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however.”
    “I’d rather play for good,” I said firmly, “if that’s all the same to you. I certainly wouldn’t want to represent the forces of entropy.”
    The Overlord shrugged delicately and said, “As you please.”
    “Am I going back to Warsaw now?”
    “Oh no. I’m afraid that that tournament has already been disbanded. You are going to be transportedto an excellent terrestrial-type environment on the settled moon of Titan, satellite of Saturn, and from there preparations for the match will be made, the match to begin tomorrow on your time schedule. I’m afraid that we’re quite behind schedule as I told you,” the Overlord said. Then I was whisked away from there at such horrifying speed and with such intensity that my next recollection is of the panelling in the room on Titan which, as the Overlord had promised, was indeed quite terrestrial.
    From that moment on I was enmeshed in preparations for the match. I had my own set of seconds, of course, all provided by the Overlords, who did their best to make me comfortable. I also had my own crew of technicians and dieticians and physicians to make my lot easier, and I understand that Louis did as well. Media and publicity, however, were cooperative efforts; the press releases and biographies during the match emanated from the same set of offices on Sirius to avoid what the Overlord told me would otherwise have been wasteful duplication.

    It is odd that of all people, Louis and I should be thrust into such juxtaposition. There are elements of irony here, and the publicity materials have not been shy of those ironies. Although I am a much better player than Louis (stupidly the Overlords got it all wrong; I do not see how our abilities can be compared; he is a plodding, methodical player whereas I am inventive and brilliant, and he has never competed for a world championship whereas I got to the quarter-finals a quarter of a century ago and was defeated only after a stupid blunder which I will not rehash at this point), there is no question of the similarityof our backgrounds, a co-mingling of history and purpose which even now amazes me.
    We grew up together in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York; we began to play competitive chess at the same time; we advanced in the spectrum of the chess hierarchy at graduated intervals only weeks apart, and ultimately we traveled through the world together, our careers paralleling, dovetailing with stunning occlusion. All along, of course, it was well known by those who really followed the game that I was a far superior player to Louis and that indeed he had fastened himself upon me, sheer doppelganger, leaching from me the greatest of my own techniques in order to improve his own mediocre game, his defenses and strategies copied from me, even his public image, a mixture of gruffness and deference, stolen from my own personality (which is, nevertheless, far more pleasing than his, to say nothing of the fact that I am also a much handsomer man).
    I do not wish to give the impression that I am fond of Louis. Although from the very beginning our careers and personal lives have meshed strikingly, I consider him to be nothing more than a parasite. Indeed I believe that his very decision to be a chess master was one appropriated from me; he showed no interest in entering the National Juniors, for instance, until I declared my own intention, and it was not until I obtained from the Roxbury Press a contract for
Fianchetto and Fork: Bishop Versus Knight
that he expressed interest in becoming an author and obtained a publisher for his own miserable
To Castle or Not to Castle: The Intricacies of Defense.
    It has always been this way; there have been times, in truth, when I thought that Louis mightnot be a discrete personality so much as a horrid extension of myself, a phantom, a creation, a literal extension of my own desire not to be lonely, which had led me to create another of similar will and intention with such