Project Gutenberg's The Game of Rat and Dragon, by Cordwainer Smith

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Title: The Game of Rat and Dragon

Author: Cordwainer Smith

Illustrator: Hunter

Release Date: August 5, 2009 [EBook #29614]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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

[Illustration]

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

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

As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the
outer 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 a
minimum 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, full
of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching
horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his
mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of