The Grand Wheel

FOUR

Overhead, the sun beat down brilliantly on the extended wings of the shuttle. Below, visible through the vehicle’s windows once they were within the atmosphere, were spread out chessboard squares of cloud, land and sea: the pattern of Earth’s controlled weather areas.

As they descended the chessboard effect was reinforced by the illusion of pieces standing on some of the squares. The pieces were in fact vertical tower cities, complete with coronas and lumpy protruberances, creating the impression of kings and queens, knights and castles.

The shuttle planed down to the big dispersal centre. Here there was no automatic immigration count, as there would have been on, say, Mars, a Legitimacy-dominated world. They walked straight off the shuttle and on to the force network platforms. Soon Scarne’s escorts had procured a vehicle and they were hurtling through the air towards their destination, propelled by the invisible inertial guidelines.

The landscape was mostly forest and empty plain, dotted here and there with vacation lodges. The population was all in the teeming colourful cities.

It said much for the dichotomic nature of human civilization that Earth, the capital planet, was a Wheel world – one where the Grand Wheel’s influence was strong, unchecked by the Legitimacy’s repressive efforts. On Earth the game was the thing; it was the site of the original corruption, the birthplace of the Wheel. Here people spent their lives testing fortune, moving from one ingenious game of chance to another.

A vast pile loomed up and became a blur as the inertial vehicle slammed towards it at ten thousand miles per hour, slowing to a mere sixty in the few seconds before entering the tower city. Briefly they sped through lighted tunnels, changing direction every now and then.

When the inertial beam brought the vehicle to a stop they were in what seemed to be a largish office, or study. An untidy desk was littered with papers, tapes and box files. Around it were chairs, a couch, a service cabinet. One or two paintings, mediocre to moderately good, hung on the walls.

Hervold folded down the front of the small vehicle. They clambered out, looking around them.

‘Where’s Soma?’ Caiman asked, disgruntled.

‘He ain’t here.’ Hervold crossed to the desk, glanced at a notepad there. ‘Well, we delivered, anyway.’

He spoke to Scarne. ‘He’ll be along shortly. Make yourself comfortable.’

He nodded to Caiman. The two of them climbed back into the inertial cab. It withdrew into the tunnel; a facing panel came down, leaving the wall smooth and unbroken. In a few hours they would probably be back on Io.

Suddenly alone, Scarne put down his holdall. He went to the desk. Nothing there gave him any clue.

A door opened behind him. Scarne turned to see a pale-eyed woman, aged about thirty-five, standing in sudden surprise in the doorway.

She recovered herself quickly. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘The man from Io?’ She searched her mind. ‘Professor Scarne.’

‘Yes. Cheyne Scarne.’ He offered his hand. She shook it limply. She was still attractive, Scarne thought, but with the faded, slightly worn look of a woman who has lived perhaps a little too fast. Her face had something appealing, almost touching about it.

‘Welcome to the Make-Out Club,’ she said. ‘I’m Cadence Mellors. We’d better get to know one another, I guess. How long have you been synched?’

‘Synched?’

A frown crossed her face. ‘How long have you been entitled to wear one of these?’ She held up her wrist to show him the dangling gridded wheel, similar to Hervold’s.

He caught her meaning. There was probably a lot of jargon inside the Wheel organization. ‘Only since yesterday, as a matter of fact.’

‘Oh.’ The new realization clouded her features, as if it disappointed her.

‘Who’s this man Soma?’ Scarne asked.

‘Jerry Soma? He’ll be your boss. This is his office. He runs the Make-Out.’ She crossed to the service unit and came back with two glasses, handing one to Scarne. ‘Have some refreshment.’

She clinked her glass against his before they drank. ‘Good health,’ she said. While Scarne merely sipped the malt whisky, she knocked hers straight back. ‘I’d never get through the afternoon without a pick-me-up,’ she explained cheerfully.

The door opened again, admitting a tall, lean man who walked with a slight slouch, head down. He ignored Cheyne and Cadence as he strode to the desk, where he sat down and quickly tapped something out on an integrator.

‘Jerry, this is Professor Scarne,’ Cadence said breathlessly.

Soma didn’t look up until he had finished what he was doing. Then eyes went from Scarne to Cadence and back again, calculatingly, as though suspicious of their being together.

‘Scarne. You got here, then.’ His hand went to a piece of desk equipment, depressing a key. He read out loud from the show plate. ‘Lessee… born in Minnesota, Earth. A ground town.’

‘Not everyone likes to live in a tower,’ Scarne interrupted him.

Soma didn’t seem to hear. ‘Your parents were cyb-clerks. Looks like they tried to give their son a start in life. You attended the University of Oceania, majored with honours in randomatics. Then you got drawn back to source, like a lot of randomaticians are: you became a full-time gambler. Your legit-type parents didn’t like that, did they? Still, it’s a professional hazard… the science of probability originally grew out of games of chance, didn’t it?’

‘I don’t see what my parents have got to do with anything,’ Scarne said stiffly. He hadn’t seen them for over a decade.

‘Ask any psychiatrist. Parents are the first cards you’re dealt. It’s in the Tarot, isn’t it? The Emperor, the Empress… Anyway, you haven’t made very good use of your talent. Drifting around solsystem… no concerted plan of action. Caught between two stools: science and gambling. Several times you’ve been in trouble for bad debts.’

‘I’ve always come out clean,’ Scarne said. He felt uncomfortable, being described in précis in front of the girl.

‘But that’s all you’ve done.’ Soma made a sudden, angry gesture. ‘Hell, if you’d used your abilities you could have had everything. Money, whatever you wanted. Entry into the Wheel. The Wheel really leaves it wide open for people like you – didn’t you know that? But only if you can find your own way. All these years you’ve stayed right there below the fifty-fifty line. You never got into even one weighted game.’

Scarne didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I’m surprised you want to use me now, if I’m such a loser.’

Soma smiled sourly, contemptuously. ‘You’re a failure. But you’re not a loser. Losers we can’t use.’

‘Don’t be too hard on him, Jerry,’ Cadence said tentatively. ‘You’ll make him lose confidence.’

‘He’d better not be that delicate. All right, Scarne, you’re working for us now. For the time being you’re assigned to the Make-Out while we check your performance. This is a special club, not the usual kind. We have special games, games you probably never heard of, new games, special clientèle – private list only, some of them high-ranking Legit officials who’ve got the bug, even. You’ll be learning to play against them.’ He paused. ‘One question I’m told to ask: can you play Kabala?’

Scarne hesitated. ‘I think I probably could. I’ve studied the game, but I’ve never had an opportunity to play it.’

‘The report on you says the same.’ Soma made a note on his pad.

‘Will I be playing Kabala?’

‘Not here. Who knows, maybe Dom will want to try you out.’

Searne’s mind thrilled at mention of the name. Marguerite Dom – chairman of the Grand Wheel! It excited him to think he might actually be that close to what he wanted.

He coughed and spoke in an innocent tone. ‘Is this all you want me for, as a player? I had hoped to be introduced to the planning side of things. After all, I am a highly qualified randomatician.’

‘Is this all we want you for?’ Soma mimicked unpleasantly. He leaned forward, his vulpine face glaring at Scarne. ‘We moved on past the three-card trick a long time ago. Here on Earth there are people whose whole lives are games of chance organized by the Wheel. There are people playing games just to win a chance to get into bigger games. It’s a study of life itself. There are people who don’t even know that they are playing. There are people who have a life-game set up for them before they are even born.’ He leaned back. ‘Don’t tell me it’s belittling to be a Wheel player.’

‘I won’t.’ Soma was a typical Wheel operative, Scarne thought. He had that odd combination that made the Grand Wheel so frightening. Intelligence, ability, even a certain amount of scientific knowledge, but along with it all the whiff of the hoodlum, the sinister influence of past Wheel history.

Maybe the members of the mathematical cadre, academic randomaticians like himself, would be of a different sort, he told himself.

He decided to ask a question of his own. ‘Last night on Io I hit a jackpot on the muggers. I’m curious to know how it was done.’

‘Are you implying the muggers are fixed?’ Soma asked sharply. ‘If so, forget it. All our fermats are inviolably random.’

‘It’s not that,’ Scarne said, skirting clear of the dangerous subject. ‘It was the vision itself… I’d like to know how it was achieved.’

‘What vision?’

‘The vision of probabilities.’

Soma looked puzzled for a moment. Then he glanced at Cadence, waving his hand at her peremptorily. ‘I’ll speak to the professor alone for a moment.’

The girl left. Soma settled himself in his chair again, tilting his face to look Scarne directly in the eye. ‘Tell me about this vision.’

Haltingly, as best he could, Scarne described what had happened to him when he took hold of the mugger handles. Soma listened attentively, asking a question now and then when Scarne’s account became vague.

When Scarne had finished he became silent for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You were supposed to get a brain charge, a few moments of pure pleasure, that’s all. This I’ve never heard of.’

‘Pure pleasure? Is that standard for a jackpot?’

‘Sometimes it’s a lot of money, sometimes it’s some type of brain charge. It may not sound like much; actually pure unadulterated happiness is something the average person never experiences normally. He remembers it all his life. This other thing, though, that’s something else again. I’ll check it out.’ Soma rose to his feet. ‘Cadence will show you to your quarters. Do you need any sleep?’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Rest a couple of hours, anyway. We’ll run through a session tonight.’ Soma’s hand on his shoulder was proprietorial, almost comradely, as he guided Scarne through the doorway. Cadence sat in an adjoining office. She rose to her feet, smiling nervously as Soma handed Scarne over to her; then she led him to a travel cubicle.

The cubicle was the standard means of transport in the tower cities. Zipping through a ubiquitous network of square-sectioned tunnels, up, down, sideways and in ranging curves, it could deliver one to almost any dwelling in the pile. This one did not take them far, however, staying within the precincts of the Make-Out Club.

For only a few seconds Scarne shared the cubicle with the silent presence of the girl. Then she slid open the door panel and they entered a tidy, comfortable room with a bathroom just off it. ‘Well, this is it. Hope you’ll be okay here.’ She moved around the room, turning on sidelights. ‘There’s just about everything you need.’

‘No holbooth,’ Scarne said, looking around.

She waved to an occasional table with an instrument on it. ‘There’s a vidphone, but it only serves the club, I’m afraid.’ She looked apologetic. ‘Jerry doesn’t want you calling anybody outside. Your attention has to be on the job.’

He threw his holdall on the bed and sat down beside it. ‘I couldn’t follow everything Soma was saying. What did he mean by weighted games?’

Her eyes widened. ‘You don’t know much, do you?’

‘Maybe not,’ he said irritably. ‘That’s why I’m asking.’

‘These days the Wheel is like one of those ancient secret societies,’ she told him. ‘Only bigger, grander. They don’t just make money – that’s centuries in the past. The Wheel opens up all kinds of routes for people. But you can only get it by winning, by combining chance and skill. Some people never even guess the possibilities are there. You, for instance.’

‘All right!’ Scarne was exasperated, not liking to be told what a numbskull he was. ‘But what’s a weighted game?’

‘One where the Wheel takes less than a fifty per cent chance of winning. It’s just a way of showing that you’re making progress. That the Wheel sees you as an individual, not merely as one of a statistical mass. The Wheel likes to gamble, too.’

‘But it’s not just money that’s involved?’

‘Not always. There are other things besides money. There are life experiences – the Wheel can provide those. Some people want to change their lives altogether, to become somebody else, somebody completely different. The Wheel can arrange that. There are techniques for changing people’s personalities, giving them new abilities and opening new doors for them. If you can put up the stake, play and win, you can choose what kind of person you’ll be, what kind of life you’ll live. Have you ever known someone disappear without trace? It could be that’s what happened to them.’

‘What would the stake be in such a case?’ Scarne asked tartly.

She shrugged. ‘Or there’s power. It’s possible to win power inside the Wheel, a high-ranking position.’

‘You can win influence in the Wheel hierarchy? In a game of chance?’ Scarne was amazed.

‘It’s like an esoteric society,’ she repeated. ‘On the higher circuits there are grades and degrees; you gain them by winning games of greater and greater difficulty. That’s how rank is decided. Hell, you could have got a long way if you really can play Kabala. Not now, though. I think they want you for something special.’

‘Do you have to be in the Wheel hierarchy already to play these games? Or can you come in direct from outside?’

She smiled. ‘Theoretically it’s possible for an outsider to become a member of the inner council just by playing one game. I can’t imagine that happening. But people do try to gamble their way into the lower circuits. We gain control of quite a few Legit officials that way. You have to be able to put up the stake, you see. You must already have power on the outside. If you lose, you owe that power to the Wheel. But if people win they invariably come over to us – so we can’t really lose, whatever happens.’

‘And the Grand Wheel grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger,’ Scarne said. He deliberated sombrely. ‘Suppose the Wheel had a chance to gamble everything it has gained. Do you reckon they’d do it?’

‘I don’t know. How could it happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. The idea had just come to him, out of the blue. But the question was not meaningless. Centuries ago a gambling organization would not, itself, have been composed of gamblers; it would have preyed on them. Today, he intuited, the case was different. They had made a religion of the thrills of hazard and chance.

‘You’ve been in the Wheel a long time, haven’t you?’ he said suddenly, looking up at her. ‘All your life.’

‘Since I was seventeen.’ She took a cigar from a box on the dresser, and sat on the bed with Scarne while she lit it, blowing out a streamer of aromatic smoke. ‘I was living with a man who was an operative. He brought me in as a club girl. Afterwards I just hung around.’

‘Do you think you did the right thing?’ He looked at her curiously.

‘Sure.’ She glanced at him. ‘Life can be hard. Outside, I don’t think I’d have what it takes to weather the knocks. I wouldn’t understand what I understand now. The Wheel teaches you that everything happens by chance. It’s all random, good or bad. So nothing is really your own fault – you couldn’t have done anything about it. Realizing that makes life easier.’

‘You make it sound as if it hasn’t been all that easy,’ he said cautiously.

‘I like to think of the story of two people meeting on a bridge. Suppose there are two people whose lives would be transformed if they were to meet one another. One day they both cross the same bridge in opposite directions. It’s possible that they will both cross at the same moment, and that something will happen to bring them together. Then people say they were “destined for one another”. But that’s all rubbish. They could miss one another by hours, by minutes or seconds, or they could simply pass by without really noticing one another. Out of millions of potentially miraculous meetings, one or two are bound to come off. It’s the law of averages.’ She shrugged again, a trifle sourly. ‘The rest of us miss our chance.’

‘Some people seem to get more than their fair share of coincidences,’ Scarne pointed out. ‘They’re always meeting on bridges.’

He paused. ‘Do you believe in luck?’

‘Luck? No. It doesn’t exist. There’s just chance. People who believe in luck don’t understand the laws of probability. Chance doesn’t mean everybody gets the same. Everybody gets something different; that’s what makes games possible – that’s why life is a game, isn’t it?’ She gazed at him coolly. ‘Probability alone ensures that there are a few who always have fortunate accidents and a few who always have unfortunate accidents. Then there’s the great mass of us in the mediocre middle. Whereabouts are you?’

Scarne laughed. ‘That’s what’s known as the bell-shaped curve.’

‘So Jerry keeps telling me.’

‘But all gamblers believe in luck.’ He fingered his dangling necklace. ‘Lady. Anyone can tell you it comes in runs. You have to know when you’re on a winning streak and when you’re on a loser. People still touch someone they think has luck, to try to get some of it.’

‘But that’s probability again, isn’t it? They learn how to predict probability.’ She nudged him in the ribs. ‘Come on, Professor, I don’t have to tell you this. You’re the randomatician!’

‘That’s just it,’ he sighed. ‘Randomaticians have never decided whether luck exists or not.’

She had put her finger on the point of difficulty. Luck – if it really was a separate universal entity – didn’t contradict probability; it worked through probability. Mathematically, no one had ever succeeded in separating them – as far as he knew, rumours apart.

It was hard, too, to find empirical evidence for the existence of luck. He thought of the really great players, the ones who seemed to know what the cards were, to intuit it, to feel it without working it out. Was that evidence? No, he decided; it had to be some sort of psychic perception, a rudimentary new faculty. Luck didn’t come from within. It struck from outside: the dazzling glances of Lady, lighting on only a few.

What fantastic power it would mean to be able to manipulate luck, he thought. To be able to achieve anything practically by wishing for it. No wonder the Legitimacy wanted it.

But if Cadence knew anything about the new discovery she was keeping that knowledge well hidden. Scarne believed her scornful disclaimers. Belief in Lady was not deeply ingrained in Wheel people on the whole. Oddly enough, Legitimacy people were more inclined to believe in her. She offered the hope of certainty, a quality they craved.

It was depressing to realize how little he knew about the Wheel, in whose shadow he had lived for so long. Much of what Cadence had said was new to him.

‘The Wheel never took much interest in me before,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m not really their type. More a randomatician than a pure gambler, perhaps. But why do they suddenly want me now?’

‘It isn’t just you. They’re pulling in a lot of people like you, people with your kind of talent.’ She spoke in a low, guarded tone. ‘I think it’s something to do with the war.’

‘The war? What does the Wheel want with the war?’

He recalled Caiman’s bitterness and contempt when they had seen the military officers on the Earth shuttle. But Cadence said nothing further and Scarne sat brooding. Perhaps things weren’t going his way after all.