The Grand Wheel

SIX

Luna was an old, quaint, well-worn environment favoured by the wealthy and successful. Everything there seemed to be hundreds of years old. The sun-burnished towns and cities were luxuriously ancient, built in a rococo style fashionable half a millennium ago, and the planet’s dry, dead surface was criss-crossed with an antiquated tracked transport system.

As before, Scarne travelled with a two-man escort. The conservationist-minded local government had steadfastly refused to install a modern atmosphere plant, and the shuttle descended through vacuum until entering the landing bay at Tycho, the oldest and largest of Luna’s cities.

Tycho was not their destination, however; they left the shuttle and walked through concourses until coming to the track station adjoining the landing bay. Scarne found time to revel in the magnificence of the station’s baroque, cavernous interior, which glowed in the unique lunar light that fell through the high vaulted roof. Visiting Luna always made him feel good.

His escort guided him through the bustling main area to a private carriage waiting in a small siding, tucked away under the lower edge of the cascading roof. Within, the carriage was plush and luxurious, upholstered with purple velvet. Immediately they had seated themselves the vehicle surged into motion. It rattled through the unlighted tunnel carved through the wall of Tycho crater, and when they emerged it was like a revelation, for suddenly they were in the midst of the arid landscape and Luna’s hard merciless sunlight.

For about half an hour the track vehicle sped through the Lunar terrain. Then it climbed a range of hills, began a descent to the plain below, and the private manse of Marguerite Dom, chairman of the Grand Wheel, came in sight. Scarne studied it as they approached. He saw a style of architecture that was pure indulgence: a wandering maze of gables, domes and belvederes. Incongruous, he thought, that an airless medium should harbour so unfunctional a building.

The track carriage slowed, coasted into the shadow of an overhanging pantile roof, and shuffled through an airlock. It halted in what appeared to be a reception foyer. The doors clicked back; they stepped out.

The two Wheel men seemed nervous and tense. This is probably their Mecca, Scarne thought.

An automatic glass door opened; a tall negro entered the foyer. His teeth flashed in a polite smile.

‘Mr Scarne?’

‘Here he is,’ said one of the Wheel men. ‘Delivered as per schedule.’

The negro spoke to them, pointed to a door at the further end. ‘Go through there and take some refreshment. You will be informed.’ He turned to Scarne. ‘This way, if you please.’

Scarne followed him through the glass door. They paused while the floor sank beneath their feet. When it steadied they were standing on a circular mosaic which resembled the centre of a three-dimensional spider’s web. Passages, trellised arbours, crooked stairways both ascending and descending, radiated from it in all directions. It was an architectural fancy, a folly.

The negro turned to him again. ‘We are ready to see you now. But perhaps the journey has fatigued you. Would you prefer to rest, to refresh yourself?’

Scarne steeled his nerve. ‘No. Now will be fine.’

They walked down a corridor into the deepening silence of the rambling house. Finally the negro opened a timber door and entered a wood-panelled room, glancing at Scarne to follow.

Five men, of all races and ages – one of them was scarcely more than a boy – sat around a horseshoe-shaped table. A sixth place was empty, while yet another chair, evidently intended for Scarne, stood in the gap of the horseshoe.

Here he was, facing the Grand Wheel’s mathematical cadre at last – and he felt like an amateur. These people were all special, he realized; some of them prodigies, probably, gathered from all over man-inhabited space. Wordlessly he lowered himself into the solitary chair, aware that the interrogators were subjecting him to a chilling scrutiny. The tall negro, lank and self-controlled, walked around the table and took up the vacant sixth place. Somehow it took Scarne by surprise to learn that he, too, was a cadre member.

‘Now,’ the negro said, speaking in a deep, well-modulated voice, ‘tell us about this jackpot.’

Self-consciously Scarne began slowly to repeat the account he had given to Jerry Soma. They stopped him before he got beyond the third sentence.

His new listeners were of different mettle from the club manager. Merely verbal descriptions did not satisfy them at all. They wanted mathematics, the language of pure thought. The inquisition became arcane, almost bizarre, as they forced Scarne to sharpen and re-define every item of his experiences, probing and testing every concept he put forward as he plunged, in memory, back into what had happened while he held the handles of the mugger, and later, while he was under the identity machine.

When the account was finally finished they put him to yet another examination. They fired prodigious equations at him from all directions, giving him but scant seconds to solve them in his head. They were testing out the limits of his ability.

After an hour of the hardest work Scarne had ever known, it was over. He was asked to wait in an adjoining room.

He left, and found himself in a long, narrow, musty-smelling annexe lined with shelves. It was given a vault-like appearance by the deep alcoves which punctuated the walls at intervals, and which also contained nothing but shelves, all loaded with files and papers. He was, apparently, in some sort of ill-ordered data library.

Bending his ear to the door he had just closed, he heard the murmur of voices. He crossed to one of the shelves, pulled out a file, opened it and scanned its contents with frantic speed. It contained a dissertation on some particularly abstruse point in randomatics.

Replacing it, he looked at another and then another. This was a storeroom of papers in randomatics, a kind of cellar, probably, of past and discarded work emanating from the cadre which now was discussing him in the next room.

His heart beat rapidly. He dashed up and down the annexe, looking wildly at the shelves. But there was no ordering system, evidently, nothing to tell him where he might look to find a clue to the rumoured luck equations.

He calmed down. It was highly unlikely that any reference to the equations – presuming they existed at all – would be found here, he reasoned. Glancing through the files, he finally settled on one whose meaning, at a cursory inspection, baffled even him. It was a prime example of rarefied speculative thought, containing no explanatory text at all. It might, he decided, keep an average mathematician guessing for a while. Taking a pen from his breast pocket he photographed several pages with its hidden vid recorder.

He was still handling the file when the door opened and the tall negro walked in. Calmly Scarne replaced it on the shelf and turned to meet him.

The cadre randomatician gave no sign that he saw anything improper in Scarne’s behaviour. ‘We’ve discussed your story, Mr Scarne,’ he said. ‘We found it quite interesting.’

‘But what does it mean?’

‘Your experience can only have been subjective, of course. We think you have a type of mind which has a particularly intuitive grasp of mathematical relations. The jackpot shot must have impinged on the faculty in some way, inducing an hallucination. It’s possible. The incident with the identity machine would be a hangover from that. In many ways you have a fortunate combination of qualities. You will make a good gamesman.’

The negro hesitated, became reflective. ‘You have what we pure theoreticians lack, in fact.’

‘Really? I’ve always considered myself too much of a mathematician, not enough of a player,’ Scarne said dubiously.

A faint smile came to the other’s lips. ‘Jerry Soma’s assessment shows you to be quite talented. You may be just the type of person we are looking for – but that’s by the way, for now.’ He straightened, self-consciously formal again. ‘The Chairman would be pleased if you would join him at breakfast, which he is about to take.’

The invitation was so sudden that it sent a shock of anticipation through Scarne. ‘Yes, of course. I would be honoured,’ he murmured.

The sound of a string quartet, weaving a melancholy pattern of melody, was the first impression Scarne received as his guide opened the door to Marguerite Dom’s breakfast-room. The cadre member did not follow him in; Scarne heard the door close softly behind him. He was alone with one of the most powerful men – in some eyes the most powerful man – in human-held space.

The Wheel leader rose from a wrought-iron chair, one of two facing one another across a low table, to greet him. He wore a long soft jacket of green velvet; a foot-long cigarette holder dangled from one hand. ‘So pleased to meet you, Mr Scarne. Did you have a good journey? I do hope my couriers were courteous…’ He waved his hand, causing the music to stop, and pointed negligently to the table. ‘Shall we be seated?’

Obediently Scarne took the chair opposite the grand master.

Dom’s frame was spare, his height medium. His sparse black hair, slicked and combed back, failed to cover a balding pate. He had been born at a time when there had been a brief fashion for naming one’s children after members of the opposite sex – though usually with ancient-sounding names. Consequently Sol was replete with middle-aged male Marguerites, Pamelas and Elkas, and with female Arthurs, Yuris and Dwights. It so happened that Dom suited his first name perfectly. He was that ripe combination, the thoroughly masculine, camp, decadent male. His movements were almost feminine. When he spoke, an ingratiating and deceptively defensive smile was apt to come to his features, and the modulations of his voice were more exaggerated than those of the average man, giving the impression of a neurotic factor in his make-up.

Although he seemed a far cry from the tough, solid types who had built up the Wheel centuries ago, Scarne needed to contemplate his face for scant moments to realize that there was only one vital difference between him and those legendary creators of the syndicate. As a rule, those men had not been addicted to the practices which brought them their wealth. But Dom’s face, with its creases and strain lines, its deep intensive eyes, told Scarne that he belonged to a highly specific human type: the compulsive gambler. It was a strong face: his was not a weakness, or a compulsion to lose, as it was with many. It was a need to win.

A butler appeared and began serving coffee, steak and eggs. ‘I hear you have some unusual tendencies,’ Dom said lightly. ‘Glimpses into ultimate reality and so forth.’ His mouth creased into a tight smile, as though with nervousness or sarcasm.

‘Your cadre people assure me it was hallucinatory,’ Scarne said.

‘Oh, they always put everything down to delusion. But we know it’s not that simple, don’t we? After all, everything you saw is known scientifically. We know that matter is constructed of waves, and that these waves are waves of probability. We also know that below this quantum level there is another level, a level of pure randomness where no physical laws obtain. The material world floats on that, so to speak. But then it’s all in the Tarot, isn’t it?’ Dom flicked his hand; a card appeared in it, and he passed it to Scarne.

Scarne bent his head to study the card. It was number Ten, the Wheel of Fortune. The card was of traditional design; an upright wheel mounted in a frame which was supported by boats, or pontoons, floating on water.

‘Somewhat cursory symbolism, but apt,’ Dom was saying. ‘In substance, that represents the content of your first vision, does it not?’

Scarne felt slightly dizzy. Dom was right. The picture on the card seemed bland and ordinary – until one put one’s mind to work on it. The wheel stood for chance as it was manifested in the physical universe – in human life, for instance. But it floated on the waters of a greater randomness, the one he had perceived in his ‘black-out’ in the gaming-house.

‘Water symbolizes the foundation of the universe in several ancient mythologies,’ Dom continued. ‘Because it is fluid and formless, the ancients thought it a perfect symbol of randomness. In Hindu mythology, the world is supported by a series of animals standing on one another’s backs, all ultimately carried by a turtle swimming in an infinite sea. Sometimes the turtle is a fish, but again swimming in the sea of chaos. Charming, don’t you think?’

‘But not very scientific.’ Scarne laid down the card and attempted to tackle the food he had been given, feeling not at all hungry.

Dom chuckled. ‘But what is science studying, after all? Don’t be put off by the mathematical cadre. The gods are greater than science – but purely scientific types can never understand that, can they? All they can do is calculate.’

‘You believe in the gods, then?’

‘Not as persons, of course. Not as actual entities.’

It was the standard reply an educated person gave – often covering up for a more primitive acceptance of the gambler’s pantheon.

‘I’m glad you’re not superstitious,’ Scarne said.

Dom flicked his hand again, producing the card numbered zero: the Fool. ‘Do I look like one of these?’

‘No.’

Scarne felt awkward. He was aware that Dom was watching him, that behind all his charm and camaraderie a cold shrewdness was at work.

‘I’ve gained the impression that I’m being groomed for a special project,’ he said boldly.

‘A game,’ Dom said, a veiled look coming over his face. ‘We’re setting up a new, very important game.’

‘Who’s playing?’

Dom laughed.

Having eaten all he could, Scarne pushed aside his plate. ‘Chairman, perhaps you can clear up a conundrum for me. The very same night I was introduced into the Wheel I hit a mugger jackpot. Now, I’ve made a simple calculation about that. The odds against hitting a jackpot are high enough, but the odds of its coinciding with another equally significant event… do you follow me? They are unbelievable. The gods may, as you say, be greater than science, but why should the gods be interested in me? I’m forced to the conclusion that your people rigged the mugger.’

‘Out of the question. Whatever you got, you got by chance.’

‘But it just doesn’t make sense.’

Dom laughed again. ‘Then perhaps we have learned to propitiate Lady! You certainly were very lucky. And we do employ the very best mathematicians…’

Dom continued to chuckle, and Scarne made no reply. He had gone as far as he dared in sounding the chairman out. Dom’s replies were meant to be cryptic, of course – he had no idea that Scarne had ever heard of the luck equations.

But his answer was a final confirmation that luck was an authentic scientific principle, a universal quantity – and that the Wheel had derived equations that brought it within reach!

Scarne wondered who was responsible for this awesome feat. The people who had just questioned him? And how was it done? Imagine a high-tension charge of luck, steered on to one individual so as to make him hit a billions-to-one shot… it was incredible.

As the butler cleared away the breakfast things, Dom produced a fresh Tarot pack. ‘Well how about a game? I believe you have never played Kabala…’

Kabala, it was said, if played properly, brought about a change of consciousness in the players. Scarne, already brain-weary from his interrogation, found the contest with Dom equally an ordeal. The game required a unique combination of calculation and intuition, and he was forced to think so fast, to extend his mind so far, that at times he did feel almost as though he were on some drug-induced high. But it was only the kind of mental exhilaration that came from prolonged effort.

Perhaps the reward of changed consciousness came only to the winner. Because Dom, of course, won. Two hours later the Wheel master sat back silently, eyes glazed, drawing meditatively on his cigarette holder and blowing out puffs of smoke.

‘You play well, Scarne,’ he said at length. ‘One day, perhaps, you will be able to beat me.’

Scarne felt that he had passed the final test. Whatever the scheme was that was afoot, he was in it.

‘How did you like it?’ Dom murmured. ‘Your first game?’

‘It was taxing – but satisfying. Very satisfying. To tell you the truth I’ve never been sure if I was equal to it.’ Scarne, in fact, felt drained.

Dom inclined his head in an abbreviated nod. ‘It sorts out the men from the boys, all right. If you can play Kabala you can play anything – and that’s an established fact. That’s why we need men like you.’

Dom rose, pushing away his chair and stretching, so that he seemed to loom over Scarne. ‘I want to show you something,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

Full of anticipation, Scarne followed. Dom led him to even deeper levels of the manse. They went down in an elevator (Scarne experiencing an embarrassed, privileged nervousness to be sharing the cubicle with so unique a personage), and then down a winding staircase to a concrete cellar.

The denouement was not what he had expected. At one end of the cellar, fed by dozens of pipes and cables and surrounded by humming machinery, stood a glass tank filled either with a liquid or a dense gas – it was hard to tell which. It provided a murky, brownish-purple environment which was inhabited by a flapping, aquatic-looking shape.

Dom stepped before the tank and gazed into it with an ironic expression. ‘The sequence of events that have led to your coming here began with the arrival in Sol of this creature,’ he told Scarne. ‘We call him Pendragon – just a name, no particular significance. As for his origin, it hardly matters; he’s been everywhere. He really is travelled – like all hustlers.’ Dom was chuckling, as though at some joke known to himself.

Scarne peered closer. The creature, resembling no alien race that Scarne could recall, raised itself off the floor of the tank and began surging to and fro as though aware of their presence.

‘What is he, a guest or a prisoner?’

‘He’d like to leave. But he’s too useful to us, in fact we’re most grateful to him. Let me tell you the story. As I said, Pendragon is a hustler – an interstellar gambler preying on less skilled races. He came to Solsystem expecting to clean up from the ignorant natives – but he came unstuck.’ Dom nodded with self-satisfaction. ‘He underestimated the Grand Wheel, so he’s getting what the hustler usually gets: no consideration.’

Swimming to one side of the tank, Pendragon seized in an undulating flapper what looked like a rod-mike, the flesh of his limb enclosing it completely. A voice, at once resonant and hissing, came from an external speaker.

‘I deserve consideration now! I have done what you asked! Release me!’

The demand reminded Scarne of his own angry remonstrances with Magdan. Dom’s reply, too, followed the same form. ‘We’ll free you on completion of the arrangement, Pendragon,’ he said. ‘Not before.’

Pendragon let go the rod-mike and retreated sullenly to the rear of the tank.

‘What is this arrangement?’ Scarne enquired. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

For an answer Dom stepped to a pedestal and operated a small control unit. The adjoining wall of the cellar suddenly vanished, eradicated by a floor-to-ceiling hologram.

‘You may ask,’ Dom said, ‘since you will have to know eventually, provided you understand that your life will be conditional upon your respecting my confidence.’

The hologram was a map of the galaxy, including, like off-shore islands, the Magellanic Clouds. Further to one side, in an inset, was a smaller map of the Andromeda galaxy. Scarne studied the layout briefly. The minute portion controlled by human civilization was clearly marked, as was the territory of the Hadranics – the latter’s expansionist tendency being shown by thrusting arrows. The map contained other data, too: wavering coloured lines, stars indexed according to a code at the bottom of the hologram.

‘Little of this information is definite,’ Dom said. ‘We’ve gleaned it, one way and another, from Pendragon. It locates some of the civilizations in unexplored parts of the galaxy, and also some particular contact points.’

‘Contact points?’

Dom was staring raptly at the map. ‘The world, it emerges, is bigger than any of us had thought,’ he murmured. ‘There are wheels within wheels, Scarne. Wheels within wheels, worlds within worlds.’

He turned his back to the map, his manner suddenly brisker. ‘And gambling, it is clear, is by no means a preoccupation unique to humanity. Most intelligent life has a taste for it – yet one more indication, one might think, that contingency and hazard, rather than formal laws, are what lie at the root of existence. Not only that, but there is gambling on a very large scale – larger than anything our civilization can offer.’

He glanced at Scarne. ‘Given these circumstances, it shouldn’t take you long to guess that there exists an organization analogous to our own, but operating on a galactic scale, or greater: a syndicate whose operations cover thousands, if not millions, of species.’

This colossal, totally new thought was spoken so blandly that Scarne could scarcely believe he was taking in the import of Dom’s words. Yet Dom had no reason to lie. Scarne looked again at the creature in the tank… there was the evidence.

‘Oddly enough this super-syndicate also calls itself the Wheel,’ Dom ruminated, ‘possibly for the same reason – the language of symbols might well turn out to be universal. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Or perhaps it’s to represent the wheel of the galaxy. As yet we’re not sure whether they are restricted to this galaxy alone, or if they actually originate from outside. That’s why we’ve tried to get Pendragon to tell us something about Andromeda, but his knowledge of that quarter is sketchy.’

‘Then your game,’ Scarne said quietly, ‘is with them.’

‘Yes!’ Dom’s eyes became lustrous. ‘A game with the Galactic Wheel – that’s what this is all about. With the help of Pendragon we eventually made contact. Now we’re on the verge of setting something up.’

‘Are the Hadranics anything to do with this? I heard this training programme has something to do with the war.’

Dom shook his head. ‘We’re not interested in them. We’re thinking on a bigger scale. We aren’t the sort of people to stay huddled in our own little corner, collecting pennies, now we know what’s going on out there in the wider world. If this Galactic Wheel exists we want a piece of it. I think we’ve got what it takes to get it.’

‘How do you know you can play your way into this galactic thing?’ Scarne asked. ‘You might just stay punters. How intelligent are they? How much experience have they got? Do you even know any of this?’

Dom moved his shoulders in a sinuous motion. ‘They could be millions of years old for all we know,’ he admitted. ‘But we’ve a thousand years of experience ourselves. I think we’re out of the kindergarten stage. After all, Pendragon made the mistake of underestimating us.’ He leaned closer. ‘I taught him to play Kabala, you know. Offered him his freedom if he could beat me. But he’s quite hopeless at it. Can barely play at all.’

There was a sudden surge of movement at the back of the tank. The fluid roiled and became congested. A bunch of plastic plaques, oblong in shape, were flung towards them to splatter against the near wall of the tank, spinning and tumbling in the murk, displaying the coloured Tarot figures etched on them: Pendragon’s special pack.

‘And if this game comes off,’ Scarne said, ‘what will the stakes be?’

Dom’s expression became veiled. The hint of a smile played at the corners of his mouth. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the big question.’

After Scarne had left for Luna, Marguerite Dom received a briefer, rarer visitor.

Historically the interview was unique, though since it was held in secret it would remain unrecorded. Never before had a meeting taken place between the Chairman of the Grand Wheel and the Premier of the Legitimacy. And even now it would have seemed unthinkable, to the public mind, that the Premier should have been the one to make the move, to request the meeting, and to travel to the demesne of Marguerite Dom.

Dom reposed himself in his main lounge to await the Premier’s arrival, permitting himself feelings neither of triumph nor of curiosity. When Premier Mheert entered, he found him to be a fair copy of the personality profile he had already studied: a white-haired man of about Dom’s age, with flinty blue eyes, a strong, prominent nose, and a face that displayed an obdurate, committed character.

They wasted no time in dispensing pleasantries. Mheert, his subdued tone expressing how burdensome he found the necessity for his visit, told Dom that the war situation was grave. Every effort would be needed to beat back the Hadranics. War production would have to be expanded. For this, industry would have to be re-directed. Otherwise there was a possibility of total military collapse.

The Legitimacy, regrettably, did not have enough practical power to achieve the necessary rationalization. Too much commercial influence – the huge stock and commodity exchanges, the banks, the commercial houses – was under the aegis of the Grand Wheel. To avert catastrophe, therefore, the Legitimacy had need of an unprecedented co-operation from the Wheel.

Dom listened to this argument coolly, and when the Premier had finished he fitted another purple cigarette into his long holder, blowing out fragrant streamers. The Grand Wheel was not a government, he pointed out, and had none of the responsibilities of a government. The conduct of the war was, entirely and absolutely, a matter for the Legitimacy.

Mheert was shocked and indignant at his refusal. ‘Do you not understand the consequences? We have our backs to the wall. We are all in this together!’

Dom made a proposal of his own. ‘You’re asking us to bail you out because you can’t handle this thing on your own,’ he said. ‘You’re asking me, in effect, to save humanity for you. All right, we’ll co-operate on the industrial side – if you can meet the price. Something reciprocal and condign.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Mheert suspiciously.

‘The Legitimacy becomes our property.’

Mheert snorted, aghast. ‘You want to own mankind!’

‘Yes!’ Dom’s eyes blazed. ‘If we pull it out of the fire, it belongs to us. We are not for hire, Premier. I’m putting you the same deal you just put me. If you want to hold off the Hadranics, move over.’

‘It is impossible. You cannot simply take over the government. There would be chaos.’

Dom’s expression mellowed. ‘We don’t want to be the government. We want the Legitimacy to stay on in that role. The only difference will be that you’ll be in thrall to us. You’ll make a secret covenant with us. Nobody will know about it for the present, maybe not ever. I don’t even say we’ll necessarily ever invoke that covenant. But it will be there if we want to.’

‘To destroy everything we have tried to achieve – to plunge humanity into disorder, superstition, random activity!’ Mheert spoke with passion – the passion of a man who had spent his life trying to construct a civilization that was durable, in control of itself, and not subject to the contingencies of nature. Always the fight had been against nature’s tendency to disorder, to chance and hazard. Mheert saw mankind as fighting a perpetual war against these destructive natural forces – and he saw the Grand Wheel as merely an extension of the same forces, capitulating to them by reason of its evil philosophy and threatening any hope for the future.

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Dom said blandly. The basic ideology of you people is that you can build a civilization so solid that it will always be able to resist the shocks of chance. That’s a rigid concept; and anyway it can’t be done. In the long run you can’t go against nature, any more than King Canute could stop the tides. We all come under the law of accident. The gambler learns to live with it, but the Legitimacy thinks it can build a kind of siege civilization, a rigidly controlled shell isolated from accident.’ He shook his head sadly. In a way he admired the Legitimacy for its obstinacy; but he was sure that, come what may, the Grand Wheel would outlive it – just as it had preceded it.

‘The law of accident!’ Mheert muttered. ‘I’ll tell you what the law of accident means. It means that every plan, every effort, is endangered. Years of preparation go into some vital endeavour, and then something unforeseen happens to wreck everything. Only if chance eventualities can be eradicated can mankind be assured of a continued existence. Otherwise, something like this—’ He slipped his jacket over one shoulder and pulled aside the shirt beneath, displaying the surgery scars at the shoulder where the arm was grafted on. ‘You know well what these scars mean, Chairman Dom. A medicinal drug added to the water supply, harmless as it was thought. Yet it caused an entire generation to give birth to limbless children. It was years before the source of the deformities was isolated.’

Dom was indeed familiar with the scars. He had them himself, at shoulders and hips. Everyone of their age group had. ‘In that case science triumphed,’ Mheert continued. ‘Thanks to Legitimacy planning we were able to grow culture limbs from each victim’s body cells and graft them on. Chance was overcome. But another time—’

Dom laughed sourly. ‘Planning had nothing to do with it. It was luck. What if it had happened centuries earlier, when it wasn’t known how to switch off repressor genes in individual body cells? Then no limbs could have been grown. We would have had a generation with neither arms nor legs.’

‘We could still have managed with prosthetics. But granted, the disaster could have been worse. By the law of averages some such worse disaster awaits mankind at an unspecified date in the future – unless we learn how to eliminate these accidents. The war with the Hadranics is itself an accident, an interruption of our plans. Let’s see you try to gamble your way out of that one.’

Dom’s sour smile had not left his face. ‘Let’s see you plan your way out of it,’ he said.

The meeting proceeded little further. Men of diametrically opposed minds cannot discourse for long. Dom sat musing for a while after Premier Mheert departed. In one sense, he reflected, both of them worshipped the same thing: power. Unfettered, broad and absolute power.

Not for one moment had he expected Mheert to accede to his demand, even though the covenant, by its nature, would have been virtually unenforceable.

But it had been worth a try.

A few days later Dom was obliged to travel several thousand miles to the partly abandoned town of Voridnov, where he entered a large building so decrepit it was hard to believe it was still air-tight.

Within, he paused at the head of a flight of iron stairs, recovering his breath. It was a long climb, but tradition had to be respected; all who entered the room to which the staircase gave access had to get there on their own two feet – hence, there could be no elevator.

The armed vigils standing guard outside the steel door snapped to attention. He put them at ease with a wave of his hand.

‘Are all present?’

‘Yes, Chairman. All are here.’

He stepped forward. The door, responding to secret factors about his person, moved ponderously aside. He walked through a bare ante-room, and then into the dusty sacrosanct council chamber.

The eyes of the eleven men seated at the large circular table turned to meet him. He, Dom, made the twelfth. He took his place, his eyebrows lifted in private amusement. Twelve men of disparate character, he was thinking to himself, bound together in close brotherhood. Hadn’t that been so of another crucial time in history? But no, that would have to be thirteen if he, Dom, was to regard himself as the leader. And somehow he couldn’t think of himself as a Christ.

The chair grimed his clothes as he sat down. Everything in the council chamber was filthy. It was never cleaned: nobody was allowed in except for council members, and that was the way it had been for centuries here in this gutted building on the nether, unfashionable side of the Moon (Dom, like many fond lunarites, liked to refer to his adopted planet by its affectionate archaism, the Moon).

To call a full meeting a consensus of four voices was necessary. In this case the number had been six, which meant that Dom’s policy was being challenged. He was, however, sure of his five assenters.

His eyes glittered as they roved over his co-members. ‘Well, gentlemen, you have called this meeting, as is your right – or some of you have. Now, put your business.’

The first to speak was the tall, smooth, engaging Holt. ‘The business of the meeting is already known to you, Chairman. Some of us are doubtful about the coming project.’

‘So. And why?’

‘Think what we stand to lose!’

‘What has the Wheel come to?’ Dom said suavely. ‘I find it difficult to take you seriously. Are you afraid now of a little gamble? In my view, the odds are favourable.’

Pawarce, a thick-set man with hard, brutal eyes, took up the argument. ‘There’s another angle to this caper. Supposing this Pendragon animal is smarter than he seems? It could be that we are still being hustled – railroaded into playing a game where we’re out of our depth.’

This point had not escaped Dom. Essentially, he could only answer it in a pragmatic sense. ‘That is something we have to assess for ourselves as we proceed,’ he said. ‘If we feel suspicious, we can always withdraw. So far, I see nothing to indicate that we are being tricked. Safeguards can be arranged – are being arranged. I believe our opponents are as interested in testing our performance as we are in testing theirs.’

‘Then why don’t we play for smaller stakes, to begin with?’ Pawarce demanded harshly.

‘They are not interested in playing for pennies,’ Dom said mildly. ‘Come, gentlemen! Life was a gamble since the first amoeba crawled up out of the slime. Besides, if you want a better reason for abandoning your caution, consider this: the stakes we are putting into the game may shortly be valueless. I have recently received information from the Legitimacy which makes clear the imminent possibility of total defeat at the hands of the Hadranics. Think of that, when you tremble to risk what we have.’

But when the argument was over, minds remained unchanged. Attitudes had already been firmed up before the meeting took place. They took a vote. It was six to six.

Dom felt a sudden impatience with the dissenters. ‘Go and join the Legitimacy, you creeping tortoises,’ he thought. ‘Build a shell round yourselves, like them’. He rose from his place and stepped to the other side of the chamber, laying his hand on the dust-encrusted casing of a machine standing there.

‘The matter must move forward,’ he said stonily.

Everyone gazed at the machine in fascination. ‘Velikosk’s roulette?’ Pawarce rasped in a hushed tone. ‘But that thing hasn’t been used for fifty years.’

‘What matter? It is still in good order, and there is precedence. Unless someone wishes to change his vote.’

They all sat as if paralysed. With a nervous smile Dom lifted a flap of metal and slapped a switch. When he returned to his wrought-iron chair, to which the machine was connected as it was to all the others, he was calm. Gracefully, he sat down.

The Velikosk roulette machine hummed as it went into action. A flicker of light ran round the edge of the table, momentarily pausing at each man in turn. Hands gripped the table in unbearable nervous tension. Dom, however, was relaxed, facing whatever the future might bring with practised imperturbability.

Faster and faster ran the ghostly nimbus. Then, abruptly, it ceased to be. And the chair over which it had last flickered was empty. Its occupant had disappeared, sucked into the gulf of pure randomness that underpinned the universe.

This was the fifth time, Dom believed, that the Velikosk machine had been put to the purpose of resolving differences of opinion among the council of the Grand Wheel. Until recently no one had even remotely understood how it worked – Velikosk had never been able to explain it to anybody. Even now it was doubtful if it could be repaired should it break down, in which case a tradition would die.

The empty chair had been Pawarce’s.

‘I believe the vote will now prove to be six to five, gentlemen,’ Dom intoned calmly. ‘Shall we formalize it, or would you prefer to leave it at that?’