Excerpt from The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

With these words, the stranger picked up his knight and held it above the pawns. Looking at the board, Tibor noticed a gap in his own ranks. His red queen was missing. Tibor glanced up, and the nobleman anticipated his question. He patted his waistcoat pocket, where the queen was tucked away.

"It would be too easy with the queen."

"But without a queen how am I supposed to ....?"

"That's up to you."

Tibor made his first move. His opponent riposted at once. Tibor made five quick moves before he finally had time to turn his attention to the bread and water. The nobleman was playing an aggressive game. Intent on taking advantage of his superior numbers of chessmen to decimate Tibor's ranks, he deployed a chain of pawns and moved into Tibor's half of the board. But Tibor held his ground. His opponent's pauses for thought grew longer.

"Your thinking is costing me time," protested Tibor, when five minutes had passed by the watch.

"You'll just have to play faster."

And Tibor did play faster: he leaped over the line of white pawns and drove the king into a corner. Five minutes later he could see that he was going to win. His opponent nodded, put his king aside, and sat back on his stool.

"Giving up?" asked Tibor.

"I'm calling a halt. You know I can't win now. So I can make better use of your last five minutes in captivity. Congratulations. You played well. "He offered Tibor his hand. "I'm Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, from Pressburg."

"Tibor Scardanelli, from Provesano."

"Pleased to meet you. Tibor, I want to make you an offer. I must go a little way back in time in my story here: I am in the service of Her Majesty Empress Maria Theresia of Austria and Hungary. She has entrusted a number of tasks to me since I took up my position as a civil servant attached to her court, and I've carried them all out to her complete satisfaction. But other good men could have done them equally successfully. I, however, want to do something out of the ordinary. Something that will raise me higher in her eyes ... and may even make me immortal. Do you follow me?"

Wolfgang von Kempelen waited for Tibor's nod, then went on.

"A few weeks ago the French physicist Pelletier showed off some of his experiments at court: he was playing around with magnetism—hocus-pocus, nails flying through the air, coins apparently moved over a piece of paper by an invisible hand, hair suddenly standing on end, that sort of thing. Dr. Mesmer's already curing people with his knowledge of magnetism, and now along comes this French conjuror with his tricks, wasting my valuable time—and the Empress's too. After the performance Maria Theresia asked me what I thought of Jean Pelletier, and I spoke my mind: I told her that science had already progressed much further, and I myself, even without studying at the Académie like Pelletier, could show her an experiment that would make his act look like mere mumbo-jumbo. That aroused her curiosity, of course. She took me at my word ...and gave me leave of absence from all my duties for six months to prepare this experiment."

"What sort of experiment?"

"I didn't know myself at the time, but I'd already made up my mind to construct some extraordinary kind of machine. I must tell you that I'm not just a civil servant; I also have a good knowledge of mechanics. My original plan was to build the Empress a machine that could speak."

"But that can't be done, "Tibor instinctively protested.

The Baron smiled and shook his head, as if many others before Tibor had already reacted in the same way. "Of course it can be done. I shall build the world a device that speaks as distinctly as a human being, and in every language too. But six months, as I realized, isn't long enough for such a Herculean labor. There just isn't time to get hold of all the materials and test them. And one doesn't keep an empress waiting. So I'm going to build a different sort of machine."  Kempelen took the red queen out of his waistcoat pocket and put her down with the other chessmen. "A chess machine."

Excerpted from The Chess Machine by Robert Loer. Copyright © 2007 by Robert Loer. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.