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
inlighting 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.
oodley 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