The Game of Rat and Dragon Read online

  Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Adam Buchbinder, and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  The Game of

  Rat and Dragon

  By CORDWAINER SMITH

  _Only partners could fight this deadliest of wars--and the one way to dissolve the partnership was to be personally dissolved!_

  Illustrated by HUNTER

  * * * * *

  THE TABLE

  Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furiousas he closed the door behind himself. It didn't make much sense towear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciatewhat you did.

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

  As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in theouter 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 nonentity?Didn't she know that for every half hour of pinlighting, he got aminimum of two months' recuperation in the hospital?

  By now the set was warm. He felt the squares of space around him,sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, fullof nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow achinghorror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which hismind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.

  As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clock-work ofthe familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him. Our own solar systemwas as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled withfamiliar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons ofMars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularitywas itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of theecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less driftingoutside the lanes of human travel.

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

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

  * * * * *

  Woodley came in.

  "Same old ticking world," said Underhill. "Nothing to report. Nowonder 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 andcompact. 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 havebeen 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 earntheir livings among the stars. They didn't have to dodge the Rats orplay the Game. They couldn't have invented pinlighting because theydidn't have any need of it, did they, Woodley?"

  Woodley grunted, "Uh-huh." Woodley was twenty-six years old and due toretire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He hadgotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best ofthem. 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 andthinking 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 resentedhim. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners onoccasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint inarticulate form, the other pinlighters and the Chiefs of theInstrumentality left him alone.

  Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily hebabbled on, "What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you thinkit's sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soulpulled out?"

  "Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it," said Woodley."After all these years, nobody knows whether we have souls or not."

  "But I saw one once. I saw what Dogwood looked like when he cameapart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky asif it were bleeding and it went out of him--and you know what they didto Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital whereyou and I never go--way up at the top part where the others are, wherethe others always have to go if they are alive after the Rats of theUp-and-Out have gotten them."

  Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning somethingcalled tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made himlook very dashing and adventurous.

  "Look here, youngster. You don't have to worry about that stuff.Pinlighting is getting better all the time. The Partners are gettingbetter. I've seen them pinlight two Rats forty-six million miles apartin one and a half milliseconds. As long as people had to try to workthe pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with aminimum of four hundred milliseconds for the human mind to set apinlight, we wouldn't light the Rats up fast enough to protect ourplanoforming ships. The Partners have changed all that. Once they getgoing, they're faster than Rats. And they always will be. I know it'snot easy, letting a Partner share your mind--"

  "It's not easy for them, either," said Underhill.

  "Don't worry about them. They're not human. Let them take care ofthemselves. I've seen more pinlighters go crazy from monkeying aroundwith Partners than I have ever seen caught by the Rats. How many doyou actually know of them that got grabbed by Rats?"

  * * * * *

  Underhill looked down at his fingers, which shone green and purple inthe vivid light thrown by the tuned-in pin-set, and counted ships.The thumb for the _Andromeda_, lost with crew and passengers, theindex finger and the middle finger for _Release Ships_ 43 and 56,found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and childon board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and thethumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost tothe Rats--lost as people realized that there was something out there_underneath space itself_ which was alive, capricious and malevolent.

  Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like like--

  Like nothing much.

  Like the twinge of a mild electric shock.

  Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time.

  Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.

  Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earthdisappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half alight-year or fifty light-years off.

  At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-setready and the familiar Solar System ticking around inside his head.For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was,subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he wasloose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars,where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mindand the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.

  Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death andhorror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached outfor inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the
light of the suns keptthe Dragons away.

  * * * * *

  Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, therewas nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammerblow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descendinginto their minds.

  But to the telepaths, they were Dragons.

  In the fraction of a second between the telepaths' awareness of ahostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space andthe impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all livingthings within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities somethinglike the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever thanbeasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of alivenessand hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin tenuous matterbetween the stars.

  It took a surviving ship to bring back the news--a ship in which, bysheer chance, a telepath had a light beam ready, turning it out at theinnocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragondissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselvesnon-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their ownimmediate deaths had been averted.

  From then on, it was easy--almost.

  * * * * *

  Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had theirsensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which weretelepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turnwere electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light didit.

  Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reformthree-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star tostar.

  The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind tosixty to forty in mankind's favor.

  This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to becomeultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than amillisecond.

  But it was found that the Dragons could move a million miles in justunder two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mindto activate the light beams.

  Attempts had been made to sheath the ships in light at all times.

  This defense wore out.

  As mankind learned about the Dragons, so too, apparently, the Dragonslearned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and camein on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.

  Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could beprovided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.

  Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniaturephotonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesiumisotope into pure visible radiance.

  The odds kept coming down in mankind's favor, yet ships were beinglost.

  It became so bad that people didn't even want to find the shipsbecause the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bringback to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred orthree hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed,and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their liveswere ended.

  Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had beendamaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vividspouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial iditself, the volcanic source of life.

  Then came the Partners.

  Man and Partner could do together what Man could not do alone. Men hadthe intellect. Partners had the speed.

  The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outsidethe spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside themin their six-pound craft ready to attack.

  The tiny ships of the Partners were swift. Each carried a dozenpinlights, bombs no bigger than thimbles.

  The pinlighters threw the Partners--quite literally threw--by means ofmind-to-firing relays direct at the Dragons.

  What seemed to be Dragons to the human mind appeared in the form ofgigantic Rats in the minds of the Partners.

  Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the Partners' mindsresponded to an instinct as old as life. The Partners attacked,striking with a speed faster than Man's, going from attack to attackuntil the Rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time, itwas the Partners who won.

  With the safety of the inter-stellar skip, skip, skip of the ships,commerce increased immensely, the population of all the colonies wentup, and the demand for trained Partners increased.

  Underhill and Woodley were a part of the third generation ofpinlighters and yet, to them, it seemed as though their craft hadendured forever.

  Gearing space into minds by means of the pin-set, adding the Partnersto those minds, keying up the mind for the tension of a fight on whichall depended--this was more than human synapses could stand for long.Underhill needed his two months' rest after half an hour of fighting.Woodley needed his retirement after ten years of service. They wereyoung. They were good. But they had limitations.

  So much depended on the choice of Partners, so much on the sheer luckof who drew whom.