"That's what you think," Bill told her. "Did you know that Willie Angler has hired Evil Eye Bixel out of Brooklyn to put the whammy on the Machine? S'fact."
"... pow-wow-wers unknown to mere mortals of flesh and blood—"
"Shut up!" Dave hissed. "Now you've done it. Here comes old Eagle Eye. Look, I don't know you two. I'm with this lady here."
Bela Grabo was suffering acute tortures. He had a winning attack, he knew it. The Machine was counter-attacking, but unstrategically, desperately, in the style of a Frank Marshall complicating the issue and hoping for a swindle. All Grabo had to do, he knew, was keep his head and not blunder—not throw away a queen, say, as he had to old Vanderhoef at Brussels, or overlook a mate in two, as he had against Sherevsky at Tel Aviv. The memory of those unutterably black moments and a dozen more like them returned to haunt him. Never if he lived a thousand years would he be free of them.
For the tenth time in the last two minutes he glanced at his clock. He had fifteen minutes in which to make five moves. He wasn't in time-pressure, he must remember that. He mustn't make a move on impulse, he mustn't let his treacherous hand leap out without waiting for instructions from its guiding brain.
First prize in this tournament meant incredible wealth—transportation money and hotel bills for more than a score of future tournaments. But more than that, it was one more chance to blazon before the world his true superiority rather than the fading reputation of it. "... Bela Grabo, brilliant but erratic...." Perhaps his last chance.
When, in the name of Heaven, was the Machine going to make its next move? Surely it had already taken more than four minutes! But a glance at its clock showed him that hardly half that time had gone by. He decided he had made a mistake in asking again for the screens. It was easier to watch those damned lights blink than have them blink in his imagination.
Oh, if chess could only be played in intergalactic space, in the black privacy of one's thoughts. But there had to be the physical presence of the opponent with his (possibly deliberate) unnerving mannerisms—Lasker and his cigar, Capablanca and his red neck-tie, Nimzowitsch and his nervous contortions (very like Bela Grabo's, though the latter did not see it that way). And now this ghastly flashing, humming, stinking, button-banging metal monster!
Actually, he told himself, he was being asked to play two opponents, the Machine and Simon Great, a sort of consultation team. It wasn't fair!