand; it would only be another failure for her to laugh at. He should never have mentioned it.

‘Well?’ she prodded. ‘What about this great upset, dear? Tell me.’

It was too late, Peter realized. She’d never let him drop it now. She’d needle him and needle him until he told her. He sighed and said, ‘It was ten years ago this week. The nationals were always held between Christmas and New Year’s, when everyone was on break. An eight-round team tournament, two rounds a day. All of our teams did moderately well. Our A team finished seventh overall.’

‘You were on the B team, sweetie.’

Peter grimaced. ‘Yes. And we were doing best of all, up to a point. Scored a couple nice upsets late in the tournament. It put us in a strange position. Going into the last round, the University of Chicago was in first place, alone, with a 6-1 match record. They’d beaten our A team, among their other victims, and they were defending national champions. Behind them were three other schools at 5½-½. Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts, and – I don’t know, someone else, it doesn’t matter. What mattered was that all three of those teams had already played U of C. Then you had a whole bunch of teams at 5-2, including both Northwestern A and B. One of the 5-2 teams had to be paired up against Chicago in the final round. By some freak, it turned out to be us. Everyone thought that cinched the tournament for them.

‘It was really a mismatch. They were the defending champions, and they had an awesome team. Three Masters and an Expert, if I recall. They outrated us by hundreds of points on every board. It should have been easy. It wasn’t.’

‘It was never easy between U of C and Northwestern. All through my college years, we were the two big Midwestern chess powers, and we were archrivals. The Chicago captain, Hal Winslow, became a good friend of mine, but I gave him a lot of headaches. Chicago always had a stronger team than we did, but we gave them fits nonetheless. We met in the Chicago Intercollegiate League, in state tournaments, in regional tournaments, and several times in the nationals. Chicago won most of those, but not all. We took the city championship away from them once, and racked up a couple other big upsets too. And that year, in the nationals, we came this close’ - he held up two fingers, barely apart - ‘to the biggest upset of all.’ He put his hand and back on the wheel, and scowled.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m breathless to know what comes next.’

Peter ignored the sarcasm. ‘An hour into the match, we had half the tournament gathered around our tables, watching. Everyone could see that Chicago was in trouble. We clearly had superior positions on two boards, and we were even on the other two.

‘It got better. I was playing Hal Winslow on third board. We had a dull, even position, and we agreed to a draw. And on fourth board, E. C. gradually got outplayed and finally resigned in a dead lost position.’

‘E. C.?’

‘Edward Colin Stuart. We all called him E. C. Quite a character. You’ll meet him up at Bunnish’s place.’

‘He lost?’

‘Yes.’

‘This doesn’t sound like such a thrilling upset to me,’ she said drily. ‘Though maybe by your standards, it’s a triumph.’

‘E. C. lost,’ Peter said, ‘but by that time, Delmario had clearly busted his man on board two. The guy dragged it out, but finally we got the point, which tied the score at 1½-1½, with one game in progress. And we were winning that one. It was incredible. Bruce Bunnish was our first board. A real turkey, but a half-decent player. He was another A player, but he had a trick memory. Photographic. Knew every opening backwards and forwards. He was playing Chicago’s big man.’ Peter smiled wryly. ‘In more ways than one. A Master name of Robinson Vesselere. Damn strong chess player, but he must have weighed four hundred pounds. He’d sit there absolutely immobile as you played him, his hands folded on top of his stomach, little eyes squinting at the board. And he’d crush you. He should have crushed Bunnish easily. Hell, he was rated four hundred points higher. But that wasn’t what had gone down. With that trick memory of his, Bunnish had somehow outplayed Vesselere in an obscure variation of the Sicilian. He was swarming all over him. An incredible attack. The position was as complicated as anything I’d ever seen, very sharp and tactical. Vesselere was counterattacking on the queenside, and he had some pressure, but nothing like the threats Bunnish had on the kingside. It was a won game. We were all sure of that.’

‘So you almost won the championship?’

‘No,’ Peter said. ‘No, it wasn’t that. If we’d won the match, we would have tied Chicago and a few other teams at 6-2, but the championship would have gone to someone else, some team with 6½ match points. Berkeley maybe, or Mass. It was just the upset itself we wanted. It would have been incredible. They were the best college chess team in the country. We weren’t even the best at our school. If we had beaten them, it would have caused a sensation. And we came so close.’

‘What happened?’

‘Bunnish blew it,’ Peter said sourly. ‘There was a critical position. Bunnish had a sac. A sacrifice, you know? A double piece sac. Very sharp, but it would have busted up Vesselere’s kingside and driven his king out into the open. But Bunnish was too timid for that. Instead he kept looking at Vesselere’s queenside attack, and finally he made some feeble defensive move. Vesselere shifted another piece to the queenside, and Bunnish defended again. Instead of following up his advantage, he made a whole series of cautious little adjustments to the position, and before long his attack had dissipated. After that, of course, Vesselere overwhelmed him.’ Even now, after ten years, Peter felt the disappointment building inside him as he spoke. ‘We lost the match 2½-1½, and Chicago won another national championship. Afterwards, even Vesselere admitted that he was busted if Brucie had played knight takes pawn at the critical point. Damn.’

‘You lost. That’s what this amounts to. You lost.’

‘We came close.’

‘Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades,’ Kathy said. “You lost. Even then you were a loser, dear. I wish I’d known.’

‘Bunnish lost, damn it,’ Peter said. ‘It was just like him. He had a Class A rating, and that trick memory, but as a team player he was worthless. You don’t know how many matches he blew for us. When the pressure was on, we could always count on Bunnish to fold. But that time was the worst, that game against Vesselere. I could have killed him. He was an arrogant asshole, too.’

Kathy laughed. ‘Isn’t this arrogant asshole the one we are now speeding to visit?’

‘It’s been ten years. Maybe he’s changed. Even if he hasn’t, well, he’s a multimillionaire asshole now. Electronics. Besides, I want to see E.C. and Steve again, and Bunnish said they’d be there.’

‘Delightful,’ said Kathy. Well, rush on, then. I wouldn’t want to miss this. It might be my only opportunity to spend four days with an asshole millionaire and three losers.’

Peter said nothing, but he pressed down on the accelerator, and the Toyota plunged down the mountain road, faster and faster, rattling as it picked up speed. Down and down, he thought, down and down. Just like my goddamned life.

Four miles up Bunnish’s private road, they finally came within sight of the house. Peter, who still dreamed of buying his own house after a decade of living in cheap apartments, took one look and knew he was gazing at a three million dollar piece of property. There were three levels, all blending into the mountainside so well you hardly noticed them, built of natural wood and native stone and tinted glass. A huge solar greenhouse was the most conspicuous feature. Beneath the house, a four-car garage was sunk right into the mountain itself.

Peter pulled into the last empty spot, between a brand new silver Cadillac Seville that was obviously Bunnish’s and an ancient rusted VW Beetle that was obviously not. As he pulled the key from the ignition, the garage doors shut automatically behind them, blocking out daylight and the gorgeous mountain vistas. The door closed with a resounding metallic clang.

‘Someone knows we’re here,’ Kathy observed.

‘Get the suitcases,’ Peter snapped.

To the rear of the garage they found the elevator, and Peter jabbed the topmost of the two buttons. When the elevator doors opened again, it was on a huge living room. Peter stepped out and stared at a wilderness of potted plants beneath a vaulting skylight, at thick brown carpets, fine wood paneling, bookcases packed with leatherbound volumes, a large fireplace, and Edward Colin Stuart, who rose from a leather-clad armchair across the room when the elevator arrived.

‘E.C,’ Peter said, setting down his suitcase. He smiled.

‘Hello, Peter,’ E.C. said, coming toward them quickly. They shook hands.

‘You haven’t changed a goddamned bit in ten years,’ Peter said. It was true. E.C. was still slender and compact, with a bushy head of sandy blonde hair and a magnificent handlebar mustache. He was wearing jeans and a tapered purple shirt with a black vest, and he seemed just as he had a decade ago: brisk, trim, efficient. ‘Not a damn bit,’ Peter repeated.

‘More’s the pity,’ E.C. said. ‘One is supposed to change, I believe.’ His blue eyes were as unreadable as ever. He turned to Kathy, and said, ‘I’m E.C. Stuart.’

‘Oh, pardon,’ Peter said. ‘This is my wife, Kathy.’

‘Delighted,’ she said, taking his hand and smiling at him.

‘Where’s Steve?’ Peter asked. ‘I saw his VW down in the garage. Gave me a start. How long has he been driving that thing now? Fifteen years?’

‘Not quite,’ E.C. said. ‘He’s around somewhere, probably having a drink.’ His mouth shifted subtly when he said it, telling Peter a good deal more than his words did.

‘And Bunnish?’

‘Brucie has not yet made his appearance. I think he was waiting for you to arrive. You probably want to settle in to your rooms.’

‘How do we find them, if our host is missing?’ Kathy asked drily.

‘Ah,’ said E.C, ‘you haven’t been acquainted with the wonders of Bunnishland yet. Look.’ He pointed to the fireplace.

Peter would have sworn that there had been a painting above the mantle when they had entered, some sort of surreal landscape. Now there was a large rectangular screen, with words on it, vivid red against black WELCOME, PETER. WELCOME, KATHY. YOUR SUITE IS ON THE SECOND LEVEL, FIRST DOOR. PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE.

Peter turned. ‘How… ?’

‘No doubt triggered by the elevator,’ E.C. said. ‘I was greeted the same way. Brucie is an electronics genius, remember. The house is full of gadgets and toys. I’ve explored a bit.’ He shrugged. ‘Why don’t you two unpack and then wander back? I won’t go anywhere.’

They found their rooms easily enough. The huge, tiled bath featured an outside patio with a hot tub, and the suite had its own sitting room and fireplace. Above it was an abstract painting, but when Kathy closed the room door it faded away and was replaced by another message: I HOPE YOU FIND THIS SATISFACTORY.

‘Cute guy, this host of ours,’ Kathy said, sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘Those TV screens or whatever they are better not be two-way. I don’t intend to put on any show for any electronic voyeur.’

Peter frowned. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if the house was bugged. Bunnish was always a strange sort.’

‘How strange?’

‘He was hard to like,’ Peter said. ‘Boastful, always bragging about how good he was as a chess player, how smart he was, that sort of thing. No one really believed him. His grades were good, I guess, but the rest of the time he seemed close to dense. E.C. has a wicked way with hoaxes and practical jokes, and Bunnish was his favorite victim. I don’t know how many laughs we had at his expense. Bunnish was kind of a goon in person, too. Pudgy, round-faced with big cheeks like some kind of chipmunk, wore his hair in a crew cut. He was in ROTC. I’ve never seen anyone who looked more ridiculous in a uniform. He never dated.’

‘Gay?’

‘No, not hardly. Asexual is closer to it.’ Peter looked around the room and shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine how Bunnish made it this big. Him of all people.’ He sighed, opened his suitcase, and started to unpack. ‘I might have believed it of Delmario,’ he continued. ‘Steve and Bunnish were both in Tech, but Steve always seemed much brighter. We all thought he was a real whiz-kid. Bunnish just seemed like an arrogant mediocrity.’

‘Fooled you,’ Kathy said. She smiled sweetly. ‘Of course, he’s not the only one to fool you, is he? Though perhaps he was the first.’

‘Enough,’ Peter said, hanging the last of his shirts in the closet. ‘Come on, let’s get back downstairs. I want to talk to E.C.’

They had no sooner stepped out of their suite when a voice hailed them. ‘Pete?’

Peter turned, and the big man standing in the doorway down the hall smiled a blurry smile at him. ‘Don’t you recognize me, Peter?’

‘Steve?’ Peter said wonderingly.

‘Sure, hey, who’d you think?’ He stepped out of his own room, a bit unsteadily, and closed the door behind him. This must be the wife, eh? Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ Peter said. ‘Kathy, this is Steve Delmario. Steve, Kathy.’ Delmario came over and pumped her hand enthusiastically, after clapping Peter roundly on the back. Peter found himself staring. If E.C. had scarcely changed at all in the past ten years, Steve had made up for it. Peter would never have recognized his old teammate on the street.

The old Steve Delmario had lived for chess and electronics. He was a fierce competitor, and he loved to tinker things together, but he was frustratingly uninterested in anything outside his narrow passions. He had been a tall, gaunt youth with incredibly intense eyes held captive behind Coke-bottle lenses in heavy black frames. His black hair had always been either ruffled and unkempt or - when he treated himself to one of his do-it-yourself haircuts - grotesquely butchered. He was equally careless about his clothing, most of which was Salvation Army chic minus the chic: baggy brown pants with cuffs, ten-year-old shirts with frayed collars, a zippered and shapeless gray sweater he wore everywhere. Once E.C. had observed that Steve Delmario looked like the last man left alive on earth after a nuclear holocaust, and for almost a semester thereafter the whole club had called Delmario, ‘the last man on earth.’ He took it with good humor. For all his quirks, Delmario had been well liked.

The years had been cruel to him, however. The Coke-bottle glasses in the black frames were the same, and the clothes were equally haphazard - shabby brown cords, a short-sleeved white shirt with three felt-tip pens in the pocket, a faded sweater-vest with every button buttoned, scuffed hush puppies - but the rest had all changed. Steve had gained about fifty pounds, and he had a bloated, puffy look about him. He was almost entirely bald, nothing left of the wild black hair but a few sickly strands around his ears. And his eyes had lost their feverish intensity, and were filled instead with a fiizziness that Peter found terribly disturbing. Most shocking of all was the smell of alcohol on his breath. E.C. had hinted at it, but Peter still found it difficult to accept. In college, Steve Delmario had never touched anything but an infrequent beer.

‘It is good to see you again,’ Peter said, though he was no longer quite sure that was true. ‘Shall we go on downstairs? E.C. is waiting.’

Delmario nodded. ‘Sure, sure, let’s do it.’ He clapped Peter on the back again. ‘Have you seen Bunnish yet? Damn, this is some place he’s got, isn’t it? You seen those message screens? Clever, real clever. Never would have figured Bunnish to go as far as this, not our old Funny Bunny, eh?’ He chuckled. ‘I’ve looked at some of his patents over the years, you know. Real ingenious. Real fine work. And from Bunnish. I guess you just never know, do you?’

The living room was awash with classical music when they descended the spiral stair. Peter didn’t recognize the composition; his own tastes had always run to rock. But classical music had been one of E.C.’s passions, and he was sitting in an armchair now, eyes closed, listening.

‘Drinks,’ Delmario was saying. ‘I’ll fix us all some drinks. You folks must be thirsty. Bunny’s got a wet bar right behind the stair here. What do you want?’

‘What are the choices?’ Kathy asked.

‘Hell, he’s got anything you could think of,’ said Delmario.

‘A Beefeater martini, then,’ she said. ‘Very dry.’

Delmario nodded. ‘Pete?’

‘Oh,’ said Peter. He shrugged. ‘A beer, I guess.’

Delmario went behind the stair to fix up their drinks, and Kathy arched her eyebrows at him. ‘Such refined tastes,’ she said. ‘A beer!’

Peter ignored her and went over to sit beside E.C. Stuart. ‘How the hell did you find the stereo?’ he asked. ‘I don’t see it anywhere.’ The music seemed to be coming right out of the walls.

E.C. opened his eyes, gave a quirkish little smile, and brushed one end of his mustache with a finger. ‘The message screen blabbed the secret to me,’ he said. ‘The controls are built into the wall back over there,’ nodding, ‘and the whole system is concealed. It’s voice activated, too. Computerized. I told it what album I wanted to hear.’

‘Impressive,’ Peter admitted. He scratched his head. ‘Didn’t Steve put together a voice-activated stereo back in college?’

‘Your beer,’ Delmario said. He was standing over them, holding out a cold bottle of Heineken. Peter took it, and Delmario - with a drink in hand - seated himself on the ornate tiled coffee table. ‘I had a system,’ he said. ‘Real crude, though. Remember, you guys used to kid me about it.’

‘You bought a good cartridge, as I recall,’ E.C. said, ‘but you had it held by a tone-arm you made out of a bent coat hanger.’

‘It worked,’ Delmario protested. ‘It was voice-activated too, like you said, but real primitive. Just on and off, that’s all, and you had to speak real loud. I figured I could improve on it after I got out of school, but I never did.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing like this. This is real sophisticated.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ E.C. said. He craned up his head slightly and said, in a very loud clear voice, ‘I’ve had enough music now, thank you.’ The silence that followed was briefly startling. Peter couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Finally E.C. turned to him and said, all seriously, ‘How did Bunnish get you here, Peter?’

Peter was puzzled. ‘Get me here? He just invited us. What do you mean?’

‘He paid Steve’s way, you know,’ E.C. said. ‘As for me, I turned down this invitation. Brucie was never one of my favorite people, you know that. He pulled strings to change my mind. I’m with an ad agency in New York. He dangled a big account in front of them, and I was told to come here or lose my job. Interesting, eh?’

Kathy had been sitting on the sofa, sipping her martini and looking bored. ‘It sounds as though this reunion is important to him,’ she observed.

E.C. stood up. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ The rest of them rose obediently, and followed him across the room. In a shadowy corner surrounded by bookcases, a chessboard had been set up, with a game in progress. The board was made of squares of light and dark wood, painstakingly inlaid into a gorgeous Victorian table. The pieces were ivory and onyx. ‘Take a look at that,’ E.C. said.

‘That’s a beautiful set,’ Peter said, admiringly. He reached down to lift the Black queen for a closer inspection, and grunted in surprise. The piece wouldn’t move.

‘Tug away,’ E.C. said. ‘It won’t do you any good. I’ve tried. The pieces are glued into position. Every one of them.’

Steve Delmario moved around the board, his eyes blinking behind his thick glasses. He set his drink on the table and sank into the chair behind the White pieces. ‘The position,’ he said, his voice a bit blurry with drink. ‘I know it.’

E.C. Stuart smiled thinly and brushed his mustache. ‘Peter,’ he said, nodding toward the chessboard. ‘Take a good look.’

Peter stared, and all of a sudden it came clear to him, the position on the board became as familiar as his own features in a mirror. ‘The game,’ he said. ‘From the nationals. This is the critical position from Bunnish’s game with Vesselere.’

E.C. nodded. ‘I thought so. I wasn’t sure.’

‘Oh, I’m sure,’ Delmario said loudly. ‘How the hell could I not be sure? This is right where Bunny blew it, remember? He played king to knight one, instead of the sac. Cost us the match. Me, I was sitting right next to him, playing the best damned game of chess I ever played. Beat a Master, and what good did it do? Not a damn bit of good, thanks to Bunnish.’ He looked at the board and glowered. ‘Knight takes pawn, that’s all he’s got to play, busts Vesselere wide open. Check, check, check, check, got to be a mate there somewhere.’

‘You were never able to find it, though, Delmario,’ Bruce Bunnish said from behind them.

None of them had heard him enter. Peter started like a burglar surprised while copping the family silver.

Their host stood in the doorway a few yards distant. Bunnish had changed, too. He had lost weight since college, and his body looked hard and fit now, though he still had the big round cheeks that Peter remembered. His crew cut had grown out into a healthy head of brown hair, carefully styled and blow-dried. He wore large, tinted glasses and expensive clothes. But he was still Bunnish. His voice was loud and grating, just as Peter remembered it.

Bunnish strolled over to the chessboard almost casually. ‘You analyzed that position for weeks afterward, Delmario,’ he said. ‘You never found the mate.’

Delmario stood up. ‘I found a dozen mates,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Bunnish said, ‘but none of them were forced. Vesselere was a Master. He wouldn’t have played into any of your so-called mating lines.’

Delmario frowned and took a drink. He was going to say something else - Peter could see him fumbling for the words - but E.C. stood up and took away his chance. ‘Bruce,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Good to see you again. How long has it been?’

Bunnish turned and smiled superciliously. ‘Is that another of your jokes, E.C? You know how long it has been, and I know how long it has been, so why do you ask? Norten knows, and Delmario knows. Maybe you’re asking for Mrs Norten.’ He looked at Kathy. ‘Do you know how long it has been?’

She laughed. ‘I’ve heard.’

‘Ah,’ said Bunnish. He swung back to face E.C. ‘Then we all know, so it must be another of your jokes, and I’m not going to answer. Do you remember how you used to phone me at three in the morning, and ask me what time it was? Then I’d tell you, and you’d ask me what I was doing calling you at that hour?’

E.C. frowned and lowered his hand.

‘Well,’ said Bunnish, into the awkward silence that followed, ‘no sense standing here around this stupid chessboard. Why don’t we all go sit down by the fireplace, and talk.’ He gestured. ‘Please.’

But when they were seated, the silence fell again. Peter took a swallow of beer and realized that he was more than just ill-at-ease. A palpable tension hung in the air. ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Bruce,’ he said, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

Bunnish looked around smugly. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve done awfully well, you know. Awfully well. You wouldn’t believe how much money I have. I hardly know what to do with it all.’ He smiled broadly and fatuously. ‘And how about you, my friends? Here I am boasting once again, when I ought to be listening to all of you recount your own triumphs.’ Bunnish looked at Peter. ‘You first, Norten. You’re the captain, after all. How have you done?’

‘All right,’ Peter said, uncomfortably. ‘I’ve done fine. I own a bookstore.’

‘A bookstore! How wonderful! I recall that you always wanted to be in publishing, though I rather thought you’d be writing books instead of selling them. Whatever happened to those novels you were going to write, Peter? Your literary career?’

Peter’s mouth was very dry. ‘I … things change, Bruce. I haven’t had much time for writing.’ It sounded so feeble, Peter thought. All at once, he was desperately wishing he was elsewhere.

‘No time for writing,’ echoed Bunnish. ‘A pity, Norten. You had such promise.’

‘He’s still promising,’ Kathy put in sharply. ‘You ought to hear him promise. He’s been promising as long as I’ve known him. He never writes, but he does promise.’

Bunnish laughed. ‘Your wife is very witty,’ he said to Peter. ‘She’s almost as funny as E.C. was, back in college. You must enjoy being married to her a great deal. I recall how fond you were of E.C.’s little jokes.’ He looked at E.C. ‘Are you still a funny man, Stuart?’

E.C. looked annoyed. ‘I’m hysterical,’ he said, in a fiat voice.

‘Good,’ said Bunnish. He turned to Kathy and said, ‘I don’t know if Peter has told you all the stories about old E.C, but he really played some amazing pranks. Hilarious man, that’s our E.C. Stuart. Once, when our chess team had won the city championship, he had a girlfriend of his call up Peter and pretend to be an AP reporter. She interviewed him for an hour before he caught on.’

Kathy laughed. ‘Peter is sometimes a bit slow,’ she said.

‘Oh, that was nothing. Normally I was the one E.C. liked to play tricks on. I didn’t go out much, you know. Deathly afraid of girls. But E.C. had a hundred girlfriends, all of them gorgeous. One time he took pity on me and offered to fix me up on a blind date. I accepted eagerly, and when the girl arrived on the corner where we were supposed to meet, she was wearing dark glasses and carrying a cane. Tapping. You know.’

Steve Delmario guffawed, tried to stifle his laughter, and nearly choked on his drink. ‘Sorry,’ he wheezed, ‘sorry.’

Bunnish waved casually. ‘Oh, go ahead, laugh. It was funny. The girl wasn’t really blind, you know, she was a drama student who was rehearsing a part in a play. But it took me all night to find that out. I was such a fool. And that was only one joke. There were hundreds of others.’

E.C. looked somber. ‘That was a long time ago. We were kids. It’s all behind us now, Bruce.’

‘Bruce?’ Bunnish sounded surprised. ‘Why, Stuart, that’s the first time you’ve ever called me Bruce. You have changed. You were the one who started calling me Brucie. God, how I hated that name! Brucie, Brucie, Brucie, I loathed it. How many times did I ask you to call me Bruce? How many times? Why, I don’t recall. I do recall, though, that after three years you finally came up to me at one meeting and said that you’d thought it over, and now you agreed that I was right, that Brucie was not an appropriate name for a Class A chess player, a twenty-year old, an officer in ROTC. Your exact words. I remember the whole speech, E.C. It took me so by surprise that I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘Good, it’s about time!’ And then you grinned, and said that Brucie was out, that you’d never call me Brucie again. From now on, you said, you’d call me Bunny.’

Kathy laughed, and Delmario choked down an explosive outburst, but Peter only felt cold all over. Bunnish’s smile was genial enough, but his tone was pure iced venom as he recounted the incident. E.C. did not look amused either. Peter took a swallow of his beer, casting about for some ploy to get the conversation onto a different track. ‘Do any of you still play?’ he heard himself blurt out.

They all looked at him. Delmario seemed almost befuddled. ‘Play?’ he said. He blinked down at his empty glass.

‘Help yourself to a refill,’ Bunnish told him. ‘You know where it is.’ He smiled at Peter as Delmario moved off to the bar. ‘You mean chess, of course.’

‘Chess,’ Peter said. ‘You remember chess. Odd little pastime played with black and white pieces and lots of two-faced clocks.’ He looked around. ‘Don’t tell me we’ve all given it up?’

E.C. shrugged. ‘I’m too busy. I haven’t played a rated game since college.’

Delmario had returned, ice cubes clinking softly in a tumbler full of bourbon. ‘I played a little after college,’ he said, ‘but not for the last five years.’ He sat down heavily, and stared into the cold fireplace. ‘Those were my bad years. Wife left me, I lost a couple jobs. Bunny here was way ahead of me. Every goddamn idea I came up with, he had a patent on it already. Got so I was useless. That was when I started to drink.’ He smiled, and took a sip. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Just then. And I stopped playing chess. It all comes out, you know, it all comes out over the board. I was losing, losing lots. To all these fish, god, I tell you, I couldn’t take it. Rating went down to Class B.’ Delmario took another drink, and looked at Peter. ‘You need something to play good chess, you know what I’m saying? A kind of … hell, I don’t know … a kind of arrogance. Self-confidence. It’s all wrapped up with ego, that kind of stuff, and I didn’t have it any more, whatever it was. I used to have it, but I lost it all. I had bad luck, and I looked around one day and it was gone, and my chess was gone with it. So I quit.’ He lifted the tumbler to his lips, hesitated, and drained it all. Then he smiled for them. ‘Quit,’ he repeated. ‘Gave it up. Chucked it away. Bailed out.’ He chuckled, and stood up, and went off to the bar again.

‘I play,’ Bunnish said forcefully. ‘I’m a Master now.’

Delmario stopped in midstride, and fixed Bunnish with such a look of total loathing that it could have killed. Peter saw that Steve’s hand was shaking.

‘I’m very happy for you, Bruce,’ E.C. Stuart said. ‘Please do enjoy your Mastership, and your money, and Bunnishland.’ He stood and straightened his vest, frowning. ‘Meanwhile, I’m going to be going.’

‘Going?’ said Bunnish. ‘Really, E.C, so soon? Must you?’

‘Bunnish,’ E.C. said, ‘you can spend the next four days playing your little ego games with Steve and Peter, if you like, but I’m afraid I am not amused. You always were a pimple-brain, and I have better things to do with my life than to sit here and watch you squeeze out ten-year-old pus. Am I making myself clear?’

‘Oh, perfectly,’ Bunnish said.

‘Good,’ said E.C. He looked at the others. ‘Kathy, it was nice meeting you. I’m sorry it wasn’t under better circumstances. Peter, Steve, if either of you comes to New York in the near future, I hope you’ll look me up. I’m in the book’

‘E.C, don’t you…’ Peter began, but he knew it was useless. Even in the old days, E.C. Stuart was headstrong. You could never talk him into or out of anything.

‘Good-bye,’ he said, interrupting Peter. He went briskly to the elevator, and they watched the wood-paneled doors close on him.

‘He’ll be back,’ Bunnish said after the elevator had gone.

‘I don’t think so,’ Peter replied.

Bunnish got up, smiling broadly. Deep dimples appeared in his large, round cheeks. ‘Oh, but he will, Norten. You see, it’s my turn to play the little jokes now, and E.C. will soon find that out.’

‘What?’ Delmario said.

‘Don’t you fret about it, you’ll understand soon enough,’ Bunnish said. ‘Meanwhile, please do excuse me. I have to see about dinner. You all must be ravenous. I’m making dinner myself, you know. I sent my servants away, so we could have a nice private reunion.’ He looked at his watch, a heavy gold Swiss. ‘Let’s all meet in the dining room in, say, an hour. Everything should be ready by then. We can talk some more. About life. About chess.’ He smiled, and left.

Kathy was smiling too. ‘Well,’ she said to Peter after Bunnish had left the room, ‘this is all vastly more entertaining than I would have imagined. I feel as if I just walked into a Harold Pinter play.’

‘Who’s that?’ Delmario asked, resuming his seat.

Peter ignored him. ‘I don’t like any of this,’ he said. ‘What the hell did Bunnish mean about playing a joke on us?’

He didn’t have to wait long for an answer. While Kathy went to fix herself another martini, they heard the elevator again, and turned expectantly toward the doors. E.C. stepped out frowning. ‘Where is he?’ he said in a hard voice.

‘He went to cook dinner,’ Peter said. ‘What is it? He said something about a joke …’

‘Those garage doors won’t open,’ E.C. said. ‘I can’t get my car out. There’s no place to go without it. We must be fifty miles from the nearest civilization.’

‘I’ll go down and ram out with my VW,’ Delmario said helpfully. ‘Like in the movies.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ E.C. said. ‘That door is stainless steel. There’s no way you’re going to batter it down.’ He scowled and brushed back one end of his mustache. ‘Battering down Brucie, however, is a much more viable proposition. Where the hell is the kitchen?’

Peter sighed. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you, E.C,’ he said. ‘From the way he’s been acting, he’d just love a chance to clap you in jail. If you touch him, it’s assault, you know that.’

‘Phone the police,’ Kathy suggested.

Peter looked around. ‘Now that you mention it, I don’t see a phone anywhere in this room. Do you?’ Silence. ‘There was no phone in our suite, either, that I recall.’

‘Hey!’ Delmario said. ‘That’s right, Pete, you’re right.’

E.C. sat down. ‘He appears to have us checkmated,’ he said.

‘The exact word,’ said Peter. ‘Bunnish is playing some kind of game with us. He said so himself. A joke.’

‘Ha, ha,’ said E.C. ‘What do you suggest we do, then? Laugh?’

Peter shrugged. ‘Eat dinner, talk, have our reunion, find out what the hell Bunnish wants with us.’

‘Win the game, guys, that’s what we do,’ Delmario said.

E.C. stared at him. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

Delmario sipped his bourbon and grinned. ‘Peter said Bunny was playing some kind of game with us, right? OK, fine. Let’s play. Let’s beat him at this goddamned game, whatever the hell it is.’ He chuckled. ‘Hell, guys, this is the Funny Bunny we’re playing. Maybe he is a Master, I don’t give a good goddamn, he’ll still find a way to blow it in the end. You know how it was. Bunnish always lost the big games. He’ll lose this one, too.’

‘I wonder,’ said Peter. ‘I wonder.’

Peter brought another bottle of Heineken back to the suite with him, and sat in a deck chair on the patio drinking it while Kathy tried out the hot tub.

‘This is nice,’ she said from the tub. ‘Relaxing. Sensuous, even. Why don’t you come on in?’

‘No, thanks,’ Peter said.

‘We ought to get one of these.’

‘Right. We could put it in our living room. The people in the apartment downstairs would love it.’ He took a swallow of beer and shook his head.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Kathy asked.

Peter smiled grimly. ‘Chess, believe it or not.’

‘Oh? Do tell.’

‘Life is a lot like chess,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Really? I’d never noticed, somehow.’

Peter refused to let her needling get to him. ‘All a matter of choices. Every move you face choices, and every choice leads to different variations. It branches and then branches again, and sometimes the variation you pick isn’t as good as it looked, isn’t sound at all. But you don’t know that until your game is over.’

‘I hope you’ll repeat this when I’m out of the tub,’ Kathy said. ‘I want to write it all down for posterity.’

‘I remember, back in college, how many possibilities life seemed to hold. Variations. I knew, of course, that I’d only live one of my fantasy lives, but for a few years there, I had them all, all the branches, all the variations. One day I could dream of being a novelist, one day I would be a journalist covering Washington, the next - oh, I don’t know, a politician, a teacher, whatever. My dream lives. Full of dream wealth and dream women. All the things I was going to do, all the places I was going to live. They were mutually exclusive, of course, but since I didn’t have any of them, in a sense I had them all. Like when you sit down at a chessboard to begin a game, and you don’t know what the opening will be. Maybe it will be a Sicilian, or a French, or a Ruy Lopez. They all coexist, all the variations, until you start making the moves. You always dream of winning, no matter what line you choose, but the variations are still … different.’ He drank some more beer. ‘Once the game begins, the possibilities narrow and narrow and narrow, the other variations fade, and you’re left with what you’ve got - a position half of your own making, and half chance, as embodied by that stranger across the board. Maybe you’ve got a good game, or maybe you’re in trouble, but in any case there’s just that one position to work from. The might-have-beens are gone.’

Kathy climbed out of the hot tub and began toweling herself off. Steam rose from the water, and moved gently around her. Peter found himself looking at her almost with tenderness, something he had not felt in a long time. Then she spoke, and ruined it. ‘You missed your calling,’ she said, rubbing briskly with the towel. ‘You should have taken up poster-writing. You have a knack for poster profundity. You know, like, I am not in this world to live up to your expect—’

‘Enough,’ Peter said. ‘How much blood do you have to draw, damn it?’

Kathy stopped and looked at him. She frowned. ‘You’re really down aren’t you?’ she said.

Peter stared off at the mountains, and did not bother to reply.

The concern left her voice as quickly as it had come. ‘Another depression, huh? Drink another beer, why don’t you? Feel sorry for yourself some more. By midnight you’ll have worked yourself up to a good crying jag. Go on.’

‘I keep thinking of that match,’ Peter said.

‘Match?’

‘In the nationals,’ he said. ‘Against Chicago. It’s weird, but I keep having this funny feeling, like … like it was right there that it all started to go bad. We had a chance to do something big, something special. But it slipped away from us, and nothing has been right since. A losing variation, Kathy. We picked a losing variation, and we’ve been losing ever since. All of us.’

Kathy sat down on the edge of the tub. ‘All of you?’

Peter nodded. ‘Look at us. I failed as a novelist, failed as a journalist, and now I’ve got a failing bookstore. Not to mention a bitch wife. Steve is a drunk who couldn’t even get together enough money to pay his way out here. E.C. is an aging account executive with an indifferent track record, going nowhere. Losers. You said it, in the car.’

She smiled. ‘Ah, but what about our host? Bunnish lost bigger than any of you, and he seems to have won everything since.’

‘Hmmmm,’ said Peter. He sipped thoughtfully at his beer. ‘I wonder. Oh, he’s rich enough, I’ll give you that. But he’s got a chessboard in his living room with the pieces glued into position, so he can stare every day at the place he went wrong in a game played ten years ago. That doesn’t sound like a winner to me.’

She stood up, and shook loose her hair. It was long and auburn and it fell around her shoulders gorgeously, and Peter remembered the sweet lady he had married eight years ago, when he was a bright young writer working hard on his first novel. He smiled. ‘You look nice,’ he said.

Kathy seemed startled. ‘You are feeling morose,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you don’t have a fever?’

‘No fever. Just a memory, and a lot of regrets.’

‘Ah,’ she said. She walked back toward their bedroom, and snapped the towel at him in passing. ‘C’mon, captain. Your team is going to be waiting, and all this heavy philosophy has given me quite an appetite.’

The food was fine, but the dinner was awful.

They ate thick slabs of rare prime rib, with big baked potatoes and lots of fresh vegetables. The wine looked expensive and tasted wonderful. Afterwards, they had their choice of three desserts, plus fresh-ground coffee and several delicious liqueurs. Yet the meal was strained and unpleasant, Peter thought. Steve Delmario was in pretty bad shape even before he came to the table, and while he was there he drank wine as if it were water, getting louder and fuzzier in the process. E.C. Stuart was coldly quiet, his fury barely held in check behind an icy, aloof demeanor. And Bunnish thwarted every one of Peter’s attempts to move conversation to safe neutral ground.

His genial expansiveness was a poor mask for gloating, and he insisted on opening old wounds from their college years. Every time Peter recounted an anecdote that was amusing or harmless, Bunnish smiled and countered with one that stank of hurt and rejection.

Finally, over coffee, E.C. could stand no more of it. ‘Pus,’ he said loudly, interrupting Bunnish. It was about the third word he’d permitted himself the entire meal. ‘Pus and more pus. Bunnish, what’s the point? You’ve brought us here. You’ve got us trapped here, with you. Why? So you can prove that we treated you shabbily back in college? Is that the idea? If so, fine. You’ve made your point. You were treated shabbily. I am ashamed, I am guilty. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now let’s end it. It’s over.’

‘Over?’ said Bunnish, smiling. ‘Perhaps it is. But you’ve changed, E.C. Back when I was the butt of your jokes, you’d recount them for weeks. Over wasn’t so final then, was it? And what about my game with Vesselere in the nationals? When that was over, did we forget it? Oh, no, we did not. That game was played in December, you’ll recall. I heard about it until I graduated in May. At every meeting. That game was never over for me. Delmario liked to show me a different checkmate every time I saw him. Our dear captain refrained from playing me in any league matches for the rest of the year. And you, E.C., you liked to greet me with, “Say, Bunny, lost any big ones lately?” You even reprinted that game in the club newsletter, and mailed it in to Chess Life. No doubt all this seems like ancient history to you. I have this trick memory, though. I can’t forget things quite so easily. I remember it all. I remember the way Vesselere sat there, with his hands folded on his stomach, never moving, staring at me out of those itty bitty eyes of his. I remember the way he moved his pieces, very carefully, very daintily, lifting each one between thumb and forefinger. I remember wandering into the halls between moves, to get a drink of water, and seeing Norten over by the wall charts, talking to Mavora from the A team. You know what he was saying? He was gesturing with his hands, all worked up, and he was telling him, He’s going to blow it, damn it, he’s going to blow it! Isn’t that right, Peter? And Les looked over at me as I passed, and said, Lose this one and your ass is grass, Bunny! He was another endearing soul. I remember all the people who kept coming to look at my game. I remember Norten standing in the corner with Hal Winslow, the two mighty captains, talking heatedly. Winslow was all rumpled and needed a shave and he had his clipboard, and he was trying to figure out who’d finish where if we won, or tied, or lost. I remember how it felt when I tipped over my king, too. I remember the way Delmario started kicking the wall, the way E.C. shrugged and glanced up at the ceiling, and the way Peter came over and just said Bunnish! and shook his head. You see? My trick memory is as tricky as ever, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. And especially I haven’t forgotten that game. I can recite all the moves to you right now, if you’d like.’

‘Shit,’ said Steve Delmario. ‘Only one important move to recite, Bunny. Knight takes pawn, that’s the move you ought to recite. The sac, the winning sac, the one you didn’t play. I forget what kind of feeble thing you did instead.’

Bunnish smiled. ‘My move was king to knight one,’ he said. ‘To protect my rook pawn. I’d castled long, and Vesselere was threatening to snatch it.’

‘Pawn, shmawn,’ said Delmario. ‘You had him busted. The sac would have gutted that whale like nobody’s goddamned business. What a laugh that would have been. The bunny rabbit beating the whale. Old Hal Winslow would have been so shocked he would have dropped his clipboard. But you blew it, guarding some diddlysquat little pawn. You blew it.’

‘So you told me,’ said Bunnish. ‘And told me, and told me.’

‘Look,’ Peter said, ‘I don’t see the sense in rehashing all of this. Steve is drunk, Bruce. You can see that. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

‘He knows exactly what he’s saying, Norten,’ Bunnish replied. He smiled thinly and removed his glasses. Peter was startled by his eyes. The hatred there was almost tangible, and there was something else as well, something old and bitter and somehow trapped. The eyes passed lightly over Kathy, who was sitting quietly amidst all the old hostility, and touched Steve Delmario, Peter Norten, and E.C. Stuart each in turn, with vast loathing and vast amusement.

‘Enough,’ Peter said, almost pleadingly.

‘NO!’ said Delmario. The drink had made him belligerent. ‘It’s not enough, it’ll never be enough, goddamn it. Get out a set, Bunny! I dare you! We’ll analyze it right now, go over the whole thing again, I’ll show you how you pissed it all away.’ He pulled himself to his feet.

‘I have a better idea,’ said Bunnish. ‘Sit down, Delmario.’

Delmario blinked uncertainly, and then fell back into his chair.

‘Good,’ said Bunnish. ‘We’ll get to my idea in a moment, but first I’m going to tell you all a story. As Archie Bunker once said, revenge is the best way to get even. But it isn’t revenge unless the victim knows. So I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you exactly how I’ve ruined your lives.’

‘Oh, come off it!’ E.C. said.

‘You never did like stories, E.C.,’ Bunnish said. ‘Know why? Because when someone tells a story, they become the center of attention. And you always needed to be the center of attention, wherever you were. Now you’re not the center of anything, though. How does it feel to be insignificant?’

E.C. gave a disgusted shake of his head and poured himself more coffee. ‘Go on, Bunnish,’ he said. ‘Tell your story. You have a captive audience.’

‘I do, don’t I?’ Bunnish smiled. ‘All right. It all begins with that game. Me and Vesselere. I did not blow that game. It was never won.’

Delmario made a rude noise.

‘I know,’ Bunnish continued, unperturbed, ‘now, but I did not know then. I thought that you were right. I’d thrown it all away, I thought. It ate at me. For years and years, more years than you would believe. Every night I went to sleep replaying that game in my head. That game blighted my entire life. It became an obsession. I wanted only one thing - another chance. I wanted to go back, somehow, to choose another line, to make different moves, to come out a winner. I’d picked the wrong variation, that was all. I knew that if I had another chance, I’d do better. For more than fifty years, I worked toward that end, and that end alone.’

Peter swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee hastily and said, ‘What? Fifty years? You mean five, don’t you?’

‘Fifty,’ Bunnish repeated.

‘You are insane,’ said E.C.

‘No,’ said Bunnish. ‘I am a genius. Have you ever heard of time travel, any of you?’

‘It doesn’t exist,’ said Peter. ‘The paradoxes…’

Bunnish waved him quiet. ‘You’re right and you’re wrong, Norten. It exists, but only in a sort of limited fashion. Yet that is enough. I won’t bore you with mathematics none of you can understand. Analogy is easier. Time is said to be the fourth dimension, but it differs from the other three in one conspicuous way — our consciousness moves along it. From past to present only, alas. Time itself does not flow, no more than, say, width can flow. Our minds flicker from one instant of time to the next. This analogy was my starting point. I reasoned that if consciousness can move in one direction, it can move in the other direction as well. It took me fifty years to work out the details, however, and make what I call a flashback possible.

‘That was in my first life, gentlemen, a life of failure and ridicule and poverty. I tended my obsession and did what I had to so as to keep myself fed. And I hated you, each of you, for every moment of those fifty years. My bitterness was inflamed as I watched each of you succeed, while I struggled and failed. I met Norten once, twenty years after college, at an autographing party. You were so patronizing. It was then that I determined to ruin you, all of you.

‘And I did. What is there to say? I perfected my device at the age of seventy-one. There is no way to move matter through time, but mind, mind is a different issue. My device would send my mind back to any point in my own lifetime that I chose, superimpose my consciousness with all of its memories on the consciousness of my earlier self. I could take nothing with me, of course.’ Bunnish smiled and tapped his temple significantly. ‘But I still had my photographic memory. It was more than enough. I memorized things I would need to know in my new life, and I flashed back to my youth. I was given another chance, a chance to make some different moves in the game of life. I did.’

Steve Delmario blinked. ‘Your body,’ he said blurrily. ‘What happened to your body, huh?’

‘An interesting question. The kick of the flashback kills the would-be time-traveler. The body, that is. The timeline itself goes on, however. At least my equations indicate that it should. I’ve never been around to witness it. Meanwhile, changes in the past create a new, variant timeline.’

‘Oh, alternate tracks,’ Delmario said. He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

Kathy laughed. ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to all this,’ she said. ‘And that he — she pointed to Delmario - ‘is taking it seriously.’

E.C. Stuart had been looking idly at the ceiling, with a disdainful, faintly tolerant smile on his face. Now he straightened. ‘I agree,’ he said to Kathy. ‘I am not so gullible as you were, Bruce,’ he told Bunnish, ‘and if you are trying to get some laughs by having us swallow this crock of shit, it isn’t going to work.’

Bunnish turned to Peter. ‘Captain, what’s your vote?’

‘Well,’ said Peter carefully, ‘all this is a little hard to credit, Bruce. You spoke of the game becoming an obsession with you, and I think that’s true. I think you ought to be talking to a professional about this, not to us.’

‘A professional what?’ Bunnish said.

Peter fidgeted uncomfortably. ‘You know. A shrink or a counselor.’

Bunnish chuckled. ‘Failure hasn’t made you any less patronizing,’ he said. ‘You were just as bad in the bookstore, in that line where you turned out to be a successful novelist.’

Peter sighed, ‘Bruce, can’t you see how pathetic these delusions of yours are? I mean, you’ve obviously been quite a success, and none of us have done as well, but even that wasn’t enough for you, so you’ve constructed all these elaborate fantasies about how you have been the one behind our various failures. Vicarious, imaginary revenge.’

‘Neither vicarious nor imaginary, Norten,’ Bunnish snapped. ‘I can tell you exactly how I did it.’

‘Let him tell his stories, Peter,’ E.C. said. ‘Then maybe he’ll let us out of this funny farm.’

‘Why thank you, E.C,’ Bunnish said. He looked around the table with smug satisfaction, like a man about to live out a dream he has cherished for a long, long time. Finally he fastened on Steve Delmario. ‘I’ll start with you,’ he said, ‘because in fact, I did start with you. You were easy to destroy, Delmario, because you were always so limited. In the original timeline, you were as wealthy as I am in this one. While I spent my life perfecting my flashback device, you made vast fortunes in the wide world out there. Electronic games at first, later more basic stuff, home computers, that sort of thing. You were born for that, and you were the best in the business, inspired and ingenious.

‘When I flashed back, I simply took your place. Before using my device, I studied all your early little games, your cleverest ideas, the basic patents that came later and made you so rich. And I memorized all of them, along with the dates on which you’d come up with each and every one. Back in the past, armed with all this foreknowledge, it was child’s play to beat you to the punch. Again and again. In those early years, Delmario, didn’t it ever strike you as strange the way I anticipated every one of your small brainstorms? I’m living your life, Delmario.’

Delmario’s hand had begun to tremble as he listened. His face looked dead. ‘God damn you,’ he said. ‘God damn you.’

‘Don’t let him get to you, Steve,’ E.C. put in. ‘He’s just making this up to see us squirm. It’s all too absurd for words.’

‘But it’s true,’ Delmario wailed, looking from E.C. to Bunnish and then, helpless, at Peter. Behind the thick lenses his eyes seemed wild. ‘Peter, what he said - all my ideas - he was always ahead of me, he, he, I told you, he—’

‘Yes,’ Peter said firmly, ‘and you told Bruce too, when we were talking earlier. Now he’s just using your fears against you.’

Delmario opened his mouth, but no words came out.

‘Have another drink,’ Bunnish suggested.

Delmario stared at Bunnish as if he were about to leap up and strangle him. Peter tensed himself to intervene. But then, instead, Delmario reached out for a half-empty wine bottle, and filled his glass sloppily.

‘This is contemptible, Bruce,’ E.C. said.

Bunnish turned to face him. ‘Delmario’s ruin was easy and dramatic,’ he said. ‘You were more difficult, Stuart. He had nothing to live for but his work, you see, and when I took that away from him, he just collapsed. I only had to anticipate him a half-dozen times before all of his belief in himself was gone, and he did the rest himself. But you, E.C, you had more resources.’

‘Go on with the fairy tale, Bunnish,’ E.C. said in a put-upon tone.

‘Delmario’s ideas had made me rich,’ Bunnish said. ‘I used the money against you. Your fall was less satisfying and less resounding than Delmario’s. He went from the heights to the pits. You were only a moderate success to begin with, and I had to settle for turning you into a moderate failure. But I managed. I pulled strings behind the scenes to lose you a number of large accounts. When you were with Foote, Cone I made sure another agency hired away a copywriter named Allerd, just before he came up with a campaign that would have rebounded to your credit. And remember when you left that position to take a better-paying slot at a brand new agency? Remember how quickly that agency folded, leaving you without an income? That was me. I’ve given your career twenty or thirty little shoves like that. Haven’t you ever wondered at how infallibly wrong most of your professional moves have been, Stuart? At your bad luck?’

‘No,’ said E.C. ‘I’m doing well enough, thank you.’

Bunnish smiled. ‘I played one other little joke on you, too. You can thank me for that case of herpes you picked up last year. The lady who gave it to you was well paid. I had to search for her for a good number of years until I found the right combination - an out-of-work actress who was young and gorgeous and precisely your type, yet sufficiently desperate to do just about anything, and gifted with an incurable venereal disease as well. How did you like her, Stuart? It’s your fault, you know. I just put her in your path, you did the rest yourself. And I thought it was so fitting, after my blind date and all.’

E.C.’s expression did not change. ‘If you think this is going to break me down or make me believe you, you’re way off base. All this proves is that you’ve had me investigated, and managed to dig up some dirt on my life.’

‘Oh,’ said Bunnish. ‘Always so skeptical, Stuart. Scared that if you believe, you’ll wind up looking foolish. Tsk.’ He turned toward Peter. ‘And you, Norten. You. Our fearless leader. You were the most difficult of all.’

Peter met Bunnish’s eyes and said nothing.

‘I read your novel, you know,’ Bunnish said casually.

‘I’ve never published a novel.’

‘Oh, but you have! In the original timeline, that is. Quite a success too. The critics loved it, and it even appeared briefly on the bottom of the Time bestseller list.’

Peter was not amused. ‘This is so obvious and pathetic,’ he said.

‘It was called Beasts in a Cage, I believe,’ Bunnish said.

Peter had been sitting and listening with contempt, humoring a sick, sad man. Now, suddenly, he sat upright as if slapped.

He heard Kathy suck in her breath. ‘My god,’ she said.

E.C. seemed puzzled. ‘Peter? What is it? You look…’

‘No one knows about that book,’ Peter said. ‘How the hell did you find out? My old agent, you must have gotten the title from him. Yes. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ said Bunnish, smiling complacently.

‘You’re lying!’

‘Peter, what is it?’ said E.C. ‘Why are you so upset?’

Peter looked at him. ‘My book,’ he said. ‘I… Beasts in a Cage was…’

‘There was such a book?’

‘Yes,’ Peter said. He swallowed nervously, feeling confused and angry. ‘Yes, there was. I… after college. My first novel.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘I thought it would be the first. I had … had a lot of hopes. It was ambitious. A serious book, but I thought it had commercial possibilities as well. The circus. It was about the circus, you know how I was always fascinated by the circus. A metaphor for life, I thought, a kind of life, but very colorful too, and dying, a dying institution. I thought I could write the great circus novel. After college, I traveled with Ringling Brothers’ Blue Show for a year, doing research. I was a butcher, I … that’s what they call the vendors in the stands, you see. A year of research, and I took two years to write the novel. The central character was a boy who worked with the big cats. I finally finished it and sent it off to my agent, and less than three weeks after I’d gotten it into the mail, I, I…’ He couldn’t finish.

But E.C. understood. He frowned. ‘That circus bestseller? What was the title?’

‘Blue Show,’ Peter said, the words bitter in his mouth. ‘By Donald Hastings Sullivan, some old hack who’d written fifty gothics and a dozen formula westerns, all under pen names. Such a book, from such a writer. No one could believe it. E.C, I couldn’t believe it. It was my book, under a different title. Oh, it wasn’t word-for-word. Beasts in a Cage was a lot better written. But the story, the background, the incidents, even a few of the character names … it was frightening. My agent never marketed my book. He said it was too much like Blue Show to be publishable, that no one would touch it. And even if I did get it published, he warned me, I would be labeled derivative at best, and a plagiarist at worst. It looked like a rip-off, he said. Three years of my life, and he called it a rip-off. We had words. He fired me, and I couldn’t get another agent to take me on. I never wrote another book. The first one had taken too much out of me.’ Peter turned to Bunnish. ‘I destroyed my manuscript, burned every copy. No one knew about that book except my agent, me, and Kathy. How did you find out?’

‘I told you,’ said Bunnish. ‘I read it’

‘You damned liar!’ Peter said. He scooped up a glass in a white rage, and flung it down the table at Bunnish’s smiling face, wanting to obliterate that complacent grin, to see it dissolve into blood and ruin. But Bunnish ducked and the glass shattered against a wall.

‘Easy, Peter,’ E.C. said. Delmario was blinking in owlish stupidity, lost in an alcoholic haze. Kathy was gripping the edge of the table. Her knuckles had gone white.

‘Methinks our captain doth protest too much,’ Bunnish said, his dimples showing. ‘You know I’m telling the truth, Norten. I read your novel. I can recite the whole plot to prove it.’ He shrugged. ‘In fact, I did recite the whole plot. To Donald Hastings Sullivan, who wrote Blue Show while in my employ. I would have done it myself, but I had no aptitude for writing. Sully was glad for the chance. He got a handsome flat fee and we split the royalties, which were considerable.’

‘You son of a bitch,’ Peter said, but he said it without force. He felt his rage ebbing away, leaving behind it only a terrible sickly feeling, the certainty of defeat. He felt cheated and helpless and, all of a sudden, he realized that he believed Bunnish, believed every word of his preposterous story. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It is really true. You did it to me. You. You stole my words, my dreams, all of it.’

Bunnish said nothing.

‘And the rest of it,’ Peter said, ‘the other failures, those were all you too, weren’t they? After Blue Show, when I went into journalism … that big story that evaporated on me, all my sources suddenly denying everything or vanishing, so it looked like I’d made it all up. The assignments that evaporated, all those lawsuits, plagiarism, invasion of privacy, libel, every time I turned around I was being sued. Two years, and they just about ran me out of the profession. But it wasn’t bad luck, was it? It was you. You stole my life.’

‘You ought to be complimented, Norten. I had to break you twice. The first time I managed to kill your literary career with Blue Show, but then while my back was turned you managed to become a terribly popular journalist. Prizewinning, well known, all of it, and by then it was too late to do anything. I had to flash back once more to get you, do everything all over.’

‘I ought to kill you, Bunnish,’ Peter heard himself say.

E.C. shook his head. ‘Peter,’ he said, in the tone of a man explaining something to a high-grade moron, ‘this is all an elaborate hoax. Don’t take Bunny seriously.’

Peter stared at his old teammate. ‘No, E.C. It’s true. It’s all true. Stop worrying about being the butt of a joke, and think about it. It makes sense. It explains everything that has happened to us.’

E.C. Stuart made a disgusted noise, frowned, and fingered the end of his mustache.

‘Listen to your captain, Stuart,’ Bunnish said.

Peter turned back to him. ‘Why? That’s what I want to know. Why? Because we played jokes on you? Kidded you? Maybe we were rotten, I don’t know, it didn’t seem to be so terrible at the time. You brought a lot of it on yourself. But whatever we might have done to you, we never deserved this. We were your teammates, your friends.’

Bunnish’s smile curdled, and the dimples disappeared. ‘You were never my friends.’

Steve Delmario nodded vigorously at that. ‘You’re no friend of mine, Funny Bunny, I tell you that. Know what you are? A wimp. You were always a goddamn wimp, that’s why nobody ever liked you, you were just a damn wimp loser with a crew cut. Hell, you think you were the only one ever got kidded? What about me, the ol’ last man on earth, huh, what about that? What about the jokes E.C. played on Pete, on Les, on all the others?’ He took a drink. ‘Bringing us here like this, that’s another damn wimp thing to do. You’re the same Bunny you always were. Wasn’t enough to do something, you had to brag about it, let everybody know. And if somethin’ went wrong, was never your fault, was it? You only lost ‘cause the room was too noisy, or the lighting was bad, whatever.’ Delmario stood up. ‘You make me sick. Well, you screwed up all our lives maybe, and now you told us about it. Good for you. You had your damn wimp fun. Now let us out of here.’

‘I second that motion,’ said E.C.

‘Why, I wouldn’t think of it,’ Bunnish replied. ‘Not just yet. We haven’t played any chess yet. A few games for old times’ sake.’

Delmario blinked, and moved slightly as he stood holding the back of his chair. ‘The game,’ he said, suddenly reminded of his challenge to Bunnish of a few minutes ago. ‘We were goin’ to play over the game.’

Bunnish folded his hands neatly in front of him on the table. ‘We can do better than that,’ he said. ‘I am a very fair man, you see. None of you ever gave me a chance, but I’ll give one to you, to each of you. I’ve stolen your lives. Wasn’t that what you said, Norten? Well, friends, I’ll give you a shot at winning those lives back. We’ll play a little chess. We’ll replay the game, from the critical position. I’ll take Vesselere’s side and you can have mine. The three of you can consult, if you like, or I’ll play you one by one. I don’t care. All you have to do is beat me. Win the game you say I should have won, and I’ll let you go, and give you anything you like. Money, property, a job, whatever.’

‘Go t’hell, wimp,’ Delmario said. ‘I’m not interested in your damn money.’

Bunnish picked up his glasses from the table and donned them, smiling widely. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘if you prefer, you can win a chance to use my flashback device. You can go back then, anticipate me, do it all over, have the lives you were destined to live before I dealt myself in. Just think of it. It’s the best opportunity you’ll ever have, any of you, and I’m making it so easy. All you have to do is win a won game.’

‘Winning a won game is one of the hardest things in chess,’ Peter said sullenly. But even as he said it, his mind was racing, excitement stirring deep in his gut. It was a chance, he thought, a chance to reshape the ruins of his life, to make it come out right. To obliterate the wrong turnings, to taste the wine of success instead of the wormwood of failure, to avoid the mockery that his marriage to Kathy had become. Dead hopes rose like ghosts to dance again in the graveyard of his dreams. He had to take the shot, he knew. He had to.

Steve Delmario was there before him. ‘I can win that goddamned game,’ he boomed drunkenly. ‘I could win it with my eyes shut. You’re on, Bunny. Get out a set, damn you!’

Bunnish laughed and stood up, putting his big hands flat on the tabletop and using diem to push himself to his feet. ‘Oh no, Delmario. You’re not going to have the excuse of being drunk when you lose. I’m going to crush you when you are cold stone sober. Tomorrow. I’ll play you tomorrow.’

Delmario blinked furiously. ‘Tomorrow,’ he echoed.

Later, when they were alone in their room, Kathy turned on him. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘let’s get out of here. Tonight. Now.’

Peter was sitting before the fire. He had found a small chess set in the top drawer of his bedside table, and had set up the critical position from Vesselere-Bunnish to study it. He scowled at the distraction and said, ‘Get out? How the hell do you propose we do that, with our car locked up in that garage?’

‘There’s got to be a phone here somewhere. We could search, find it, call for help. Or just walk.’

‘It’s December, and we’re in the mountains miles from anywhere. We try to walk out of here and we could freeze to death. No.’ He turned his attention back to the chessboard and tried to concentrate.

‘Peter,’ she said angrily.

He looked up again. ‘What?’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

‘We have to do something. This whole scene is insane. Bunnish needs to be locked up.’

‘He was telling the truth,’ Peter said.

Kathy’s expression softened, and for an instant there was something like sorrow on her face. ‘I know,’ she said softly.

‘You know,’ Peter mimicked savagely. ‘You know, do you? Well, do you know how it feels? That bastard is going to pay. He’s responsible for every rotten thing that has happened to me. For all I know, he’s probably responsible for you.’

Kathy’s lips moved only slightly, and her eyes moved not at all, but suddenly the sorrow and sympathy were gone from her face, and instead Peter saw familiar pity, well-honed contempt. ‘He’s just going to crush you again,’ she said coldly. ‘He wants you to lust after this chance, because he intends to deny it to you. He’s going to beat you, Peter. How are you going to like that? How are you going to live with it, afterwards?’

Peter looked down at the chess pieces. ‘That’s what he intends, yeah. But he’s a moron. This is a won position. It’s only a matter of finding the winning line, the right variation. And we’ve got three shots at it. Steve goes first. If he loses, E.C. and I will be able to learn from his mistakes. I won’t lose. I’ve lost everything else, maybe, but not this. This time I’m going to be a winner. You’ll see.’

‘I’ll see, all right,’ Kathy said. ‘You pitiful bastard.’

Peter ignored her, and moved a piece. Knight takes pawn.

Kathy remained in the suite the next morning. ‘Go play your damn games if you like,’ she told Peter. ‘I’m going to soak in the hot tub, and read. I want no part of this.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Peter said. He slammed the door behind him, and thought once again what a bitch he’d married.

Downstairs, in the huge living room, Bunnish was setting up the board. The set he’d chosen was not ornate and expensive like the one in the corner, with its pieces glued into place. Sets like that looked good for decorative purposes, but were useless in serious play. Instead Bunnish had shifted a plain wooden table to the center of the room, and fetched out a standard tournament set: a vinyl board in green and white that he unrolled carefully, a well-worn set of Drueke pieces of standard Staunton design, cast in black and white plastic with lead weights in the bases, beneath the felt, to give them a nice heft. He placed each piece into position from memory, without once looking at the game frozen on the expensive inlaid board across the room. Then he began to set a double-faced chess clock. ‘Can’t play without the clock, you know,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ll set it exactly the same as it stood that day in Evanston.’

When everything was finished, Bunnish surveyed the board with satisfaction and seated himself behind Vesselere’s Black pieces. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

Steve Delmario sat down opposite him, looking pale and terribly hung over. He was holding a big tumbler full of orange juice, and behind his thick glasses his eyes moved nervously. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

Bunnish pushed the button that started Delmario’s clock.

Very quickly, Delmario reached out, played knight takes pawn - the pieces clicked together softly as he made the capture - and used the pawn he’d taken to punch the clock, stopping his own timer and starting Bunnish’s.

‘The sac,’ said Bunnish. ‘What a surprise.’ He took the knight.

Delmario played bishop takes pawn, saccing another piece. Bunnish was forced to capture with his king. He seemed unperturbed. He was smiling faintly, his dimples faint creases in his big cheeks, his eyes clear and sharp and cheerful behind his tinted eyeglasses.

Steve Delmario was leaning forward over the board, his dark eyes sweeping back and forth over the position, back and forth, over and over again as if double-checking that everything was really where he thought it was. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. Peter, standing just behind him, could almost feel the tension beating off Delmario in waves, twisting him. Even E.C. Stuart, seated a few feet distant in a big comfortable armchair, was staring at the game intently. The clock ticked softly. Delmario lifted his hand to move his queen, but hesitated with his fingers poised above it. His hand trembled.

‘What’s the matter, Steve?’ Bunnish asked. He steepled his hands just beneath his chin, and smiled when Delmario looked up at him. ‘You hesitate. Don’t you know? He who hesitates is lost. Uncertain, all of a sudden? Surely that can’t be. You were always so certain before. How many mates did you show me? How many?’

Delmario blinked, frowned. ‘I’m going to show you one more, Bunny,’ he said furiously. His fingers closed on his queen, shifted it across the board. ‘Check.’

‘Ah,’ said Bunnish. Peter studied the position. The double sac had cleared away the pawns in front of the Black king, and the queen check permitted no retreat. Bunnish marched his king up a square, toward the center of the board, toward the waiting White army. Surely he was lost now. His own defenders were all over on the queenside, and the enemy was all around him. But Bunnish did not seem worried.

Delmario’s clock was ticking as he examined the position. He sipped his juice, shifted restlessly in his seat. Bunnish yawned, and grinned tauntingly. ‘You were the winner that day, Delmario. Beat a Master. The only winner. Can’t you find the win now? Where are all those mates, eh?’

‘There’s so many I don’t know which one to go with, Bunny,’ Steve said. ‘Now shut up, damn you. I’m trying to think.’

‘Oh,’ said Bunnish. ‘Pardon.’

Delmario consumed ten minutes on his clock before he reached out and moved his remaining knight. ‘Check.’

Bunnish advanced his king again.

Delmario licked his lips, slid his queen forward a square. ‘Check.’

Bunnish’s king went sideways, toward the safety of the queenside.

Delmario flicked a pawn forward. ‘Check.’

Bunnish had to take. He removed the offending pawn with his king, smiling complacently.

With the file open, Delmario could bring his rooks into play. He shifted one over. ‘Check.’

Bunnish’s harried king moved again.

Now Delmario moved the rook forward, sliding it right up the file to confront the enemy king face to face. ‘Check!’ he said loudly.

Peter sucked in his breath sharply, without meaning to. The rook was hanging! Bunnish could just snatch it off. He stared at the position over Delmario’s shoulder. Bunnish could take the rook with his king, all right, but then the other rook came over, the king had to go back, then if the queen shifted just one square … yes … too many mate threats in that variation. Black had lots of resources, but they all ended in disaster. But if Bunnish took with his knight instead of his king, he left that square unguarded … hmmm … queen check, king up, bishop comes in … no, mate was even quicker that way.

Delmario drained his orange juice and set the empty tumbler down with self-satisfied firmness.

Bunnish moved his king diagonally forward. The only possible move, Peter thought. Delmario leaned forward. Behind him, Peter leaned forward too. The White pieces were swarming around Black’s isolated king now, but how to tighten the mating net? Steve had three different checks, Peter thought. No, four, he could do that too. He watched and analyzed in silence. The rook check was no good, the king just retreated, and further checks simply drove him to safety. The bishop? No, Bunnish could trade off, take with his rook - he was two pieces up, after all. Several subvariations branched off from the two queen checks. Peter was still trying to figure out where they led, when Delmario reached out suddenly, grabbed a pawn from in front of his king, and moved it up two squares. He slammed it down solidly, and slapped the clock. Then he sat back and crossed his arms. ‘Your move, Bunny,’ he said.

Peter studied the board. Delmario’s last move didn’t give check, but the pawn advance cut off an important escape square. Now that threatened rook check was no longer innocuous. Instead of being chased back to safety, the Black king got mated in three. Of course, Bunnish had a tempo now, it was his move, he could bring up a defender. His queen now, could … no, then queen check, king back, rook check, and the Black queen fell… bishop maybe … no, check there and mate in one, unstoppable. The longer Peter looked at the position, the fewer defensive resources he saw for Black. Bunnish could delay the loss, but he couldn’t stop it. He was smashed!

Bunnish did not look smashed. Very calmly he picked up a knight and moved it to queen’s knight six. ‘Check,’ he said quietly.

Delmario stared. Peter stared. E.C. Stuart got up out of his chair and drifted closer, his finger brushing back his mustache as he considered the game. The check was only a time-waster, Peter thought. Delmario could capture the knight with either of two pawns, or he could simply move his king. Except… Peter scowled … if White took with the bishop pawn, queen came up with check, king moved to the second, queen takes rook pawn with check, king… no, that was no good. White got mated by force. The other way seemed to bring on the mate even faster, after the queen checked from the eighth rank.

Delmario moved his king up.

Bunnish slid a bishop out along a diagonal. ‘Check.’

There was only one move. Steve moved his king forward again. He was being harassed, but his mating net was still intact, once the checks had run their course.

Bunnish flicked his knight backward, with another check.

Delmario was blinking and twisting his legs beneath the table. Peter saw that if he brought his king back, Bunnish had a forced series of checks leading to mate … but the Black knight hung now, to both rook and queen, and … Delmario captured it with the rook.

Bunnish grabbed White’s advanced pawn with his queen, removing the cornerstone of the mating net. Now Delmario could play queen takes queen, but then he lost his queen to a fork, and after the tradeoffs that followed he’d be hopelessly busted. Instead he retreated his king.

Bunnish made a tsking noise and captured the White knight with his queen, again daring Delmario to take it. With knight and pawn both gone, Delmario’s mating threats had all dissipated, and if White snatched that Black queen, there was a check, a pin, take, take, take, and … Peter gritted his teeth together … and White would suddenly be in the endgame down a piece, hopelessly lost. No. There had to be something better. The position still had a lot of play in it. Peter stared, and analyzed.

Steve Delmario stared too, while his clock ticked. The clock was one of those fancy jobs, with a move counter. It showed that he had to make seven more moves to reach time control. He had just under fifteen minutes remaining. Some time pressure, but nothing serious.

Except that Delmario sat and sat, eyes flicking back and forth across the board, blinking. He took off his thick glasses and cleaned them methodically on his shirttail. When he slid them back on, the position had not changed. He stared at the Black king fixedly, as if he were willing it to fall. Finally he started to get up. ‘I need a drink,’ he said.

‘I’ll get it,’ Peter snapped. ‘Sit down. You’ve only got eight minutes left.’

‘Yeah,’ Delmario said. He sat down again. Peter went to the bar and made him a screwdriver. Steve drained half of it in a gulp, never taking his eyes from the chessboard.

Peter happened to glance at E.C. Stuart. E.C. shook his head and cast his eyes up toward the ceiling. Not a word was spoken, but Peter heard the message: forget it.

Steve Delmario sat there, growing more and more agitated. With three minutes remaining on his clock, he reached out his hand, thought better of it, and pulled back. He shifted in his seat, gathered his legs up under him, leaned closer to the board, his nose a bare couple inches above the chessmen. His clock ticked.

He was still staring at the board when Bunnish smiled and said, ‘Your flag is down, Delmario.’

Delmario looked up, blinking. His mouth hung open. ‘Time,’ he said urgently. ‘I just need time to find the win, got to be here someplace, got to, all those checks…’

Bunnish rose. ‘You’re out of time, Delmario. Doesn’t matter anyway. You’re dead lost.’

‘NO! No I’m not, damn you, there’s a win…’

Peter put a hand on Steve’s shoulder. ‘Steve, take it easy,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Bruce is right. You’re busted here.’

‘No,’ Delmario insisted. ‘I know there’s a winning combo, I just got to … got to… only…’ His right hand, out over the board, began to shake, and he knocked over his own king.

Bunnish showed his dimples. ‘Listen to your captain, winner-boy,’ he said. Then he looked away from Delmario, to where E.C. stood scowling. ‘You’re next, Stuart. Tomorrow. Same time, same place.’

‘And if I don’t care to play?’ E.C. said disdainfully.

Bunnish shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here, and the game will be here. I’ll start your clock on time. You can lose over the board or lose by forfeit. You lose either way.’

‘And me?’ Peter said.

‘Why, captain,’ said Bunnish. ‘I’m saving you for last.’

Steve Delmario was a wreck. He refused to leave the chessboard except to mix himself fresh drinks. For the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon he remained glued to his seat, drinking like a fish and flicking the chess pieces around like a man possessed, playing and replaying the game. Delmario wolfed down a couple sandwiches that Peter made up for him around lunchtime, but there was no talking to him, no calming him. Peter tried. In an hour or so, Delmario would be passed out from the booze he was downing in such alarming quantities.

Finally he and E.C. left Delmario alone, and went upstairs to his suite. Peter knocked on the door. ‘You decent, Kathy? E.C. is with me.’

She opened the door. She had on jeans and a T-shirt. ‘Decent as I ever get,’ she said. ‘Come on in. How did the great game come out?’

‘Delmario lost,’ Peter said. ‘It was a close thing, though. I thought we had him for a moment.’

Kathy snorted.

‘So what now?’ E.C. said.

‘You going to play tomorrow?’

E.C. shrugged. ‘Might as well. I’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘Good,’ Peter said. ‘You can beat him. Steve almost won, and we both know the shape he’s in. We’ve got to analyze, figure out where he went wrong.’

E.C. fingered his mustache. He looked cool and thoughtful. ‘That pawn move,’ he suggested. ‘The one that didn’t give check. It left White open for that counterattack.’

‘It also set up the mating net,’ Peter said. He looked over his shoulder, saw Kathy standing with her arms crossed. ‘Could you get the chessboard from the bedroom?’ he asked her. When she left, Peter turned back to E.C. ‘I think Steve was already lost by the time he made that pawn move. That was his only good shot — lots of threats there. Everything else just petered out after a few checks. He went wrong before that, I think.’

‘All those checks,’ E.C. said. ‘One too many, maybe?’

‘Exactly,’ said Peter. ‘Instead of driving him into a checkmate, Steve drove him into safety. You’ve got to vary somewhere in there.’

‘Agreed.’

Kathy arrived with the chess set and placed it on the low table between them. As Peter swiftly set up the critical position, she folded her legs beneath her and sat on the floor. But she grew bored very quickly when they began to analyze, and it wasn’t long before she got to her feet again with a disgusted noise. ‘Both of you are crazy,’ she said. ‘I’m going to get something to eat.’

‘Bring us back something, will you?’ Peter asked. ‘And a couple of beers?’ But he hardly noticed it when she placed the tray beside them.

They stayed at it well into the night. Kathy was the only one who went down to dine with Bunnish. When she returned, she said, ‘That man is disgusting,’ so emphatically that it actually distracted Peter from the game. But only for an instant.

‘Here, try this,’ E.C. said, moving a knight, and Peter looked back quickly.

‘I see you decided to play, Stuart,’ Bunnish said the next morning.

E.C, looking trim and fresh, his sandy hair carefully combed and brushed, a steaming mug of black coffee in hand, nodded briskly. ‘You’re as sharp as ever, Brucie.’

Bunnish chuckled.

‘One point, however,’ E.C. said, holding up a finger. ‘I still don’t believe your cock-and-bull story about time-travel. We’ll play this out, alright, but we’ll play for money, not for one of your flashbacks. Understood?’

‘You jokers are such suspicious types,’ Bunnish said. He sighed. ‘Anything you say, of course. You want money. Fine.’

‘One million dollars.’

Bunnish smiled broadly. ‘Small change,’ he said. ‘But I agree. Beat me, and you’ll leave here with one million. You’ll take a check, I hope?’

‘A certified check.’ E.C. turned to Peter. ‘You’re my witness,’ he said, and Peter nodded. The three of them were alone this morning. Kathy was firm in her disinterest, and Delmario was in his room sleeping off his binge.

‘Ready?’ Bunnish asked.

‘Go on.’

Bunnish started the clock. E.C. reached out and played the sacrifice. Knight takes pawn. His motions were crisp and economical. Bunnish captured, and E.C. played the bishop sac without a second’s hesitation. Bunnish captured again, pushed the clock.

E.C. Stuart brushed back his mustache, reached down, and moved a pawn. No check.

‘Ah,’ Bunnish said. ‘An improvement. You have something up your sleeve, don’t you? Of course you do. E.C. Stuart always has something up his sleeve. The hilarious, unpredictable E.C. Stuart. Such a joker. So imaginative.’

‘Play chess, Brucie,’ snapped E.C.

‘Of course.’ Peter drifted closer to the board while Bunnish studied the position. They had gone over and over the game last night, and had finally decided that the queen check that Delmario had played following the double sac was unsound. There were several other checks in the position, all tempting, but after hours of analysis he and E.C. had discarded those as well. Each of them offered plenty of traps and checkmates should Black err, but each of them seemed to fail against correct play, and they had to assume Bunnish would play correctly.

E.C.’s pawn move was a more promising line. Subtler. Sounder. It opened lines for White’s pieces, and interposed another barrier between Black’s king and the safety of the queenside. Suddenly White had threats everywhere. Bunnish had serious troubles to chew on now.

He did not chew on them nearly as long as Peter would have expected. After studying the position for a bare couple minutes, he picked up his queen and snatched off White’s queen rook pawn, which was undefended. Bunnish cupped the pawn in his hand, yawned, and slouched back in his chair, looking lazy and unperturbed.

E.C. Stuart permitted himself a brief scowl as he looked over the position. Peter felt uneasy as well. That move ought to have disturbed Bunnish more than it had, he thought. White had so many threats … last night they had analyzed the possibilities exhaustively, playing and replaying every variation and subvariation until they were sure that they had found the win. Peter had gone to sleep feeling almost jubilant. Bunnish had a dozen feasible defenses to their pawn thrust. They’d had no way of knowing which one he would choose, so they had satisfied themselves that each and every one ultimately ended in failure.

Only now Bunnish had fooled them. He hadn’t played any of the likely defenses. He had just ignored E.C.’s mating threats, and gone pawn-snatching as blithely as the rankest patzer. Had they missed something? While E.C. considered the best reply, Peter drew up a chair to the side of the board so he could analyze in comfort.

There was nothing, he thought, nothing. Bunnish had a check next move, if he wanted it, by pushing his queen to the eighth rank. But it was meaningless. E.C. hadn’t weakened his queenside the way Steve had yesterday, in his haste to find a mate. If Bunnish checked, all Stuart had to do was move his king up to queen two. Then the Black queen would be under attack by a rook, and forced to retreat or grab another worthless pawn. Meanwhile, Bunnish would be getting checkmated in the middle of the board. The more Peter went over the variations, the more convinced he became that there was no way Bunnish could possibly work up the kind of counterattack he had used to smash Steve Delmario.

E.C, after a long and cautious appraisal of the board, seemed to reach the same conclusion. He reached out coolly and moved his knight, hemming in Bunnish’s lonely king once and for all. Now he threatened a queen check that would lead to mate in one. Bunnish could capture the dominating knight, but then E.C. just recaptured with a rook, and checkmate followed soon thereafter, no matter how Bunnish might wriggle on the hook.

Bunnish smiled across the board at his opponent, and lazily shoved his queen forward a square to the last rank. ‘Check,’ he said.

E.C. brushed back his moustache, shrugged, and played his king up. He punched the clock with a flourish. ‘You’re lost,’ he said flatly.

Peter was inclined to agree. That last check had accomplished nothing; in fact, it seemed to have worsened Black’s plight. The mate threats were still there, as unstoppable as ever, and now Black’s queen was under attack as well. He could pull it back, of course, but not in time to help with the defense. Bunnish ought to be frantic and miserable.

Instead his smile was so broad that his fat cheeks were threatening to crack in two. ‘Lost?’ he said. ‘Ah, Stuart, this time the joke is on you!’ He giggled like a teenage girl, and brought his queen down the rank to grab off White’s rook. ‘Check!’

Peter Norten had not played a game of tournament chess in a long, long time, but he still remembered the way it had felt when an opponent suddenly made an unexpected move that changed the whole complexion of a game: the brief initial confusion, the - what is that? feeling, followed by panic when you realized the strength of the unanticipated move, and then the awful swelling gloom that built and built as you followed through one losing variation after another in your head. There was no worse moment in the game of chess.

That was how Peter felt now.

They had missed it totally. Bunnish was giving up his queen for a rook, normally an unthinkable sacrifice, but not in this position. E.C. had to take the offered queen. But if he captured with his king, Peter saw with sudden awful clarity, Black had a combination that won the farm, which meant he had to use the other rook, pulling it off its crucial defense of the central knight… and then … oh, shit!

E.C. tried to find another alternative for more than fifteen minutes, but there was no alternative to be found. He played rook takes queen. Bunnish quickly seized his own rook and captured the knight that had moved so menacingly into position only two moves before. With ruthless precision, Bunnish then forced the tradeoff of one piece after another, simplifying every danger off the board. All of a sudden they were in the endgame. E.C. had a queen and five pawns; Bunnish had a rook, two bishops, a knight, and four pawns, and - ironically - his once-imperiled king now occupied a powerful position in the center of the board.

Play went on for hours, as E.C. gamely gave check after check with his rogue queen, fighting to pick up a loose piece or perhaps draw by repetition. But Bunnish was too skilled for such desperation tactics. It was only a matter of technique.

Finally E.C. tipped over his king.

‘I thought we looked at every possible defense,’ Peter said numbly.

‘Why, captain,’ said Bunnish cheerfully. ‘Every attempt to defend loses. The defending pieces block off escape routes or get in the way. Why should I help mate myself? I’d rather let you try to do that.’

‘I will do that,’ Peter promised angrily. Tomorrow.’

Bunnish rubbed his hands together. ‘I can scarcely wait!’

That night the postmortem was held in E.C.’s suite; Kathy - who had greeted their glum news with an ‘I told you so’ and a contemptuous smile - had insisted that she didn’t want them staying up half the night over a chessboard in her presence. She told Peter he was behaving like a child, and they had angry words before he stormed out.

Steve Delmario was going over the morning’s loss with E.C. when Peter joined them. Delmario’s eyes looked awfully bloodshot, but otherwise he appeared sober, if haggard. He was drinking coffee. ‘How does it look?’ Peter asked when he pulled up a seat.

‘Bad,’ E.C. said.

Delmario nodded. ‘Hell, worse’n bad, it’s starting to look like that damn sac is unsound after all. I can’t believe it, I just can’t, it all looks so promising, got to be something there. Got to. But I’m damned if I can find it.’

E.C. added, ‘The surprise he pulled today is a threat in a number of variations. Don’t forget, we gave up two pieces to get to this position. Unfortunately, that means that Brucie can easily afford to give some of that material back to get out of the fix. He still comes out ahead, and wins the endgame. We’ve found a few improvements on my play this morning—’

‘That knight doesn’t have to drop,’ interjected Delmario.

‘… but nothing convincing,’ E.C. concluded.

‘You ever think,’ Delmario said, ‘that maybe the Funny Bunny was right? That maybe the sac don’t work, maybe the game was never won at all?’ His voice had a note of glum disbelief in it.

‘There’s one thing wrong with that,’ Peter said.

‘Oh?’

‘Ten years ago, after Bunnish had blown the game and the match, Robinson Vesselere admitted that he had been lost.’

E.C. looked thoughtful. ‘That’s true. I’d forgotten that.’

‘Vesselere was almost a Senior Master. He had to know what he was talking about. The win is there. I mean to find it.’

Delmario clapped his hands together and whooped gleefully. ‘Hell yes, Pete, you’re right! Let’s go!’

‘At last the prodigal spouse returns,’ Kathy said pointedly when Peter came in. ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’

She was seated in a chair by the fireplace, though the fire had burned down to ashes and embers. She wore a dark robe, and the end of the cigarette she was smoking was a bright point in the darkness. Peter had come in smiling, but now he frowned. Kathy had once been a heavy smoker, but she’d given it up years ago. Now she only lit a cigarette when she was very upset. When she lit up, it usually meant they were headed for a vicious row.

‘It’s late,’ Peter said. ‘I don’t know how late. What does it matter?’ He’d spent most of the night with E.C. and Steve, but it had been worth it. They’d found what they had been looking for. Peter had returned tired but elated, expecting to find his wife asleep. He was in no mood for grief. ‘Never mind about the time,’ he said to her, trying to placate. ‘We’ve got it, Kath.’

She crushed out her cigarette methodically. ‘Got what? Some new move you think is going to defeat our psychopathic host? Don’t you understand that I don’t give a damn about this stupid game of yours? Don’t you listen to a thing I say? I’ve been waiting up half the night, Peter. It’s almost three in the morning. I want to talk.’

‘Yeah?’ Peter snapped. Her tone had gotten his back up. ‘Did you ever think that maybe I didn’t want to listen? Well, think it. I have a big game tomorrow. I need my sleep. I can’t afford to stay up till dawn screaming at you. Understand? Why the hell are you so hot to talk anyway? What could you possibly have to say that I haven’t heard before, huh?’

Kathy laughed nastily. ‘I could tell you a few things about your old friend Bunnish that you haven’t heard before.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Do you? Well, did you know that he’s been trying to get me into bed for the past two days?’

She said it tauntingly, throwing it at him. Peter felt as if he had been struck. ‘What?’

‘Sit down,’ she snapped, ‘and listen.’

Numbly, he did as she bid him. ‘Did you?’ he asked, staring at her silhouette in the darkness, the vaguely ominous shape that was his wife.

‘Did I? Sleep with him, you mean? Jesus, Peter, how can you ask that? Do you loathe me that much? I’d sooner sleep with a roach. That’s what he reminds me of anyway.’ She gave a rueful chuckle. ‘He isn’t exactly a sophisticated seducer, either. He actually offered me money.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘To knock some goddamned sense into you! Can’t you see that Bunnish is trying to destroy you, all of you, any way he can? He didn’t want me. He just wanted to get at you. And you, you and your moron teammates, are playing right into his hands. You’re becoming as obsessed with that idiot chess game as he is.’ She leaned forward. Dimly, Peter could make out the lines of her face. ‘Peter,’ she said almost imploringly, ‘don’t play him. He’s going to beat you, love, just like he beat the others.’

‘I don’t think so, love,’ Peter said from between clenched teeth. The endearment became an epithet as he hurled it back at her. ‘Why the hell are you always so ready to predict defeat for me, huh? Can’t you ever be supportive, not even for a goddamned minute? If you won’t help, why don’t you just bug off? I’ve had all I can stand of you, damn it. Always belittling me, mocking. You’ve never believed in me. I don’t know why the hell you married me, if all you wanted to do was make my life a hell. Just leave me alone!’

For a long moment after Peter’s outburst there was silence. Sitting there in the darkened room, he could almost feel her rage building - any instant now he expected to hear her start screaming. Then he would scream back, and she would get up and break something, and he would grab her, and then the knives would come out in earnest. He closed his eyes, trembling, feeling close to tears. He didn’t want this, he thought. He really didn’t.

But Kathy fooled him. When she spoke, her voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘Oh, Peter,’ she said. ‘I never meant to hurt you. Please. I love you.’

He was stunned. ‘Love me?’ he said wonderingly.

‘Please listen. If there is anything at all left between us, please just listen to me for a few minutes. Please.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Peter, I did believe in you once. Surely you must remember how good things were in the beginning? I was supportive then, wasn’t I? The first few years, when you were writing your novel? I worked, I kept food on the table, I gave you the time to write.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, anger creeping back into his tone. Kathy had thrown that at him before, had reminded him forcefully of how she’d supported them for two years while he wrote a book that turned out to be so much wastepaper. ‘Spare me your reproaches, huh? It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t sell the book. You heard what Bunnish said.’

‘I wasn’t reproaching you, damn it!’ she snapped. ‘Why are you always so ready to read criticism into every word I say?’ She shook her head, and got her voice back under control. ‘Please, Peter, don’t make this harder than it is. We have so many years of pain to overcome, so many wounds to bind up. Just hear me out.

‘I was trying to say that I did believe in you. Even after the book, after you burned it… even then. You made it hard, though. I didn’t think you were a failure, but you did, and it changed you, Peter. You let it get to you. You gave up writing, instead of just gritting your teeth and doing another book.’

‘I wasn’t tough enough, I know,’ he said. ‘The loser. The weakling.’

‘Shut up!’ she said in exasperation. ‘I didn’t say that, you did. Then you went into journalism. I still believed. But everything kept going wrong. You got fired, you got sued, you became a disgrace. Our friends started drifting away. And all the time you insisted that none of it was your fault. You lost all the rest of your self-confidence. You didn’t dream any more. You whined, bitterly and incessantly, about your bad luck.’

‘You never helped.’

‘Maybe not,’ Kathy admitted. ‘I tried to, at the start, but it just got worse and worse and I couldn’t deal with it. You weren’t the dreamer I’d married. It was hard to remember how I’d admired you, how I’d respected you. Peter, you loathed yourself so much that there was no way to keep the loathing from rubbing off on me.’

‘So?’ Peter said. ‘What’s the point, Kathy?’

‘I never left you, Peter,’ she said. ‘I could have, you know. I wanted to. I stayed, through all of it, all the failures and all the self-pity. Doesn’t that say anything to you?’

‘It says you’re a masochist,’ he snapped. ‘Or maybe a sadist.’

That was too much for her. She started to reply, and her voice broke, and she began to weep. Peter sat where he was and listened to her cry. Finally the tears ran out, and she said, quietly, ‘Damn you. Damn you. I hate you.’

‘I thought you loved me. Make up your mind.’

‘You ass. You insensitive creep. Don’t you understand, Peter?’

‘Understand what?’ he said impatiently. ‘You said listen, so I’ve been listening, and all you’ve been doing is rehashing all the same old stuff, recounting all my inadequacies. I heard it all before.’

‘Peter, can’t you see that this week has changed everything? If you’d only stop hating, stop loathing me and yourself, maybe you could see it. We have a chance again, Peter. If we try. Please.’

‘I don’t see that anything has changed. I’m going to play a big chess game tomorrow, and you know how much it means to me and my self-respect, and you don’t care. You don’t care if I win or lose. You keep telling me I’m going to lose. You’re helping me to lose by making me argue when I should be sleeping. What the hell has changed? You’re the same damn bitch you’ve been for years.’

‘I will tell you what has changed,’ she said. ‘Peter, up until a few days ago, both of us thought you were a failure. But you aren’t! It hasn’t been your fault. None of it. Not bad luck, like you kept saying, and not personal inadequacy either, like you really thought. Bunnish has done it all. Can’t you see what a difference that makes? You’ve never had a chance, Peter, but you have one now. There’s no reason you shouldn’t believe in yourself. We know you can do great things! Bunnish admitted it. We can leave here, you and I, and start all over again. You could write another book, write plays, do anything you want. You have the talent. You’ve never lacked it. We can dream again, believe again, love each other again. Don’t you see? Bunnish had to gloat to complete his revenge, but by gloating he’s freed you!’

Peter sat very still in the dark room, his hand clenching and unclenching on the arm of the chair as Kathy’s words sunk in. He had been so wrapped up in the chess game, so obsessed with Bunnish’s obsession, that he had never seen it, never considered it. It wasn’t me, he thought wonderingly. All those years, it was never me. ‘It’s true,’ he said in a small voice.

‘Peter?’ she said, concerned.

He heard the concern, heard more than that, heard love in her voice. So many people, he thought, make such grand promises, promise better or worse, promise rich or poorer, and bail out as soon as things turn the least bit sour in a relationship. But she had stayed, through all of it, the failures, the disgrace, the cruel words and the poisonous thoughts, the weekly fights, the poverty. She had stayed.

‘Kathy,’ he said. The next words were very hard. ‘I love you, too.’ He started to get up and move toward her, and began to cry.

They arrived late the next morning. They showered together, and Peter dressed with unusual care. For some reason, he felt it was important to look his best. It was a new beginning, after all. Kathy came with him. They entered the living room holding hands. Bunnish was already behind the board, and Peter’s clock was ticking. The others were there too. E.C. was seated patiently in a chair. Delmario was pacing. ‘Hurry up,’ he said when Peter came down the stairs. ‘You’ve lost five minutes already.’

Peter smiled. ‘Easy, Steve,’ he said. He went over and took his seat behind the White pieces. Kathy stood behind him. She looked gorgeous this morning, Peter thought.

‘It’s your move, captain,’ Bunnish said, with an unpleasant smile.

‘I know,’ Peter said. He made no effort to move, scarcely even looked at the board. ‘Bruce, why do you hate me? I’ve been thinking about that, and I’d like to know the answer. I can understand about Steve and E.C. Steve had the presumption to win when you lost, and he rubbed your nose in that defeat afterwards. E.C. made you the butt of his jokes. But why me? What did I ever do to you?’

Bunnish looked briefly confused. Then his face grew hard. ‘You. You were the worst of them all.’

Peter was startled. ‘I never …’

‘The big captain,’ Bunnish said sarcastically. ‘That day ten years ago, you never even tried. You took a quick grandmaster draw with your old friend Hal Winslow. You could have tried for a win, played on, but you didn’t. Oh, no. You never cared how much more pressure you put on the rest of us. And when we lost, you didn’t take any of the blame, not a bit of it, even though you gave up half a point. It was all my fault. And that wasn’t all of it, either. Why was I on first board, Norten? All of us on the B team had approximately the same rating. How did I get the honor of being board one?’

Peter thought for a minute, trying to recall the strategies that had motivated him ten years before. Finally he nodded. ‘You always lost the big games, Bruce. It made sense to put you up on board one, where you’d face the other teams’ big guns, the ones who’d probably beat whoever we played there. That way the lower boards would be manned by more reliable players, the ones we could count on in the clutch.’

‘In other words,’ Bunnish said, ‘I was a write-off. You expected me to lose, while you won matches on the lower boards.’

‘Yes,’ Peter admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry,’ mocked Bunnish. ‘You made me lose, expected me to lose, and then tormented me for losing, and now you’re sorry. You didn’t play chess that day. You never played chess. You were playing a bigger game, a game that lasted for years, between you and Winslow of U.C. And the team members were your pieces and your pawns. Me, I was a sac. A gambit. That was all. And it didn’t work anyway. Winslow beat you. You lost!’

‘You’re right,’ Peter admitted. ‘I lost. I think I understand now. Why you did all the things you’ve done.’

‘You’re going to lose again now,’ Bunnish said. ‘Move, before your clock runs out.’ He nodded down at the checkered wasteland that lay between them, at the complex jumble of Black and White pieces.

Peter glanced at the board with disinterest. ‘We analyzed until three in the morning last night, the three of us. I had a new variation all set. A single sacrifice, instead of the double sac. I play knight takes pawn, but I hold back from the bishop sac, swing my queen over instead. That was the idea. It looked pretty good. But it’s unsound, isn’t it?’

Bunnish stared at him. ‘Play it, and we’ll find out!’

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t want to play.’

‘Pete!’ Steve Delmario said in consternation. ‘You got to, what are you saying, beat this damn bastard.’

Peter looked at him. ‘It’s no good, Steve.’

There was a silence. Finally Bunnish said, ‘You’re a coward, Norten. A coward and a failure and a weakling. Play the game out.’

‘I’m not interested in the game, Bruce. Just tell me. The variation is unsound.’

Bunnish made a disgusted noise. ‘Yes, yes,’ he snapped. ‘It’s unsound. There’s a countersac, I give up a rook to break up your mating threats, but I win a piece back a few moves later.’

‘All the variations are unsound, aren’t they?’ Peter said.

Bunnish smiled thinly.

‘White doesn’t have a won game at all,’ Peter said. ‘We were wrong, all those years. You never blew the win. You never had a win. Just a position that looked good superficially, but led nowhere.’

‘Wisdom, at last,’ Bunnish said. ‘I’ve had computers print out every possible variation. They take forever, but I’ve had lifetimes. When I flashed back - you have no idea how many times I have flashed back, trying one new idea after another - that is always my target point, that day in Evanston, the game with Vesselere. I’ve tried every move there is to be tried in that position, every wild idea. It makes no difference. Vesselere always beats me. All the variations are unsound.’

‘But,’ Delmario protested, looking bewildered, ‘Vesselere said he was lost. He said so!’

Bunnish looked at him with contempt. ‘I had made him sweat a lot in a game he should have won easily. He was just getting back. He was a vindictive man, and he knew that by saying that he’d make the loss that much more painful.’ He smirked. ‘I’ve taken care of him too, you know.’

E.C. Stuart rose up from his chair and straightened his vest. ‘If we’re done now, Brucie, maybe you would be so kind as to let us out of Bunnishland?’

‘You can go,’ Bunnish said. ‘And that drunk, too. But not Peter.’ He showed his dimples. ‘Why, Peter has almost won, in a sense. So I’m going to be generous. You know what I’m going to do for you, Captain? I’m going to let you use my flashback device.’

‘No thank you,’ Peter said.

Bunnish stared, befuddled. ‘What do you mean, no? Don’t you understand what I’m giving you? You can wipe out all your failures, try again, make some different moves. Be a success in another timeline.’

‘I know. Of course, that would leave Kathy with a dead body in this timeline, wouldn’t it? And you with the satisfaction of driving me to something that uncannily resembles suicide. No. I’ll take my chances with the future instead of the past. With Kathy.’

Bunnish let his mouth droop open. ‘What do you care about her? She hates you anyway. She’ll be better off with you dead. She’ll get the insurance money and you’ll get somebody better, somebody who cares about you.’

‘But I do care about him,’ Kathy said. She put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. He reached up and touched it, and smiled.

‘Then you’re a fool too,’ Bunnish cried. ‘He’s nothing, he’ll never be anything. I’ll see to that.’

Peter stood up. ‘I don’t think so, somehow. I don’t think you can hurt us anymore. Any of us.’ He looked at the others. ‘What do you think, guys?’

E.C. cocked his head thoughtfully, and ran a finger along the underside of his mustache. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think you’re right.’

Delmario just seemed baffled, until all of a sudden the light broke across his face, and he grinned. ‘You can’t steal ideas I haven’t come up with yet, can you?’ he said to Bunnish. ‘Not in this timeline, anyhow.’ He made a loud whooping sound and stepped up to the chessboard. Reaching down, he stopped the clock. ‘Checkmate,’ he said. ‘Checkmate, checkmate, checkmate!’

Less than two weeks later, Kathy knocked softly on the door of the study. ‘Wait a sec!’ Peter shouted. He typed out another sentence, then flicked off the typewriter and swiveled in his chair. ‘C’mon in.’ She opened the door and smiled at him. ‘I made some tuna salad, if you want to take a break for lunch. How’s the book coming?’

‘Good,’ Peter said. ‘I should finish the second chapter today, if I keep at it.’ She was holding a newspaper, he noticed. ‘What’s that?’

‘I thought you ought to see this,’ she replied, handing it over.

She’d folded it open to the obits. Peter took it and read. Millionaire electronics genius Bruce Bunnish had been found dead in his Colorado home, hooked up to a strange device that had seemingly electrocuted him. Peter sighed.

‘He’s going to try again, isn’t he?’ Kathy said.

Peter put down the newspaper. ‘The poor bastard. He can’t see it.’

‘See what?’

Peter took her hand and squeezed it. ‘All the variations are unsound,’ he said. It made him sad. But after lunch, he soon forgot about it, and went back to work.

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