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In the presence of arbitrary background gauge, gravitational, and antisymmetric tensor fields, the heterotic string may be described by a two-dimensional local field theory. It is conjectured, and verified to a certain approximation, that the conditions on the background fields for this model to have vanishing β function are identical to the equations of motion for the massless fields. In particular, the appearance of the Chern-Simons three-forms in the classical equations of motion is shown to be related to the chiral anomaly in two-dimensional gauge theories.