Free The Collection by Fredric Brown

so wrong. There is a God, and so great a
God that He will forgive your heresy, because there was no evil in you,
Tibault, except as doubt—no, doubt is error but it is not evil.
    Without faith we are noth--
    But something is happening! Our Rook, he who was on the
Queen's side of the field in the Beginning, swoops toward the evil Black King,
our enemy. The villainous one is under attack—and cannot escape. We have won!
We have won!
    A voice in the sky says calmly, " Checkmate. "
    We have won! The war, this bitter stricken field, was not in vain. Tibault, you were wrong, you were--
    But what is happening now? The very Earth tilts; one side of
the battlefield rises and we are sliding—White and Black alike into--
    —into a monstrous box and I see that it is a mass
coffin in which already lie dead--
    IT IS NOT FAIR; WE WON! GOD, WAS TIBAULT RIGHT? IT IS NOT
JUST; WE WON!
    The King, my liege lord, is sliding too across the
squares—
    IT IS NOT JUST; IT IS NOT RIGHT; IT IS NOT...

EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK
     
     
    His name was Dooley Hanks and he was One of Us, by which I
mean that he was partly a paranoiac, partly a schizophrenic, and mostly a nut
with a strong idee fixe, an obsession. His obsession was that someday
he'd find The Sound that he ' d been looking for all his life, or at
least all of his life since twenty years ago, in his teens, when he had
acquired a clarinet and learned how to play it. Truth to tell, he was only an
average musician, but the clarinet was his rod and staff, and it was the
broomstick that enabled him to travel over the face of Earth, on all the continents,
seeking The Sound. Playing a gig here and a gig there, and then, when he was
ahead by a few dollars or pounds or drachmas or rubles he ' d take a
walking tour until his money started to run out, then start for the nearest
city big enough to let him find another gig.
    He didn ' t know what The Sound would sound like,
but he knew that he ' d know it when he heard it. Three times he ' d thought he'd found it. Once, in Australia, the first time he ' d
heard a bull-roarer. Once, in Calcutta, in the sound of a musette played by a
fakir to charm a cobra. And once, west of Nairobi, in the blending of a hyena ' s
laughter with the voice of a lion. But the bull-roarer, on second hearing, was
just a noise; the musette, when he ' d bought it from the fakir for
twenty rupees and had taken it home, had turned out to be only a crude and
raucous type of reed instrument with little range and not even a chromatic
scale; the jungle sounds had resolved themselves finally into simple lion roars
and hyena laughs, not at all The Sound.
    Actually Dooley Hanks had a great and rare talent that could
have meant much more to him than his clarinet, a gift of tongues. He knew
dozens of languages and spoke them all fluently, idiomatically and without
accent. A few weeks in any country was enough for him to pick up the language
and speak it like a native. But he had never tried to cash in on this talent,
and never would. Mediocre player though he was, the clarinet was his love.
    Currently, the language he had just mastered was German,
picked up in three weeks of playing with a combo in a beerstube in
Hannover, West Germany. And the money in his pocket, such as it was, was in
marks. And at the end of a day of hiking, augmented by one fairly long lift in
a Volkswagen, he stood in moonlight on the banks of the Weser River. Wearing
his hiking clothes and with his working clothes, his good suit, in a haversack
on his back. His clarinet case in his hand; he always carried it so, never
trusting it to suitcase, when he used one, or to haversack when he was hiking.
    Driven by a demon, and feeling suddenly an excitement that
must be, that could only be, a hunch, a feeling that at long last he was really
about to find The Sound. He was trembling a little; he'd never had the hunch
this strongly before, not even with the lions and the hyenas, and that had been
the closest.
    But where? Here,