Mark Pearce is the author of three books: Tobias and the Isle of Justice, Specimens Under Glass, and Asylum. He has had stories published in over 80 literary journals in the United States, England, and Canada and is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and recipient of Granfalloon magazine’s “Story of the Year.”
The Grandmaster
Tivadar Szilard walked through the tenements of Brooklyn, the stench of the streets
wafting up his nostrils and permeating his clothes. Filthy urchins ran through the streets, adding a cacophony of noise to the squalor of the neighborhood, making Szilard cringe and draw back into his own skin. He checked the directions on the torn slip of paper he carried in his left hand, then turned south at a street corner where raw sewage oozed from the gutter.
Tivadar Szilard was the World Chess Champion. He was provably the best player who
had ever lived.
But he was not The Legend.
The Legend had the improbable name of Guster Boone. He had retired and disappeared
twenty years ago after burning through the world of chess like a magnesium flame. Boone had
grown up in a middle class neighborhood in a better part of Brooklyn. A child prodigy, he was
the youngest Grandmaster in history. After winning the American chess title, he had abruptly
ceased tournament play. It was theorized that he had burnt out, that he was a prodigy who would never achieve mature status.
Then came the Magnificent Year. Boone had suddenly risen up, entered the tournament
for the World Chess Championship, and had destroyed his opponents in ways that had never
been seen in the world of chess. In the semifinals and finals, he demolished his opponents 6-0,
6-0, 9-0, no draws. It had never happened in chess before. It had never happened since.
In the championship match that year, he had destroyed the old Russian who had stood as
champion of the world for a decade. The old Russian had continued to perform in tournaments for several years thereafter, but it was universally acknowledged that he was no longer the player he once had been. It was said that the match with Boone had broken something inside him.
The world had hailed Boone, the conquering hero, and proclaimed him invincible.
But he had never played another game. He had never defended his title. He had
disappeared from public view. When the next championship tournaments began, he didn’t enter.
There was much media coverage of the invincible champion who refused to defend his title.
There was speculation and editorials, theorizing and psychologizing, predictions of an eventual triumphant return. But as the years passed, the world of chess had sadly moved on.
Then came Tivadar Szilard, the Hungarian phenom. It was said Szilard had the most
creative play in the history of the game. He had the highest chess score of anyone who had ever lived. He had read every book ever written on the game and penned a score of them himself.
But his entire career had been dogged by the shadow of the former champion. Guster Boone.
The Legend.
Szilard stopped in front of the brownstone and checked the address on the slip of paper.
He hesitated a moment, then climbed the stoop. He had come to destroy a legend.
A narrow wooden stairway led to the second floor, its steps old and sagging. A bare bulb
was the only illumination. Szilard ascended slowly.
The second floor hallway was dark. Though it was midday, the lone window at the end
of the corridor allowed little sunlight through its grime. Szilard stopped at a wooden door
marked 2A. He knocked.
“It’s open,” called a voice from within.
Szilard turned the brass knob and pushed the door ajar.
The apartment consisted of a single room. An unmade bed stood in the corner. Dirty
dishes cluttered the wooden table and the sink. Piles of magazines lined the walls and scattered across the floor, competing with hills of books. And there, sitting in an ancient cloth chair under a reading lamp, sat the Legend.
Guster Boone was older than any picture Szilard had seen of him. His gaunt face was
narrower than it had been in his youth. But it was unmistakably him. Above the light of the
reading lamp, Szilard could see the eyes, brilliant and sinister, almost reptilian. The corners of
his mouth were turned up in a slight, mocking grin. The two men stared at each other.
“You’re Guster Boone,” said Szilard; it was not a question.
Boone lowered his head in acknowledgement, the grin deepening, the angle of his
eyebrows highlighting the sinister eyes.
“I’m Tivadar Szilard.” When Boone gave no answer, Szilard added, “The World Chess
Champion.”
The reptilian nature of Boone’s eyes deepened. The grin became tighter.
“I’ve come to play you.”
Szilard saw no surprise in the man’s face, no resentment, no amusement, no emotion of
any kind—only a sharp attentiveness.
“I’m not talking about a public tournament,” said Szilard. “I mean a private match. Just
you and me. No press, no media, no hordes. Just the two best chess players who have ever
lived.”
Emotion returned to Boone’s visage, the sinister amusement. “Tivadar Szilard. I’ve
studied all your games.”
“I’ll put up any stakes you name,” said Szilard. “Offer any prize, any amount. A single
game or a match of any length. You set the terms. You set the stakes.”
“I don’t want your money,” said Boone.
“What do you want?”
The sinister glint deepened. “I’ll play you. A single game. But on my terms.”
Szilard waited. Boone leaned forward.
“The winner will open the head of the loser and eat his brain.”
Szilard stared into the madness of Boone’s eyes. It was not a joke or a bluff. He meant
it. And he saw something else in the mad brilliance of Boone’s eyes—a total certainty of what
the outcome would be.
Szilard knew that for the rest of his life he would never forget the look in the eyes—or
the quality of the laughter that echoed in the narrow shaft of the stairway and only ended when the door closed behind him as he emerged into the street.
Before Hiroshima, Before Nagasaki – There Was Trinity
The spot is marked by a 12 foot obelisk composed of lava rocks. Melted earth. The area
of the crater is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. In one direction is a mountain wall. The rest of the landscape is barren desert. A truly remote location. After more than 75 years, the area is still slightly radioactive.
Before Hiroshima, before Nagasaki, there was Trinity. On the morning of July 16, 1945,
the world’s first nuclear device was exploded in the remote desert of New Mexico. As the
morning sky was rent by the explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled the lines from the
Bhagavad Gita – “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
It was a destination I knew I would have to visit in my travels. I would have to stand in
the spot where the human animal, unique among the beasts, had become capable of causing its own extinction.
I stopped in Socorro, New Mexico, about thirty miles northwest of the Trinity site. In a
roadside diner, I met an old timer who had been alive at the time of the blast. He told me about the night it had occurred, when the sky was a bath of white and the sound of thunder had come tearing across the desert. A few weeks later he heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and knew what that night had wrought.
He spoke of going to the Trinity Site as a child and collecting strange chips of stone,
altered by the blast, a substance that would later be called trinitite. Then the government had
arrived and cordoned off the area. He related tales of protesters who occasionally came with
signs, protesting the atomic bomb, or wars, or nuclear power, or the use of the bomb at
Hiroshima, or Trinity itself. And he said the people of his generation had suffered “a lot of ailments” through the years, from living so close to the bomb site. But it never occurred to him to move. This was his home. This was all he knew. To him, an atom bomb might go off in your
neighborhood when you’re a child. It’s just a part of life.
The Trinity Site is deep inside the White Sands Missile Base. I had to pass through a
barbed-wire gate and show photo identification. I was told to drive about 17 miles down a desert road until I came to the Permanent High Explosive Testing Area. I was then to turn left. I was worried I might miss the turn, but there was no chance of that. When I reached the fork in the road, an armed soldier stood sentry, making certain I didn’t accidentally stray into the Permanent High Explosive Testing Area. He didn’t feel half as strongly about it as I did.
After driving another five miles, I could see the obelisk in the distance, surrounded by a
large, circular barbed wire fence, the size and shape of the blast crater. I had to exit my car and
pass on foot through another guarded gate.
I stood where Oppenheimer had stood, and Fermi and Teller. There were those who had
chosen not to come, like Leo Szilard, who did not want to witness what they had done.
In the final days before the detonation, a macabre humor had developed among the
scientists. They had organized a betting pool to predict the size of the explosion. General Groves received disturbing reports from the Army guards—Enrico Fermi was taking side bets on whether they would accidentally ignite the atmosphere and end all life on the planet.
The device was placed on a metal grate tower with wires leading to various measuring
devices. The scientists set it off just before dawn.
It has been called “The Day the Sun Rose Twice.”
An atomic tourist who looks carefully on the ground can still see examples of trinitite, a
substance that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It was created when the nuclear explosion fused the desert sand of New Mexico. A piece of trinitite is about a centimeter wide.
The top surface is smooth and green. The bottom is light gray and rough and looks like concrete.
The most common form of trinitite is green, but there is also black, red, and blue. Black trinitite contains occlusions of iron from the tower which held the device. Red trinitite is caused by the fusing of copper from the wires that were run from the bomb to the various measuring devices.
No one knows what causes blue trinitite. It is illegal to remove a piece of trinitite from the area.
All trinitite is radioactive.
After absorbing enough history, and probably more than enough radiation, I got back into
my car and headed toward the state highway, glad to leave the Trinity site in my rearview mirror.
H.G. Wells, one of history’s seminal thinkers, had thought the tank so horrific—as it
rolled insensate across the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers and civilians, as it destroyed
fields, and ruined villages—that the world would be unable to face the horrors of such a
monstrous weapon and would be forced to put an end to war once and for all. The thinkers of an earlier generation had believed the same thing about the rapid-fire Gatling gun. The next
generation would hold the same belief about the atomic bomb.
I imagine that somewhere in our dim, dark past, a cave philosopher noticed that the
attacking tribe was swinging sticks, and thought, “This can’t go on!”
After making his name and fortune writing prophetic tales of science fiction, H.G. Wells
turned his great mind to anti-war activism and spent the latter part of his life trying to save the world.
He didn’t realize the world doesn’t want to be saved.
When the earliest human discovered he had an opposable thumb, the first thing he made
was a fist.
Never, Never Land, My Ship
Never, never land, my ship,
For now would be too late.
I always dreamt someday you’d come,
But my days were spent in wait.
If you had come when I was young,
What shores we might have found,
But I was closely watching,
And you never came to ground.
So never, never land, my ship,
I’m too old to sail the seas.
I’ll finish out my days ashore …
But, wait, I hear a breeze--!
Could it be my ship has come at last?
I squint my eyes to see,
But the sound was just my own deep sigh,
No speck disturbs the sea.
So never, never land, my ship,
You’ve taken far too long,
Seek out some younger dreamer,
For I’m no longer strong.
impspired 