Part 1 (1/2)

The Game of Rat and Dragon.

by Cordwainer Smith.

THE TABLE

Pinlighting is a h.e.l.l of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn't make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciate what you did.

He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest and pulled the helmet down over his forehead.

As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully.

”Meow.” That was all she had said. Yet it had cut him like a knife.

What did she think he was--a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonent.i.ty?

Didn't she know that for every half hour of pinlighting, he got a minimum of two months' recuperation in the hospital?

By now the set was warm. He felt the squares of s.p.a.ce around him, sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching horror of s.p.a.ce itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.

As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clock-work of the familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him. Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with rea.s.suring noises. The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an a.s.surance that all was well. Far above the plane of the ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting outside the lanes of human travel.

Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood.

Nothing ever moved in on the Solar System. He could wear the pin-set forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing and burning against his living mind.

Woodley came in.

”Same old ticking world,” said Underhill. ”Nothing to report. No wonder they didn't develop the pin-set until they began to planoform.

Down here with the hot Sun around us, it feels so good and so quiet.

You can feel everything spinning and turning. It's nice and sharp and compact. It's sort of like sitting around home.”

Woodley grunted. He was not much given to flights of fantasy.

Undeterred, Underhill went on, ”It must have been pretty good to have been an Ancient Man. I wonder why they burned up their world with war.

They didn't have to planoform. They didn't have to go out to earn their livings among the stars. They didn't have to dodge the Rats or play the Game. They couldn't have invented pinlighting because they didn't have any need of it, did they, Woodley?”

Woodley grunted, ”Uh-huh.” Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had gotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best of them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job, meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them and thinking nothing more about his duties until the next emergency arose.

Woodley never made a point of getting popular among the Partners.

None of the Partners liked him very much. Some of them even resented him. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners on occasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint in articulate form, the other pinlighters and the Chiefs of the Instrumentality left him alone.

Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily he babbled on, ”What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you think it's sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soul pulled out?”

”Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it,” said Woodley.

”After all these years, n.o.body knows whether we have souls or not.”