A Better Mantrap

THE KINGDOM OF O’RYAN

The well-dressed stranger sat down, put his attaché case on the floor, crossed his legs and said, “Is there any insanity in your family?”

I thought immediately of my cousin Trev, who at that very moment was in the next office, squatting inside a packing case lined with aluminium foil and projecting reverent thoughts in the general direction of the star Betelgeuse. Had he finally stepped over the borderline between tolerable nuttiness and criminal lunacy? Was somebody coming to take him away?

“Insanity?” I gave the stranger an indignant stare. “What a ridiculous question! Has anybody filed a complaint?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr Cluny.” He smiled and took a business card from his waistcoat pocket. “I was merely trying to find out if your views on insanity coincide with mine. You see, I divide the insane into only two categories – the unpredictable and the predictable.”

“Do you?”

“Or, to put it another way – the unprofitable and the potentially profitable.”

“Really?” I glanced at the card he had handed me. It read: Ralph D. Wynter, Computer Systems Consultant. The after-effects of the previous night’s binge were impairing my ability to think, but I was practically certain that Wynter wasn’t making any kind of sense. “I’m afraid I don’t quite see …”

“In here,” Wynter said impressively, patting his attaché case, “I have a list of the names and addresses of 400,000 crazy people, and it’s worth a lot of money to you and me.”

“That’s good to know.” I tried to sound mildly interested and cheerful as I withdrew my legs from the kneehole of my desk just in case it became necessary to flee. Wynter was about forty, with steel-rimmed glasses and a look of square-jawed integrity which would have made him a champion used car salesman, but it was becoming obvious that he had a screw loose. What a way to start the day! I was closeted in my office with a genuine noodle, and the only person I could have called upon for help was my cousin Trev, selfstyled apostle of the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse.

Wynter’s eyes twinkled behind curved flakes of glass. “You must be wondering what this is all about. Let me make it clear to you by asking one question – do you ever bet on the horses?”

“What?” I gazed at Wynter with increased perplexity. This was what he called making it clear?

“Do you ever gamble on horse-racing?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“Ah …” I strove for a succinct way to express my feelings about the evils of gambling. “I might lose my money.”

“Good man!” Wynter gave me a delighted grin. “I thought you would have the right attitude, but I wanted to be sure. You see, the crazy people on my list all suffer from the same delusion – they’re convinced it is possible to predict the outcome of a horse race.”

“That is crazy,” I replied, beginning to relax a little as I sensed that Wynter was not completely adrift from reality and that he was in fact working round, albeit in a peculiar manner, to making some kind of a proposition. “If there was any way of knowing the winners in advance the profession of bookmaker would never have arisen.”

“Precisely! I can see we’re going to hit it off just fine.”

“I don’t think so, Mr Wynter,” I said, flipping his business card back across my desk. “I don’t know what all this has to do with computer systems, but I’m a very busy man and I haven’t got time to …”

To make yourself a third of a million dollars in less than a month? Tax free?”

My heart wobbled a couple of times like a machine with a defective mounting, and to gain a bit of leeway I said, “I always pay my taxes.”

That was a lie, of course. The main reason I allowed cousin Trev to stay on in the business was that he was down in the books as receiving a vice-presidential salary of 25,000 dollars a year, whereas he was able to get by quite comfortably on the sixty a week I actually doled out to him. It was tricks like that which enabled me to keep the place on its feet, but even so things were beginning to look pretty bleak and the notion of making a quick killing had a powerful appeal.

Wynter gave me a knowing glance. “What I mean is that the money will be untraceable, and it will be up to you whether you declare it or not.”

“What money? What is this?”

“Before we go into that, you’ve got to understand fully the nature of the insanity which afflicts compulsive gamblers.” Wynter straightened out his legs and hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, becoming expansive as he reached a well-rehearsed part of his spiel. They actually suffer from two delusions, two fantasies which complement and reinforce each other. The first one we’ve already covered; the second follows on logically from the first – namely that within the horse-racing fraternity there is a select group whose members are kept informed of all the hidden variables which affect horses’ performances, and who therefore know the result of every race in advance.

“The members of this group are supposed to be a kind of Ouspenskian élite, and the idea that they exist comforts the gambler and prevents him from crashing into the stone wall of reality when the horse he expected to win comes in fourth and costs him a lot of money. His calculations were based on the form book and were correct as far as they went, you see, but the Big Boys knew better because they had access to inside information. It’s like a religion – but in place of a Messiah the gambler dreams of a benign Big Boy who will take a special liking to him and pass on crumbs of his esoteric knowledge.

“There’s no denying the power of the dream. I’ve seen a crowded bar emptied in thirty seconds because somebody came in and gave a tip straight from the quote horse’s mouth unquote. It doesn’t matter how shabby and unlikely the tipster may be, it doesn’t even matter for the moment that the whole principle of exclusiveness is being violated – every punter there gets the feeling that he has at last been let in on something and he scuttles off to bet his rent money. Even when the horse loses, as it always does, his faith in the omniscience of the Big Boys isn’t shaken – he realizes he has allowed himself to be deceived by a false prophet and is being punished accordingly.”

“It really is pathetic,” I said, ‘but I still don’t …” I broke off as Wynter leaned forward, eyes flaring whitely, and aimed his index finger at the bridge of my nose.

“You and I are going to make that dream come true for a large group of compulsive gamblers.” Wynter’s voice was vibrant with evangelistic fervour. “And we’re going to charge them an appropriate fee for our services.”

I sneered. “A third of a million!”

“For each of us, after we clear our expenses.”

The mention of expenses set off subliminal alarms in my mind, but by then I was pretty well hooked, the more so because I had guessed the general nature of Wynter’s plan. I’d say that most people have at some stage in their mental development been intrigued by the story about the man who invents chess for the amusement of an ancient king. He refuses the bags of gold offered as payment, and instead asks for one grain of wheat for the first square on the board, two for the second, four for the third and so on, doubling up every time, and the punchline is that by the time they reach the sixty-fourth square all the granaries in the land are unable to cope with the amount of wheat involved. It’s a short step from there to putting that kind of mathematics into reverse and playing around with a dwindling series of numbers, and almost the first notion people come to is that of the seemingly infallible prediction.

I nodded at Wynter’s attaché case and said, “How many names are on your list?”

“Very good, Mr Cluny,” he replied. “I knew we’d hit it off together. I’ve got a total of 400,000 names and addresses.”

“How do you know they’re the right sort of prospects?”

“The United States, Canadian and Quebec governments have been collaborating on a coast-to-coast study of the social consequences of chronic gambling. I was involved with the data storage and retrieval system, and I managed to get a print-out of the master list. It cost me a lot of money to grease the right palms, but I got what I needed.” Wynter picked up his case and opened it, revealing a massive block of closely printed sheets.

I nodded. “What sort of breakdown were you thinking of?”

“Well, I plan to use only four-horse and five-horse races.” He was speaking quickly now, giving the impression of a man who was as much obsessed as any of his prospective victims. “There was a temptation to include a couple of three-horse races to boost the size of the final tiers, but with three horses it would look too easy. There wouldn’t be the same build-up of credibility.”

“I’m with you. Go on.”

“We start with a four-horse race and send letters to everybody on the list, introducing them to an exclusive new tipster service which is so confident of its results that it won’t introduce any charges for the service until it has given four consecutive winners. That should convince them of our honesty and integrity. Naturally, we divide the list into four blocks of 100,000 and tip a different horse to each. When the race is over, regardless of the result, we’ll have 100,000 punters on whom we have created an initial good impression, and we forget about the others.

“We take a five-horse race next and do the same kind of thing, leaving us with 20,000 hopefuls to whom we’ve given two winners. Another four-horse job boils it down to 5,000, and another one gives us 1,250 clients who have had four straight winners and by this time are convinced they’ve got a hot line to the Secret Masters of the Turf – and that’s when we start introducing a modest fee. I’d say two hundred bucks each for the next tip, giving us a first rake-off of 250,000 dollars.”

“Two hundred each,” I said, slightly taken aback. “That’s stinging them a bit, isn’t it?”

“Nonsense! The way these people bet they’ll have picked up a bundle on their four winners. That’s the beauty of the scheme – nobody really gets hurt.” Wynter paused to dab flecks of froth from the corners of his mouth. “A five-horse race will reduce them to 250 clients who have had five straight winners, and that’s where we advise them that we’re being pressured by various powerful organizations who resent our helping ordinary gamblers and want us to suspend our operation.”

“Huh?”

“That is vital to the whole plan. It’s psychology, you see. We build up their hopes and dreams, then make as though we’re going to dash the cup from their lips. They’ll see the pearly gates swinging shut in their faces and they’ll do anything to squeeze through the gap. So we tell them that, in view of the great personal risk to ourselves, it’s no longer worth carrying on with the service unless we can interest really dedicated gamblers who are prepared to pay 2,000 dollars a time for guaranteed winners.”

“Two grand!” I began to get a cold feeling in my stomach.

Think big, man. The people on my list are reasonably well heeled and they have compulsions. The higher the threshold figure we name the more determined they’ll be to get in on it. That’s the way they think. For a brief golden hour in their lives they’ll have known what it is like to be on the same side as the all-powerful Big Boys, and that’s a feeling they won’t want to relinquish. I guarantee they’ll come through with the money – and that will give us a second rake-off of 500,000 dollars. If it’s a five-horse race they’ll be reduced to fifty people who have had six straight winners and who will be putty in our hands. I wouldn’t want to take undue advantage, of course, so if we stick to the agreed two grand per tip we’ll pick off a third haul of 100,000. By then we’ll be down to about ten people and well into a diminishing returns situation, but it means that sending out a mere ten letters will net us a useful 20,000 dollars. Add that lot up.”

“I already did – it comes to 870,000.” I swallowed to ease the dryness in my mouth. “But these figures are too good, aren’t they? It can’t work out as perfect as that.”

“Oh, there’s bound to be a certain amount of wastage and falling by the wayside,” Wynter said unconcernedly, “but I’ve only been outlining the basics of the idea. In the actual event I would expect to revive clients who had four winners followed by one loser. Tell them it was the fault of the opposition and offer to let them have future tips at half price. That should bring in more than enough to compensate for erosion in the various tiers and leave some over to offset against expenses.”

Expenses. There was that word again. I mulled it over for a moment and said, “I get the feeling you didn’t pick me purely at random.”

“Of course not! I had to find somebody who controlled a mailing services outfit. It had to be big enough to cope with the first mailing shot, but small enough to keep a lot of nosy employees from screwing things up. It also had to be a place that wasn’t doing too well – so that the owner would be properly receptive to a good idea.”

“Hold it right there,” I snapped, squaring my shoulders. “What gave you the idea that … ?”

He silenced me by holding up one hand, palm outwards, and putting on a world-weary smile. “Don’t waste our time with all that stuff, Desmond. I’ve done my homework very thoroughly and I know exactly what sort of financial shape you’re in. Okay?”

“Then you should have costed the operation. Even with throwing in the paper at trade price, and fully automatic printing and folding and franking, the cost of 400,000 copies in the mail – even allowing for the new fax mail rates – is going to be … is going to be …” My voice faded to an undignified croak as I doodled some figures on my blotter.

“I can let you have eight thou in cash to prove I’m on the level, but that cleans me out. You’ll have to rack up enough credit to cover the rest of your investment. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t like it.”

“It’s only for a couple of weeks, then you can cream it back off the top – before you pick up your third of a million or more. What more do you want?”

“A drink,” I said firmly, producing a bottle of Tucker’s Choice from the bottom drawer of my desk. Wynter nodded when I offered him a glass and we sat for another hour sipping bourbon and discussing practical details of the scheme and going over the letters he had already drafted. Sometime during that hour – partly because of the booze, partly because I was desperate for money, but mainly because I was impressed by the thoroughness of Wynter’s pre-planning – I became totally committed to the adventure in applied mathematics.

After all, I told myself, even if it doesn’t work out exactly as planned, we’re bound to get some money back. It won’t be the end of the world.

Hah!

It was almost eleven when I went into Trev’s office and found he was still sitting in his thought projector. He is a very large young man, one of those people who insist on wearing T-shirts and tight jeans on figures which ought to be decently swathed. His face is huge, round and placid, unmarked by earthly cares, covered with the kind of fine golden fuzz that girls shave off their legs. His blue eyes look humorous when there is nothing to laugh at, and gravely concerned when there is nothing to worry about.

“Trev, what are you doing in here at this time?” I said, trying to control my annoyance.

“Having my mid-morning break,” he replied, twinkling.

“How can you have a break before you’ve even started?” I pointed in the direction of the shop. “There isn’t a single machine running out there.”

His eyes clouded with sorrow, and for a moment I thought I had stirred his conscience. I should have known better.

“Aw, Des, don’t tell me you’ve been at the liquor already.” He heaved himself up out of his foil-lined box, a laborious operation which had to be carried out in stages. “Have you any idea what that stuff does to your body?”

“As long as it doesn’t get like yours …”

“Unkind, Des,” he said, but azure gleams showed he was unaffected by the insult. He picked up and swigged from a bottle of his favourite drink, a revolting locally-produced concoction known as Blissfizz, which was pink, opaque and loaded with sugar. It reminded me of calamine lotion, but Trev had been addicted to it since childhood and drank nothing else – a habit which no doubt had a lot to do with his excessive girth.

I decided to try sarcasm. “What’s the good word from Betelgeuse? Have they given you clearance to do some work today, or are you going to be tied up with more important things?”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Des.” He fixed me with a worried stare. “The emissaries from the Kingdom of Orion are going to land real soon now and put their true believers in charge of the world. I’ll probably be in control of the whole continent of North America, but even I won’t be able to save you if you go around scoffing like that.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Trev extended three fingers of his right hand and made a priestly gesture. “May the Supreme Nizam forgive you, Des. I think maybe I ought to intercede with him …”

He made as if to climb back into his box, but I grabbed him and pushed his pudgy bulk into a chair. “Not now,” I said, deciding to steer the conversation on to more constructive lines. “I’ve got some important work here. Charity work.”

“You?” Trev took a generous slug of Blissfizz and gave me a look which seemed almost worldly. “Charity work?”

“I’m a very charitable person, Trev, but lack of money has always prevented me from helping people the way I wanted to.”

“You’d have plenty of money if you didn’t blow so much on rotgut whisky and fast cars and painted women,” Trev accused. “There’ll be none of that sort of thing when I’m in control.”

Only the need to be diplomatic prevented me from planting one on his downy chin. During our discussions Ralph Wynter and I had foreseen that some people on the sucker list would make a few discreet enquiries before entrusting us with their cash. For that reason our letters had to be signed by a real person, one with an unblemished record and whose name could be looked up in various directories. Trev was listed as company vice-president, had never been in any kind of trouble and nobody from out of town would have any reason to suspect he was a fully-fledged lollipop farmer – all of which made him ideal for our purpose. Wynter had been dubious before learning that Trev was so naive that he signed all the tax returns I prepared for him without ever reading what they said. He had left it to me to enlist Trev’s aid without giving him any real idea of what we were doing.

“I want to atone for all my past sins,” I said, laying on as much sincerity as I could. “I’ve thought of a great way of helping thousands of needy people – but I can’t do it without your help.”

Trev shook his head. “I don’t know, Des. I’m pretty tied up with my meditation programme and the UFO observations and the meetings of the Orion Society.”

“This won’t take up any of your free time, and …” I paused as I got a sudden inspiration, “it would be a way of proving to me that you really do get thought messages from Betelgeuse. I might become a convert.”

“Hey! That would be great, Des.” A faraway look appeared in his eyes. “If you learned to play the harp I could make you one of the praise leaders in my Grand Temple.”

“We can talk about all that after I’ve shown myself to be worthy,” I said quickly, bringing out an advance list of the runners in the second race at Hillston, a meeting due to be held in three days’ time, and set it in his lap. “Have a look at that.”

He studied the sheet briefly then handed it back to me, his moonlike face registering intense disapproval. “You know what I think about gambling, Des. It’s evil.”

“I know that gambling is evil, but what I’m proposing has nothing to do with gambling.” I got closer to him by pulling up an empty Blissfizz crate and straddling it. “Listen, Trev, with the superhuman psychic powers you get from the Supreme Nizam you could easily predict which of these four horses is going to win, couldn’t you? There’d be no element of chance involved.”

He pulled back from me, affronted. “You really do think I’m simple, don’t you, Des? You think I’m a moron.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trying to get me to prostitute my divine gifts so that you can make money on the horses.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said, relieved by the confirmation that he really was simple. “I swear to you that I wouldn’t place a single penny on a horse. I’ve never suffered from the gambling fever, but others aren’t so fortunate. I’ve got a list of thousands upon thousands of poor wretches whose lives have been ruined because they fell into the clutches of the bookmakers. They’re destitute, Trev – but you can help them. You can be their salvation.”

“How?”

“Don’t you see? If we tip them the names of a few certain winners they can get their money back from the bloodsuckers. Can’t you see the beauty and the lightness of it? We can turn the bookmakers’ own weapons against them – make the punishment fit the crime. We might even put some of them out of business.”

“I like it,” Trev mused, a messianic glitter appearing in his blue orbs. “And you promise you won’t take personal advantage of my predictions?”

“Cross my heart!” I gave the list of runners back to him. “Do your stuff, Trev. Help me fight a holy war against the syndicates.”

“I’ll do it. And do you know what, Des? Next time I communicate with Betelgeuse I’m going to give you the full credit for coming up with this idea.”

“Virtue is its own reward,” I said modestly. “Now, what about this horse?”

He frowned at the list for a full minute, took a thoughtful pull at his bottle of Blissfizz, then shook his head and heaved himself to his feet. My fears that he was going to confess failure were dispelled when he opened a cupboard and took out an instrument I recognized as his UFO detector. This was a small telescope from which he had removed the object lens and in its place had jammed an old-fashioned radio tube. I had looked into it once out of curiosity and had seen nothing but an oily blur of light which split into concentric rings when I moved the telescope’s sections – a phenomenon which apparently was enough to convince Trev that he was peering into other planes of existence. He put the UFO detector to his eye, moved the other end of the instrument up and down my list a couple of times and gave a satisfied grunt.

“That’s it,” he stated confidently. “Number four. Realrock Isle.”

“Wonderful! We’re in business.” I brought Trev into my office and brandished in front of him the introductory letter from inside information inc., which was the name Wynter had dreamed up for our phoney tipster organization. As I had expected, Trev did not even bother to scan the lines of print. His aversion to reading had in the past led to some monumental goof-offs in the mailing service, but now it was proving useful. He was standing there with a look of dreamy fulfilment all over his peach-fuzzed countenance when I handed him a pen.

He stared down at it. “What’s this for?”

“I want you to sign the letter, Trev. It’s only right that you should get all the credit. You and the Supreme Nizam.”

“I’m beginning to think I misjudged you,” he said, taking the pen. “What about putting in the name of the horse?”

“Don’t worry – I’ll strip that in at the bottom before we go to press.”

Trev nodded, satisfied, poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth the way he always did when he was writing, and signed his name with a flourish. Trevor Q. Botley. I whisked the letter away from under his hand, led him to the door and told him he was free to return to his thought projector if he wanted to bring Betelgeuse up to date on all that had been happening. Unbelievably, he shook his head.

“I’d rather get to work,” he announced. “This is no time for sitting around. It’s a time for action.”

“Action?” A sense of unreality stole over me. “Are you feeling all right?”

“This is important work, Des – not one of your trivial money-grubbing commercial exercises. In a project like this you’ll find me zealous, industrious and untiring. You’ll see.”

Coming from anybody else those words would have been disquieting – I would have much preferred to carry out the mailing shot alone and unobserved – but in the case of Trev I was not unduly worried. When it comes to serious work he has an attention span of about three seconds and a lizard-like tendency to remain perfectly motionless for hours at a time. I led the way into the shop and got down to work immediately.

Up until around 1990 the reproducing of 400,000 copies of even a single-page letter would have been a task of considerable magnitude, but the advent of gamma ray multi-sheet printing changed all that. Simply by placing the master copy on a block of treated paper and giving it a short burst of non-divergent radiation I was able to print 5,000 good copies at a time. It took me fifteen minutes to prepare the first 100,000 copies of the letter, those bearing the name of the horse Trev had selected. I passed them over to him for feeding through the Mailomat IV, the lightning-fast robot which began printing each with a name and address from Wynter’s list, folding, sealing, franking and stacking them in well-secured bundles.

True to form, Trev fell into a near-cataleptic trance in the middle of the operation. That gave me ample opportunity to peel the name of his horse off the master, strip in another one and print a further 100,000 copies. At that point Trev, apparently deciding he had had enough of being zealous, industrious and untiring, ambled off to his office to have his customary lunch of a quart of Blissfizz and a bag of nauseating confections known as Coco-blobs. It was a full hour before he returned, and by then I had printed two more 100,000 lots with the names of the remaining horses and was running them through the Mailomat.

He blinked with surprise as he glanced around the shop and saw the stage the job had reached. “Say, you’ve really been going some.”

“A strange force seemed to be driving me onwards.”

“I’m proud of you, Des,” he said. “And I want you to know you’ll get your due reward for all this work.”

I gave him a suitably enigmatic smile.

There now had to be a three-day break in the proceedings, time in which to let the letters reach their destinations and be studied in 400,000 homes.

As there was nothing I could do until the chosen race at Hillston had been run, I worked hard for the rest of the day on routine contracts and that night – partly as a celebration, partly to relieve nervous stress – blitzed a couple of my favourite clubs with all the vigour of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun rolled into one. Next morning I woke up beside a sweet young thing called Kristine, who demonstrated her essential good nature by giving me a couple of Superseltzers and remaining silent while I dressed and tottered off to work.

I got to the office shortly after eight and was brewing coffee when, to my astonishment, Trev opened the door and rolled in with a news sheet tucked under his arm. He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt on which he had painted the major stars of Orion. As usual the constellation was somewhat lacking in grandeur because the central part of it was lost in the fold beneath his squabby breasts, but his round face was more animated than I had ever seen it.

“Boy, you sure look a mess,” he said, inspecting me with a show of concern.

“Never mind how I look. What brought you in so early?”

Trev unfolded his paper. “I’ve been making my selection for today,” he said importantly, “and it’s Lightburn in the …”

“Hold it!” I snatched the paper from his grasp and dropped it into a waste bin. “There isn’t going to be any selection today.”

“But I thought we were going to rob the bookies to help the poor.”

“We are, Trev, we are – but not every day! We’ve got to allow time for the poor to collect on the first bet so that they’ll have money for the next one.” Looking at Trev’s perplexed expression I thought of a way to explain the dwindling scale of our charity work. “Besides, what we did yesterday cost me a lot of hard cash – I’ll have to concentrate on some ordinary work for a while, then see how many more needy people we can help. The list probably won’t be as big next time.”

“Sorry, Des,” he said, looking contrite. I didn’t realize the way it was.”

“It’s all right.” I patted him on the shoulder and eased him out of the office. “Just you leave the boring old practical details to me. All you’ve got to do is come up with the winners when we need them. Okay?”

“You can count on me.” He lumbered away amid a creaking of floorboards, leaving me staring thoughtfully into the coffee percolator. One thing I had not anticipated was my cousin actually taking an interest in what was going on in the shop – even when running off leaflets for his own Orion Society he was wrapped up in daydreams so much that he would let any kind of mistake go by. On one lovely occasion he had issued a news sheet, typed up by a semi-literate temp, which had referred all the way through to the Kingdom of O’Ryan. To me it had looked better that way, more appropriate somehow, but apparently a few of the faithful were pretty annoyed about the blunder and had threatened to depose Trev.

Later in the day, when Ralph Wynter called in with a draft of the second message from inside information inc., I told him I was thinking of cutting Trev out of the operation and simply stripping in his signature on future letters. Surprisingly, he was against the idea.

“What we’re doing isn’t actually against the law,” he said, staring meaningfully through his steel rims, ‘but there are large sums of money involved. Some people might get angry and there might be some embarrassing investigations and publicity. It might be advisable for us to take a long vacation.”

“And leave Trev to face the music? I don’t know if I could do that.”

“Nobody’s going to touch him. From what you told me, he’s got the best defence in the world – his innocence. How could anybody even think of leaning on a simpleton who genuinely believed he was a holy crusader?”

I nodded, impressed by the slippery quality of Wynter’s mind, and we went on to talk about more important things. Trev’s behaviour continued to worry me though. Something about the project, as he understood it, seemed to have caught his imagination and his interest was still as high as ever when Monday – the day of the selected race – came round.

On several occasions when I went into his office I found him sitting in his thought box running his UFO detector up and down racing sheets, pausing only to munch a Coco-blob. Right up to the start of the race I was fretting about what I was going to say to him if, as was likely to happen, the ‘wrong’ horse came in first, and so it was with some trepidation that I called up the afternoon’s sports pages on the Cathodata set in my office. I needn’t have worried, however – Realrock Isle had walked it by ten lengths. A combination of relief and unexpected excitement sent me sprinting in to give Trev the news.

“Naturally Realrock Isle won,” he said in a mild voice, arching his eyebrows at me. “What did you expect?”

Only then did I remember the rules of our game. “Of course, I knew it had to win if that’s what the thought voices told you,” I mumbled apologetically, doing my best to cover the slip. “It’s just that when you’re not used to this sort of thing it seems sort of … miraculous.”

“You’ve so much to learn,” he sighed, passing me a handful of racing sheets upon which one horse in every event had been underlined in red crayon. “Take your pick from that lot.”

“Thanks, Trev.” I flicked through the sheets and was pleased to see that he had covered the race Wynter and I had selected for our next mailing – a five-horse affair the following Thursday at Argent Heights. This time the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse, speaking through the medium of a defunct thermionic valve shoved in the end of a Woolworth telescope, had decreed that a nag called Wheatgerm would be first past the post. I got Trev to sign the second letter and, leaving him to his meditations, went out to the shop and started to work.

This time I only had to deal with the 100,000 people from the original list who had been given the winner, and it was a comparatively easy job to split them into five lots of 20,000 and tip a separate horse to each lot. Just to be on the safe side in case Trev came out to do a little work, I put spare letters tipping Wheatgerm on top of each pile – making it look as though the entire mailing said the same thing – and only removed them as the piles were going into the Mailomat. The precaution proved unnecessary, because it was almost quitting time before Trev roused himself and by then all 100,000 letters had been loaded into the pneumotube and were well on their various ways.

I began to feel easier in my mind about how the operation was shaping up, and celebrated by going out on the town that night with an exotic young lovely who was a snake dancer at Lord Jake’s Revue Bar. She ate enough to choke one of her pet pythons, but I had no qualms about the expense – I could feel it in my bones that all my troubles, financial and otherwise, would soon be a thing of the past.

The first faint intimation that my skeleton is a lousy fortune teller came on Thursday afternoon when Wheatgerm romped home so far ahead of the rest of the field that he was nearly placed in the previous race.

Judging by the odds he came in at the bookmakers were as surprised as I was, so I did a slightly peculiar and uncharacteristic thing. I knew that Trev had no cosmic forces working for him, and that it isn’t really remarkable for somebody to pick two winners in a row, and yet I was unable to resist digging out the handful of racing sheets he had marked and comparing them with the Cathodata results. The way it worked out, he had chosen some thirty horses and out of that number precisely three, including Wheatgerm, had been winners.

To me that figure seemed about average for somebody making blind stabs with a pin, or even with an old radio tube, so I damped down the sparks of the crazy idea that had begun to glimmer at the back of my mind and began to think about the next phase of the project. We were down to 20,000 people who had been given two winners and now the mechanical side of the operation was becoming child’s play. Trev made things easier by spending more and more time in his thought projector while he pored over racing sheets, and once again I didn’t even have to ask him to pick a horse in our next four-horse race. He had chosen an animal called Prismatic and as it was the odds-on favourite I wasn’t too surprised when it won fairly comfortably. Trev received the news with a calm shrug and handed me another bunch of marked-up sheets, including one on which he had underlined a horse called Foreign Exchange in our next four-horse race.

Pleased with the way we had settled into an undemanding routine, I split the remaining list of 5,000 clients into four equal lots, tipped each lot a different horse and had the whole mailing completed in less than half an hour. Past experience had taught me to be extra careful when everything in the garden seems lovely, but I was so bemused by the nearness of the first pay-off that I let myself be lulled into that famous false sense of security, and was totally unprepared for trouble when it came.

I had spent an entire evening at my apartment with Ralph Wynter, splitting a bottle of Tucker’s Choice and perfecting the text of the letter we were going to send to our reduced roll of 1,250 lucky people who – when the fourth race was run – would have received advice of four straight winners. Even though I say so myself it was a masterpiece of psychological manipulation, one which played on their quasi-religious hopes so accurately that they were bound to fall over themselves in their rush to mail us their money. With the serious business completed, Ralph had called up a couple of well-endowed working girls he was friendly with, and we had spent a few hours sampling what a more poetic person might have called the garden of earthly delights.

I think I was still wearing a self-satisfied smile when I got into the office next morning and began to tidy up some routine business matters. Hard work is a good way to pass the time. The race we were interested in was at noon, and within seconds of its completion the result was flashed up on my Cathodata screen. A horse called Lamplighter had won by two lengths. Trev’s selection, Foreign Exchange, had come in last, but all that did was prove that his previous record of success had been what I always knew it to be – pure dumb luck. Whistling cheerfully, I isolated the list of 1,250 people who had been tipped Lamplighter and went into the shop to send them the offers they wouldn’t be able to refuse. Visions of a promised land of dollar green pastures were shimmering before my eyes.

So intent was I on the good work that I almost keeled over with shock when, a few minutes later, a crash of breaking glass followed by a tremulous and unearthly moan drowned out the faint whir of the machinery.

I spun round, dry-mouthed, and saw Trev standing in the doorway of my office. To be more precise, his great bulbous form was slumped against the jamb and one hand was pressed to the narrow margin between his eyebrows and hairline that he regards as a forehead. His face was pale as he lurched away from the door and crunched towards me through the fragments of the Blissfizz bottle he had dropped. I backed off from him, fearful that his mind had finally snapped.

“It’s all over, Des,” he said in a hollow voice. I’m undone. The Supreme Nizam has abandoned me.”

“He’d never do a thing like that,” I soothed, wondering what in hell had happened. “Not to you.”

He rolled his eyes, horribly. “I must have transgressed, Des. That’s the only explanation.”

I was still trying to figure out what explained what when my gaze was drawn to a point behind Trev, to the electronic glow emanating from my office which told me I had forgotten to switch off the Cathodata set. That explained everything. It was obvious that Trev had wandered in there and somehow had concentrated on the screen long enough to discover his prediction for that day’s race had been wrong – and, to say the least of it, he was reacting badly. He was swaying around like a balloon man anchored only by his shoes and there was a real danger of some of my best equipment being toppled and damaged. Cursing my carelessness, I fought to steady him up, but it was like trying to wrestle a zeppelin full of water.

“I’m unworthy, Des,” he groaned. “I’m going to be cast into the outer darkness. Woe is me.”

Staggering around under each surge of his weight, I strove desperately for some way out of the jam and almost sobbed with relief when inspiration came. “Why are you saying these things, Trev? Would the Supreme Nizam keep giving you winners if he thought you were unworthy?”

He steadied up slightly. “But I got it wrong. I saw it on the screen.”

“Saw what?” I queried. “Lamplighter came in first – just like you predicted.”

“Huh?” A flicker of hope appeared in his eyes. “I… I was nearly sure I marked a different horse. Foreign something or other.”

“Perhaps that’s what you meant to do, Trev, but you’re forgetting that Another was guiding your hand.” I groped around in the inside pocket of my jacket, carefully counting sample letters from the last mailing, and whipped out one I knew to bear Lamplighter’s name. “I mean, it’s down here in black and white. You can’t argue with that, can you?”

“You’re right,” he whispered, a look of joy appearing in his eyes. He let go of me and hurried away, but not before I saw that he was on the verge of tears.

I felt a twinge of guilt over having conned him and made up my mind to give him a bonus, maybe fifty or a hundred bucks, when the big money came in. The first thing I did, however, was to search out and destroy all the racing sheets he had marked, then I unplugged the Cathodata and removed its fuse to forestall any further trouble. After that I completed the mailing and, having made sure that Trev wasn’t within earshot, telephoned Wynter to let him know that the gravy train was about to arrive.

Actually, I saw very little of Trev during the next few days – he seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his thought projector – and that was just as well because the flood of mail which began to arrive was, of course, addressed to him. And it’s no exaggeration to describe it as a flood!

I have to confess that right up to the moment it happened I didn’t really believe the scheme would pay off according to plan. Deep down inside me there had lingered a fragment of scepticism which sneered that it was all too good to be true – but I was wrong. The loot came winging from all over the continent. Well over 200,000 dollars arrived in the space of three days, all of it in the form of cash or open postal drafts as we had specified in the letter. Among the bills there was a surprising number of sincere little thank-you notes from people who were moved by Trev’s apparent philanthropy, but when we had separated those out and burned them Wynter and I were left with great heaps of beautiful, glorious, untraceable money. We felt like lying down and rolling in it.

After a hectic bout of celebrations we sent the usual spread of tips on a five-horse race to almost 1,250 paid-up clients, and I took a little time off to buy a new car and restock my wardrobe with the classiest gear I could find. When the race had been run we then had close on 250 people who were convinced that their benefactor – Trevor Q. Botley – was the greatest thing since silent cornflakes, and to them was sent the letter which revealed that the syndicate bosses were turning nasty and that in view of the huge risks involved the only way inside information inc. could stay in business was by upping the ante to two grand a throw. To the thousand disappointed clients who had been tipped the losing horses we sent an entirely different letter which apologized for the mistake, hinting that powerful enemies had been the cause, and offering the next guaranteed winner for a mere hundred dollars.

Once again I began to experience sneaking doubts – after all, two thousand dollars is a lot of money – but I needn’t have worried. Nearly half-a-million promptly arrived in registered envelopes, most of which also contained embarrassingly fervent letters of gratitude. Even Ralph Wynter was surprised by the response we got to the auxiliary missive. It seemed that many of our clients were quite prepared to forgive Trev for one little slip, and to prove it they coughed up to the tune of an extra 70,000 bucks. For days as we went through the lucrative final phase of the operation I wandered around in a dreamy euphoria, giggling aloud every now and then, and trying to understand why I had ever bothered to work when making real money was so ridiculously easy.

During that period Trev went on signing letters without reading them, and making predictions about horse races without even bothering to check the results. Apparently his traumatic moment of doubt and subsequent renewal of belief had attuned him more closely than ever to his ethereal friends in the residential section of Betelgeuse. It made him less aware of what was going on in real life. I was glad about that because his success rate continued to be abysmal and it would have been awkward for us had he found out what a rotten prophet he actually was.

The daily ritual of sorting the mail and dividing the spoil meant that Wynter was now spending quite a bit of time in the office, and inevitably there came the point at which I had to introduce him to Trev. My cousin put on a performance which under other circumstances would have embarrassed me to death.

“Forsake your worldly ways,” he said to Wynter, ignoring his outstretched hand. “The emissaries from the Kingdom of Orion are coming. They’ll be here soon.”

“Is that a fact?” Wynter winked at me. “How soon?”

“Real soon.” Trev spoke with priestly assurance. “The Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse has decreed it.”

“Yes, but how soon?”

Trev stared upwards for a moment, apparently seeking guidance from a light fixture in the ceiling. “Ten o’clock Thursday morning.”

“That’s nice,” Wynter chuckled. “He’ll be just in time for coffee.”

Trev gave him a look of mingled disdain and pity, turned on his heel and strode out of the office. He slammed the door so hard the pressure wave almost made my ears pop.

“You were right about that guy,” Wynter said, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and making an idiot face. Perhaps I had some remnant of family feeling for Trev, but Wynter’s remark and the way he delivered it annoyed me. Also there had been a strange glint in Trev’s baby blue eyes, a hint of intensity I had never seen before which made me wonder what was going on inside his head.

“You shouldn’t have pinned him down to an exact time like that,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of popping his bubble.”

Wynter shrugged carelessly. “Relax, Desmond. Nobody can pop that kind of bubble.”

For some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on the comment gave me a chilly feeling, as though somebody had opened a door nearby and admitted a coiling snake of cold air.

By the time we got near the final greatly reduced stakes, Wynter and I had settled into a routine. Every morning about nine we picked up the mail, took it into my office, locked the door and began the pleasurable task of opening the envelopes and sorting and dividing the money. Had we used the simplified scheme there would have been very little mail to deal with at that stage, but Wynter’s idea for ‘reviving’ clients who had been given only one loser was still yielding fair returns, and Thursday morning produced sizable stacks of money, postal drafts and letters of worshipful gratitude.

“This is okay, but I’m packing it in tomorrow,” Wynter announced, polishing his steel rims with a tissue. “It’s vacation time and I can feel Rio calling. You should pull out as well.”

“Expecting trouble?”

He tapped a pile of letters. “Some of the people who went down are a bit churned up about it, but I don’t think they’re a real threat. The ones I’m worried about are the characters who want to come round here and kiss your cousin’s feet. They could descend on us at any time – and that’s something I hadn’t planned for.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Perhaps I ought to…’

I never got round to finishing the sentence because at that moment I became aware of something very odd that was taking place right before my eyes. My desk faces the door of the office, only a few paces from it, and from where I sat I could see with perfect crystal clarity that the aluminium shootbolt was sliding back – all by itself! I had fitted that bolt personally and knew there was no way of moving it from the far side of the door, so the sight of it quietly slipping back through its guides did peculiar things to my stomach. Wynter noticed the startled expression on my face, but before I could say anything to him the door was flung open and Trev came striding into the room. He was wearing his best Orion T-shirt, the one on which he had sewed the gold epaulettes, and was brandishing his UFO detector.

“The appointed hour is nigh,” he boomed. “It’s almost ten o’clock, and time for you to repent and… and…” His voice faltered as his gaze was drawn towards the desk and took in the heaps of envelopes, letters and money.

“Why didn’t you lock the door?” Wynter said accusingly.

“I did,” I whispered, but there was no time to explain about the self-propelled bolt for Trev was advancing on me with anger and reproach in his eyes. He looked bigger than ever, oddly majestic.

“Des, Des,” he said, eyes burning me like blue lasers, “why have you committed this terrible sin? You gave me your word.”

“This isn’t what it looks like,” I replied hurriedly, trying to calm him down. “Ralph and I have started this little mail order business. It’s nothing to do with the horses. We sell… we sell…”

“Bibles,” Wynter put in.

I nodded emphatically. “Bibles.”

A story like that would have satisfied the old familiar Trev, but this new and rather disquieting one snatched up a handful of letters and subjected them to intense scrutiny. “You’re lying to me, Des,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me all along. These people believe in me, and you’ve been lying to me all along. These people believe in me, and you’ve been taking money from them. I’m disappointed in you.”

“I’ve had enough of this crap.” Wynter stood up and motioned for me to do the same. “Let’s throw the clown out of here.”

“Good idea,” I said, suddenly realizing how dumb I had been to let somebody like Trev knock me off balance. Wynter and I were closing in on him when the second very strange thing occurred.

“Do not move!” Trev commanded, raising his UFO detector as though it were some kind of talisman, and on the instant of his speaking I was gripped by a sudden and complete paralysis. Unable to believe what was taking place, I frantically willed myself to move forward and nothing happened – I was frozen into the immobility of a statue. Wynter was similarly petrified, locked in midstride, and judging by the expression on his face he was very unhappy about it.

For a moment Trev seemed almost as surprised as we were. His gaze shuttled between our faces and the UFO detector a few times, and I saw a look of wondering surmise appear in his eyes. He raised the detector again and, with his lips working silently, pointed it at one of my filing cabinets. The cabinet immediately turned into a stack of Blissfizz crates.

“It has happened,” Trev breathed. “It’s all coming to pass. The Supreme Nizam is rewarding the faithful.” A faint halo sprang into being around his head as he waved the modified telescope again and turned the money on my desk into a small heap of withered leaves. Wynter gave a strangled moan.

At that point the evidence in favour of Trev’s weird theories about the Kingdom of Orion was becoming pretty convincing, but in spite of everything I still couldn’t accept them. Fantastic things, miraculous things, were happening all round me – but there had to be a better explanation than that the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse was dropping in to visit my simple-minded cousin. I sometimes get flashes of intuition, and at that moment my mind suddenly seized on the last word Trev had uttered – faithful. Faith, somebody once said, can move mountains. Trev had always had faith, lots of it, but not enough to make any difference to anything in the material world, so the inference was that he had obtained reinforcements. And I – God help me – had been instrumental in bringing up those reinforcements.

Thanks to my trickery and manipulation of him, Trev was genuinely convinced he could predict the future, and furthermore there were many people throughout the country who also believed in him because they had had incontrovertible ‘proof’ of his powers. Wynter had stressed the religious element in the make-up of the compulsive gambler, and indeed we had relied on it to make the scheme work. I have never been mystically inclined, but in the moment of stress I could see clearly that the faith and fervour of our remaining clients was forming a reservoir of psychic power which Trev could tap at will. He had become a miracle-worker. In a way it was almost surprising that his transformation had not occurred at an earlier stage in the game, but perhaps the mental force of 5,000 people who are fairly well convinced of something is less than that of fifty who are total believers.

The insight I had received was a terrifying one, but it provided some sort of explanation for what was going on – and it also showed me a possible way out of the situation. The key factor was Trev’s own faith in his powers, and if I had built that faith up I should also be able to tear it down and restore him to his former state of ineffectual goofiness.

“I have a confession to make,” I said to Trev, relieved to find he had left me the power of speech. “Ralph and I have been making money out of this thing with the horses. We’ve been duping people all along. It was what we set out to do, right from the beginning.”

Trev eyed me with sorrow. “You’re a broken reed, Des.”

I nodded. “The point is, Trev, that we even duped you. Nearly all the predictions you made about the races were wrong. I fooled you into thinking you were getting them right.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, giving me a calm and pitying smile. “You showed me the letters yourself. And why are the people I helped still sending you their money?”

“But those are only a fraction of the number we started out with.”

“That’s right,” Wynter chimed in, apparently sensing what I was trying to do. “You see, my whole plan was based on starting off with a huge…”

“Silence!” There was a look of Mosaic anger on Trev’s round face as he turned on Wynter. “You are the one who corrupted my cousin, you are the serpent – and you shall be punished accordingly.”

He raised his UFO detector, waved it once – and Wynter disappeared. For a second I thought he had simply been dematerialized, then I saw there was a tiny speckled snake wriggling on the floor right where he had been standing. I stared down at it in dismay. Trev, revealing a ruthless streak I didn’t even know he possessed, completed Wynter’s punishment by raising one of his boots and stamping hard on the snake, converting it into a revolting mess.

“My God,” I quavered. This is terrible.”

“You have nothing to fear from me,” Trev said. “You are a weak man, Des, prey to all the desires of the flesh, but you have a hidden core of goodness. I have forgiven you for your sins and will give you a place by my side as soon as… Well, as soon as…” His words tailed away uncertainly.

I had been staring at him for several nervous seconds before it dawned on me that he had no idea what to do next, that he was all dressed up with supernatural powers and epaulettes on his T-shirt, and had nowhere to go. My gaze followed his to the clock on the office wall. The time was ten after ten, which meant that the Supreme Nizam was late for his appointment. Trev gnawed his lower lip and I could see he was having difficulty in reconciling himself with the notion that a Lord of Orion could have human faults such as tardiness.

“How about that?” I said, seizing the chance. “It’s way after ten and there hasn’t been any cosmic visitation. Can’t you see what this means, Trev? It proves…”

“Clam up,” Trev said irritably and, having seen what he could do to people who displeased him, I clammed up. He brooded for a moment, his face looking more and more like that of the Trev I knew, and I began to hope against hope that the bubble of his beliefs had been punctured. I studied his halo, trying to decide if it had shrunk or grown dimmer. It may have been my imagination at work, but it seemed to me that his aura really was on the wane.

I was beginning to feel quite optimistic about my chances of escaping from him when he got one of his inspirations. He raised the UFO detector to his eye and aimed it at the ceiling. There was a moment of silence and then, to my consternation, a look of inhuman elation spread over his chubby features. He snapped the telescope shut, almost dislodging the radio tube from the end of it, and turned to me.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said, beaming. I don’t know what came over me, Des. All that stuff about the Supreme Nizam coming here – it was pure nonsense.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I soothed, hardly able to credit my luck. “Anybody can make a little mistake.”

Trev shook his head. “It wasn’t a little mistake, Des – I got the message completely wrong. You see, the Supreme Nizam wants me to go to him!”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, my voice rising into a bleat of alarm as new vistas of peril opened up in my mind.

“I don’t have a minute.” Trev raised his arms and now he really was huge and awesome. “My work on Earth has ended. The time has come for me to lead the faithful to the Kingdom of Orion.”

I made an attempt to pull his arms down again, but I was too late.

The floor gave a sickening lurch, the office walls dissolved and blew away like mist, and all at once I was standing with Trev at the centre of a circular landscape about the size of a football field. It was a surrealistic landscape, dotted with ornate fountains and artificial-looking trees covered with small tufts of white. Beyond the perimeter was a hard blackness, and when I turned to my left I could see the blue-white disk of the Earth floating on a background of stars. I moaned aloud as it came to me that I was out in space and travelling through the interplanetary void in a kind of environmental bubble conjured up by Trev. I fell on my knees before him and tugged at the hem of his T-shirt.

“Have mercy on me,” I pleaded. “I don’t want to go to Betelgeuse – please send me back to Earth.”

“Can’t do that,” he said in a voice full of compassion. “Earth is no more.”

He made a casual gesture with his UFO detector as he spoke, and the Earth winked out of existence.

I cringed away from him. “Wha… what have you done, Trev? All those people…”

“Not all of them.” He gave me one of his terrifying indulgent smiles. “The harvest of the faithful is safely gathered.”

At that moment I became aware that there were about fifty people wandering around the circumscribed Dali landscape, their faces blanked out with shock. I recognized several as members of Trev’s Orion Society, and could only surmise that the rest were ‘all-winner’ clients of inside information inc. The whole affair must have been even more traumatic for them than it had been for me, but I didn’t get time to sympathize with their plight.

Trev waved his telescope and suddenly all of us were dressed in unisex garments which took the form of ankle-length robes. I looked down at the unfamiliar object which had materialized in my hands and saw that it was a small harp.

“Come, my children,” Trev called in a voice of thunder. “Come and sing the praises of the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse, who has called us to our rightful places in the Kingdom of Orion. The journey will take many years, but do not worry – there is an abundance of food and drink. Now, sing!”

Raising our voices in unison – because there is no way to disobey Trev’s commands – and with me plinking dispiritedly on the harp, we began to sing.

That was three years ago and we’ve been travelling through space ever since. I’ve become as fat as a hippo through lack of exercise and having to get all my nourishment from the Coco-blob trees and the Blissfizz fountains. With Trev in complete control of things here inside his space bubble life is, as you might imagine, hellishly boring – no booze, no decent food, no sex, and we spend sixteen hours a day singing the bloody awful hymns he composes. I don’t mind telling you, the only thing that keeps me from going mad is trying to figure out what is going to happen when we finally get to Betelgeuse.