Read Second Game for Free Online Page B

intended me to see. Here at last might be a chance to do a positive service for my side. "I would be happy to play," I said. Trobt parked the tricar on a side avenue and we walked perhaps a hundred yards. We stopped at the door of a small one-story stone house and Trobt tapped with his fingernails on a hollow gong buried in the wood.
    After a minute a curtain over the door glass was drawn back and an old woman with straggly gray hair peered out at us. She recognized Trobt and opened the door.
    We went in. Neither Trobt nor the old woman spoke. She turned her back after closing the door and went to stir embers in a stone grate.
    Trobt motioned with his head for me to follow and led the way into a back room.
    "Robert O. Lang," he said, "I would like you to meet Yondtl."
    * * *
    I looked across the room in the direction Trobt had indicated. My first impression was of a great white blob, propped up on a couch and supported by the wall at its back. Then the thing moved. Moved its eyes. It was alive. Its eyes told me also that it was a man. If I could call it a man.
    His head was large and bloated, with blue eyes, washed almost colorless, peering out of deep pouches of flesh. He seemed to have no neck; almost as though his great head were merely an extension of the trunk, and separated only by puffy folds of fat. Other lappings of flesh hung from his body in great thick rolls.
    It took another minute of fascinated inspection before I saw that he had no arms, and that no legs reached from his body to the floor. The entire sight of him made me want to leave the room and be sick.
    "Robert O. Lang is an Earthian who would challenge you, sir," Trobt addressed the monstrosity. The other gave no sign that I could see but Trobt went to pull a Games table at the side of the room over toward us. "I will serve as his hands," Trobt said. The pale blue eyes never left my face.
    I stood without conscious thought until Trobt pushed a chair under me. Mentally I shook myself. With unsteady hands—I had to do something with them—I reached for the pukts before me. "Do you . . . do you have a choice . . . of colors, sir?" I stammered, trying to make up for my earlier rudeness of staring.
    The lips of the monstrosity quivered, but he made no reply.
    All this while Trobt had been watching me with amusement. "He is deaf and speechless," Trobt said.
    "Take either set. I will place the other before him."
    Absently I pulled the red pieces toward me and placed them on their squares.
    "In deference to you as a visitor, you will play 'second game counts,"' Trobt continued. He was still enjoying my consternation. "He always allows his opponent the first move. You may begin when you are ready."
    With an effort I forced myself to concentrate on the playing board. My start, I decided, must be orthodox. I had to learn something of the type of game this . . . Yondtl . . . played. I moved the first row right hand pukt its two oblique and one left squares.
    Yondtl inclined his head slightly. His lips moved. Trobt put his hand to a pukt and pushed it forward. Evidently Trobt read his lips. Very probably Yondtl could read ours also. We played for almost an hour with neither of us losing a man.
    I had tried several gambits; gambits that invited a misplay on Yondtl's part. But he made none. When he offered I was careful to make no mistakes of my own. We both played as though this first game were the whole contest.
    Another hour went by. I deliberately traded three pukts with Yondtl, in an attempt to trick him into a misplay. None came.
    I tried a single decoy gambit, and when nothing happened, followed with a second decoy. Yondtl countered each play. I marveled that he gave so little of his attention to the board. Always he seemed to be watching me. I played. He played. He watched me.
    I sweated.
    Yondtl set up an overt side pass that forced me to draw my pukts back into the main body. Somehow I received the impression that be was teasing me. It made me want to beat him