Tactics of Conquest (18 page)
“No,” he said, “no, you’re wrong, it did happen. It cannot be denied.” All of this in a flat monotone, no inflection whatsoever. “I’m afraid that the move has been made, David, and it’s touch-move, touch-move.” This set him off into a horrid and uncontrollable series of giggles, the giggles restoring life to his limbs, arc to his inert
form. Then he had sprung to his feet, was hovering over me, his eyes agleam with an insight as perilous as mine although one hundred and eighty degrees removed. “You’re going to have to live with it,” he said. “You’re going to have to accept it. It happened and it was always meant to happen and furthermore
I did it to you, you remember that
.” This outburst drove me quite mad, or at least it made me somewhat less stable than I might have been otherwise. I was on my feet too then, arms extended, pulling and wrenching at him, the contact of his flesh more familiar to me in the efforts I made to strike him than ever I could have wanted. I said, “It never happened, it never happened, I deny all of it,” and he said, “A move made once is not a move retracted, under the international rules of gamesmanship and the grandmaster code. Once something is touched it must remain “touched, you must move the piece to a new position,” and slavering obscenities I leapt at him, going for that small, white spot of throat where I knew the immutable heart of the jugular itself beat, reaching out to tear his pulse from his body—
And I leapt over him, passed through space and beyond, and fell a sheer, clear distance into the ooze, hitting with knees and splayed palms. As the birds of Canarsie wheeled in position from this aspect I saw something else: the 1947 Pontiac was on fire, some unseen workman’s torch had gotten it, and the sparks from the car danced and flew, the metal shivered and contracted upon itself; the vast, brutal sheet metal of the body itself contracted within ... and as I watched in amazement the car shrank upon itself like the layers of some tormented thing in an oven shriveling back upon one another. The body drew tighter and
tighter into itself until what had once been a conveyance was now an agonized ball with a circumference of no more than three feet. Some ultimate sadness, final understanding, drove the shrieks from my throat ... as that mottled ball rolled upon itself on the ground like a tortured animal and finally came to rest, to coldness, hammered in upon itself so that in all the spaces of the world no one would have ever known that it had contained anything but flame and then ruptured steel.
Barry N. Malzberg (1939–)
Barry N. Malzberg is an American writer, editor and agent, whose prolific career has spanned numerous genres – most notably crime and science fiction. Malzberg was particularly active in the science fiction scene of the early seventies, although he became disillusioned with the market forces defining the field, and has rarely published SF works since. His most recent activity in the field has been in the form of advice columns for writers in the quarterly magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Barry N. Malzberg has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Barry N. Malzberg 1974
All rights reserved.
The right of Barry N. Malzberg to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10230 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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