John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, "Sure, sure, anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I been talking to them for two months and they don't do shit about it."
"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you two refuse to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable either. Now it seems to me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you're arguing about stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can't seize air rights. You can't touch each other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me your typewriter and we'll get this down."
So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel might do if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on our wing.
--November--
Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'? "Fred, sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it." "What's the situation?"
"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"
"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"
Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center, two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen-- the "new guy"-- and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and snapped his fingers incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God's sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.
At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through the inch-thick rule b k, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses. Surrounding the tables were twenty other garners who had come to observe the carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior, thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!
"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle parted so Fred Fine could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he cursed to himself. "Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalingrad and Moscow, which were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.