"Charles DeVet & Katherine MacLean - Cosmic Checkmate" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeVet Charles)

As a final gesture I had been smuggled in—in an attempt to breach that
stand-off stubbornness. This booth at their Fair was my best chance—as I
saw it—to secure audience with the men in authority. And with luck it
would serve a double purpose.

Several Veldians gathered around the booth and watched with interest
as my opponent and I chose colors. He took the red; I the black, We
arranged our fifty-two pieces on their squares and I nodded to him to
make the first move.

He was an anemic oldster with an air of nervous energy, and he played
the same way, with intense concentration. By the fourth move I knew he
would not win. On each play he had to consult the value board suspended
between us before deciding what his next move would be. On a play board
with one hundred and sixty nine squares, each with a different value—in
fact one set of values for offense, and another for defense—only a brilliant
player could keep them all in mind. But no man without that ability was
going to beat me.

I let him win the first game. Deliberately. The "second game counts"
gimmick was not only to attract attention, but to give me a chance to test
a player's strength—and find his weakness.

At the start of the second game the oldster moved his front row center
pukt three squares forward and one left oblique. I checked it with an end
pukt, and waited.

The contest was not going to be exacting enough to hold my complete
attention. Already an eidetic portion of my mind—which I always thought
of as a small machine, ticking away in one corner of my skull, independent
of any control or direction from me—was moving its interest out to the
spectators around my booth.

Every object about me, every passing face, would make its picture in
the memory banks of that machine and wait there to be recalled. Further,
it catalogued each fact learned or observed in its proper relation with
others already there. Sometimes the addition of one new fact caused it to
give an almost audible click, and a conclusion, or answer, seemingly
unrelated to the original fact, lay clear before me. The best simile I knew
was that of a penny scale, spitting out a card of fortune as a penny was
dropped inside. It constantly amazed me.

Most men, I presume, would regard an eidetic-recall memory as a very
desirable faculty. Some, a bit more introspective, might wonder if it might
not be a curse. The latter would be more nearly correct. To me it was like
another mouth—a hungry mouth, that had to be constantly fed. At times I
felt like a man with a load on his shoulders,, being piled higher and
higher, until some day I would slowly fold beneath the weight of it.

The other part of my mind idly carried on the action of the game and in