The Grand Wheel

SIXTEEN

There had been changes made at the camp site when the travel globe set him down on the desert again. The Disk of Hyke had returned, accompanied by a Legitimacy battle-cruiser. Legitimacy troops patrolled both camps; all Wheel personnel were under armed guard.

As soon as he made his appearance Scarne was picked up. He found himself facing Hakandra, Shane’s stern-faced guardian.

‘What happened to your arm?’ the official asked, glancing at the stump which now had solidified as efficiently as if it had been cauterized. Scarne still felt no more than a dull ache from it.

‘I had an accident. I’ll get a new one grafted on as soon as there’s time.’

Hakandra nodded. ‘I’ll get someone to attend to it. Where’s Dom?’

‘He’s dead. Probably.’

‘Probably? What do you mean by that?’

‘He’s dead,’ Scarne said with finality.

‘I see… well, we’ll take a full statement from you later. We already know something of why the Wheel came to the Cave. Illicit contacts with an alien race. Were you a party to that?’

‘Not really. Dom kept it to himself. It’s over now, anyway.’ Scarne wanted, if possible, to extricate himself from the whole question of galactic involvement. Otherwise he would never be free of the Legitimacy.

The SIS would want a report out of him, too. He would have to try to convince them that the luck equations didn’t work. Dom’s demise was probably a chilling enough lesson.

Hakandra was speaking again. ‘You’ve heard the latest news? We’re going to have to leave here. There have been major losses in the big battle at the far end of the Cave. The positions we’ve set up won’t hold the Hadranics back now. They’ll sweep through the Cave and into our star arm.’ He looked grave and distraught. Pityingly he looked at Shane, who sat in the corner of the tent; the two were hardly ever separated. ‘All our work here has been for nothing.’

‘What about the randomness machine?’

‘We’ll take it with us. But it can’t be of any use to us now.’

‘It can help you. Make another test run with it.’

The Legitimacy official looked at him closely. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘I know something. You haven’t discovered the right settings for it, that’s all. How to control it.’ He hesitated. ‘I met the people who built it when I was up on – where we went.’

‘You’re talking nonsense.’

Scarne shrugged.

Hakandra turned to Shane. ‘What are they doing with the machine now?’

‘I don’t know.’

On a sudden decision Hakandra marched over to the laboratory tent. Within, there was the desultory air of a project that has failed but is still officially operational. Scarne saw Haskand, the Wheel scientist, talking to Wishom, his Legitimacy counterpart.

‘What are these settings?’ Wishom asked him when Hakandra had made representations for him.

But Scarne didn’t know. In a technical sense, he understood nothing of the machine and the equipment the research team was using on it.

He walked up to the control rig, and beckoned Shane to him. ‘Put the power through,’ he told the technicians. ‘I’ll make the adjustments.’

‘It’s not safe!’ Hakandra snapped.

Wishom waved his hand. ‘Why not? We’ve been working in the dark. He can’t do anything more risky than we did. If he does something silly, I’ll simply cut off the power.’ He nodded to Scarne. ‘I expect you’re a lunatic, but… what do you think, Haskand?’

‘Where is the Chairman?’ Haskand demanded sharply of Scarne.

Scarne gave him a hard look. ‘I have what you gave him,’ he said quietly.

It took a moment for Haskand to absorb that. Then he nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s his field, in a sense… let’s see what happens.’

Scarne drew Shane close to him. ‘I want you to help me,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me when it feels right… you know what I mean.’

‘No I don’t. Why are you so vague? You have to use hard data.’

Scarne ignored the Legitimacy jargon. As the generator began to hum he held his intended image clearly in mind and manipulated the controls at random: power-level, waveform… a web of energy flowed into the alien machine.

Shane neither moaned, screamed or doubled up, as was his wont during these experiments. ‘That feels different from before,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Sort of… smooth. It’s flowing.’

‘Flowing where, Shane?’

‘Flowing out – out there.’ Shane waved his hands over his head, unsure of what he meant.

Scarne sent his fingers over the switches again. Shane frowned, then gave a grimace of pain. ‘No, that’s all wrong, that won’t work,’ he complained.

‘Well, let’s see—’ Scarne once more amended the controls, with a glimmering of an idea what to aim for this time.

And then it struck home to him, too. He knew he had hit it, and Lady was hovering over him, smiling down on him, her hand on his shoulder.

He closed his eyes. ‘Thank you, Lady,’ he whispered.

‘It’s there,’ Shane murmured. His eyes were withdrawn, concentrating on the feeling inside him. ‘That’s it. It’s beautiful. It works.’

‘It works?’ Wishom queried in a cracked voice, rushing up to them. ‘What works? What’s happening?’

‘You’ll find out in a few hours,’ Scarne said. He saw no point in explaining it; it sounded too fantastic.

Even he would eagerly await the reports, to make sure he hadn’t simply imagined the picture that had blazed in his mind when the machine hit its resonant level. Suns exploding, thousands of suns.

Every single sun at the far end of the Cave had gone nova. With luck, a good part of the assembled Hadranic forces would be caught in the holocaust. At any rate, the Hadranics would now regard the Cave as too dangerous to operate in, and therefore it was effectively impassable.

Eventually they would overcome their caution, or else find another attack route, but the Legitimacy now had a valuable breathing space. Later, perhaps he would explode more suns, perhaps all the suns in the Cave.

If, that was, he had not already used up all his luck in such a titanic act. He exulted. It was like being a god oneself! Then he checked himself, remembering the hubris that had brought about the downfall of Marguerite Dom, Chairman of the Grand Wheel which was now under new management.

Lady had dealt mankind a new hand, he reflected. He wondered what difference it was going to make to civilization now that the Galactic Wheel held all its gambling concessions.

And it came into his mind that the people who really knew about the luck deity did not see her as a smiling woman, but as a male figure, stern and retributive. That could make a difference, too.

He turned to Hakandra. ‘There’s another kind of machine in one of the Wheel tents,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll take any notice, but if I were you I’d have it destroyed.’

‘Oh? Why is that?’

Scarne smiled. ‘There’s too much luck attached to it.’