The Grand Wheel Read online

  TWO

  When Scarne awoke six hours later it was dawn. Atop the highest tower of the town the artificial sun was kindling, casting daylight into the streets and through the windows of his living-room.

  Blearily he rose, still feeling slightly disorientated. More than that, his nerves were beginning to twitch in a way he knew would become much worse unless he gave himself the fix he so badly needed.

  He unlocked a cabinet and took out what appeared to be an ordinary deodorant spray. The atomizer hissed as he spray-injected a dose of the drug it contained into his jugular vein.

  Rapidly his nerves steadied. On one occasion he had tried to defy the addiction, letting the withdrawal symptoms continue. It had been an experience he did not intend to go through again.

  He decided he had better get in touch with Magdan, his contact. He opened a wall closet and swished aside the clothes hanging there, then placed a small stool in the space he made. He climbed in, sat down, and closed the door behind him, reaching as he did so for the switch that activated his secret holbooth.

  The darkness of the cupboard vanished. He was sitting on an ordinary chair in a small, windowless room. The walls were decorated with blue and gold fretwork: it was a standard holbooth room. The chair facing him was, however, empty.

  He waited until Magdan, his Legitimacy controller, appeared suddenly in the chair about a minute later. He wore a satin dressing-gown and was rubbing his eyes. Evidently Scarne had got him out of bed.

  ‘This is a hell of a time to be calling, Scarne,’ Magdan’s hologram image said with a scowl. ‘There’d better be a good reason for it.’

  ‘There is.’ Briefly Scarne recounted the events of the previous night, the game with Skode Loder and the subsequent approach. ‘This kind of thing is traditional,’ he explained. ‘So there you are: I think I’ve got my foot in.’

  Magdan showed none of the expected delight. ‘About time. I was beginning to write you off. How much did this mechanic take off you?’

  ‘Everything. About two hundred thousand.’

  At that, Magdan became angry. ‘Hell, that was government money,’ he exploded. ‘I have to account for everything you throw down the drain.’

  ‘It was fun,’ Scarne admitted. ‘I can’t honestly see that I owe anything. Besides, I thought I just explained: the Wheel wouldn’t have made contact until I was destitute. They have a high regard for tradition.’ He paused. ‘By the way, did you know the Wheel does still run mugger jackpots?’

  ‘So what’s new?’ Magdan grunted, sinking into his thoughts for a moment.

  ‘I hit one last night. After the game.’

  Magdan showed interest. ‘Well! That wasn’t exactly coincidence, was it?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Scarne said doubtfully. ‘The Wheel doesn’t fix its muggers. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. Like your Tarot cards weren’t stripped.’

  ‘That was different,’ Scarne told him. ‘The house didn’t do the sharping. A player from outside did it – a hired freelance or a Wheel employee from another level, somebody the house doesn’t know anything about. There was something unusual about this jackpot, too.’ He ruminated, trying to find words to describe his experience. ‘I had a vision. A vision of randomness – pure randomness, below every level maths can reach.’ He stopped. There was little point in trying to convey abstract ideas to this beefy secret serviceman.

  ‘What are you trying to suggest?’ Magdan asked slowly.

  ‘Maybe the Wheel are using their new equations. The luck equations.’

  ‘And they steered you a jackpot by sheer luck?’

  ‘Yes. Then they wouldn’t have to fix it.’

  ‘It’s quite a thought,’ Magden conceded. He became thoughtful. ‘When this is all over we’ll have you de-briefed over that jackpot. They can be psychologically damaging – that’s one reason why they’re outlawed.’ He frowned, sinking his chin into his chest, thinking hard. ‘I’m still inclined to think the mugger was rigged, though. I don’t have your belief in the Wheel’s fastidiousness. When did you say they’re calling?’

  ‘At ten.’

  ‘Meantime I’m closing this connection down. We don’t want it traced. When you have something for us, call one of the numbers you’ve already memorized.’

  ‘The antidote,’ Scarne said.

  ‘Huh?’ Magdan looked up at him, sharply.

  ‘If you’re leaving me without a personal controller, I want the antidote. I’m as good as inside. I’ve done enough to deserve it.’

  Magdan pulled an ugly face, expressing derision. ‘Forget it. You’ll get the antidote when you deliver the luck equations, and not a minute before.’

  He rose from his seat. Scarne began to get desperate. ‘Don’t leave me without a link-man,’ he pleaded. ‘The Wheel could take me literally anywhere. What if I need to renew my supply?’

  ‘Call one of the numbers.’

  ‘I might not be able to call a number! Or perhaps your agent won’t be able to reach me.’ Scarne’s tone became wheedling. ‘Give me the antidote. You needn’t worry about my reneging. I’m on your side.’

  Magdan cast his eyes upwards. ‘Oh, sure. Look, you know the score, Scarne, or at least you ought to by now. You’re not our only hook in the water, you know. Come through with the goods and you’ll be all right. After all, people like you never do anything without an incentive, do they?’

  As Magdan turned to go Scarne surged to his feet in a sudden fury. ‘You goddamned bastard,’ he choked. He threw himself at Magdan. Their two forms tussled, the scanners integrating their hologram images and causing them to respond to one another like physical objects. The holbooth system was nothing if not pure communication.

  Abruptly Magdan vanished, quickly followed by the holbooth room itself. Scarne found himself back in the darkened clothes closet, threatening empty air.

  Nothing happened when he tried the activating switch again. Magdan had dissolved the secret holbooth connection, as he had said he would. Scarne stepped from the closet shaking with reaction. One day he’d get even with Magdan, he promised himself savagely, but futilely. In fact, he was aware that he would not have the courage physically to attack the controller in the flesh.

  When it came to method, he thought as he padded to the bathroom, there was little to choose between the Legitimacy and the Grand Wheel. Magdan had chosen a hell of a way to ensure his loyalty. The drug his men had forcibly addicted him to was a specific drug, one synthesized exclusively for use on him. The antidote was equally specific. Neither it, nor the drug itself, could be obtained from anyone but his masters, the Legitimacy’s secret intelligence service.

  In the bathroom mirror he examined his face carefully. Its lines were continuing to deepen, his incipient middle age being accelerated by the ravages of the drug.

  Wearily he washed, dressed, and then breakfasted on coffee and synthetic fluffed eggs. There was time to wait before his appointment with the Wheel callers. He tried to relax, attempting to soothe himself by playing with a favourite curio: a pair of cubical white dice, the faces bearing black dots from one to six. They were centuries old, quite valuable as antiques. Loaded with tiny movable internal weights, with a little expertise – it was all in the wrist action – they could be made to come up with any number to order. Or, again by means of the right shake, they could be converted into even-weighted dice safe for inspection.

  He shook the dice in his hand and threw a seven. He threw four more sevens, then switched to eleven.

  In a games-conscious civilization the weighted dice were but one item in a long and colourful history of cheating devices. Cheating at cards, for instance, was a science all of its own; it had a tradition of ingenuity that made it almost honourable in some eyes. Locaters, shiners, marked cards of inexhaustible variety, strippers both concave and convex, change-cards whose surface mutated and could assume the value of any card in the deck – the mechanics of it was endless, not to speak of sleight of hand, which in s
ome practitioners had reached almost superhuman levels.

  The ultimate in cheating devices was probably the holdout robot, given its name from the ancient (but still used) hold-out machine, a device strapped to the arm which delivered either a set of cards or a cold deck into the hand. The hold-out robot was a proxie player, a nearly undetectable man-like robot which entered play but remained in touch with its owner who looked through its eyes and partly controlled it. More than a mere waldo, the hold-out proxie had its own brain and such a sublime sense of touch that it never needed to use trick shuffles or any other gimmick. It could take a deck in its fingers and count the cards down by touch alone, cutting to obtain any card it wanted. It could keep track of every individual card through shuffles and deals and so always knew what everybody was holding.

  Hold-out robots had gone out of fashion recently, though. It was becoming easier to detect them. The last one Scarne had heard about had been smashed to pieces, right there in the card-room.

  At ten the annunciator toned. Scarne, who had become increasingly more nervous during the past half-hour, checked the door monitor. Two men stood outside, both snappily dressed. One was big, and had an air of restrained violence: the heavy. The other was smaller, more like a functionary.

  He let them in. The heavy looked around the apartment in a cool, professional manner. ‘Is this place bonded?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. We don’t have to worry about it.’

  The other spoke, mildly but firmly. ‘We’re here to take you to see some people, Professor Scarne. Don’t expect to be back in a hurry. Unless you have any substantial objections, I suggest we leave now.’

  Scarne coughed, found his voice. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Earth. The planliner leaves in half an hour.’

  ‘Could you tell me exactly what I’m wanted for?’ Scarne asked, stumbling over the words. The Wheel man made no direct answer, but merely stared at him. Do you not understand your good fortune? his eyes seemed to say. You’re being taken into the employment of the Grand Wheel. You’ll be a Wheel man, like me, a member of the most powerful brotherhood in the human world.

  Scarne picked up the hold-all he had already prepared. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  A car was waiting in the street below. Scarne sat in the back, sandwiched between his two escorts, while they rode through the town.

  ‘What are your names?’ he asked boldly.

  The smaller man gestured to his companion, then to himself. ‘Caiman. Hervold.’

  ‘We’re going to Earth, you say. At least you can tell me where on Earth.’

  ‘Just Earth.’ Hervold smiled wryly. ‘We just do our job, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course.’ Scarne peered out of the car window, watching the buildings speeding past.

  The shuttle whooshed skywards, leaving Io’s miniature landscape laid neatly out below. The towers of Maintown jutted up like a crop of metal whiskers. The atmosphere plant on the outskirts looked like an Earth-type stadium, exhaling the gases of life.

  In less than a minute they were above the shallow atmosphere and in darkness. The shuttle pushed its passenger tube into the hull of the planliner; there were clinking sounds and sudden, small movements. Then smoothly and imperceptibly the inertial engines took hold, hurling the planliner on a brief geodesic to Earth.

  The planliner was about half full. Scarne shared a seat with Hervold and Caiman in the large, comfortable lounge. If he remembered correctly, the journey would take around an hour at this time of the year.

  He pulled a sealed deck of cards from his pocket. ‘Care to play?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Hervold said. A servit entered the lounge and began wheeling between the zigzag rows of seats, offering drinks and smokes. Hervold beckoned the machine over. As he did so, Scarne noticed a piece of jewellery dangling from his wrist: a little wheel of gridded gold.

  ‘I’ll bet you feel good to wear that,’ Scarne ventured.

  Hervold glanced at the trinket and scowled. ‘Sure.’

  Scarne realized he had been personal. Wheel people were touchy about the emblem of their order.

  The other’s gaze focused on his throat. ‘I see you’re not travelling alone, either,’ he said. ‘You believe in Lady. That’s interesting.’

  Scarne fingered the image of Lady, goddess of luck, that hung from his neck. ‘It’s not that I’m religious,’ he explained. ‘I don’t believe in Lady as an actual being. More as an impersonal force or principle.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ Hervold replied sarcastically, turning to the servit. He bought green-tinted jamboks for the three of them.

  The Wheel men were unwilling to talk further. Scarne drank his jambok. Then he fell into a reverie.

  In a half doze, he seemed to see the wheel symbol spinning dizzily, throwing off probability in all directions. The Wheel, most ancient of man’s symbols, sign of chance, image of eternity. The Wheel of Fortune, the Tarot pack called it. Elsewhere it was known as the Wheel of Life. The randomatic equations also had a cyclic form, as had the equations used in most fermats.

  The Grand Wheel had probably chosen the symbol fortuitously to begin with, back in the days when it had been no more than a semi-criminal gambling syndicate, before it had developed into a political and ideological power well able to withstand the onslaughts of its arch-enemy, the Legitimacy government. It might once have signified no more than a roulette wheel or some such device. But now it had come to mean much more. It was curious, Scarne thought, how the Grand Wheel had swallowed itself in its own symbolism, as if hypnotized by its own mystique, delving, for instance, into the arcana of the Tarot pack, and generally indulging in the mystico-symbolism that it was so easy to associate with the laws of chance.

  Had the world always been like this, he wondered? Hustlers and hold-out robots, instantly addictive drugs administered by government agencies, a perpetual struggle between law and hazard. Had civilization always been dichotomic? Or would one side, the Legitimacy or the Grand Wheel, eventually vanquish the other? Probably not, Scarne thought. The Wheel was scornful of, rather than antagonistic to, the Legitimacy’s obsession for predictability and control, for eradicating chance hazard. It did not seek to replace the government, merely to tap mankind’s gambling instinct which the Legitimacy abhorred. And the Legitimacy would never rid society of the Grand Wheel, either; its tentacles were too deep. Indeed, the Legitimacy itself could scarcely do without the Grand Wheel any more. By now the proliferating gaming houses, the interstellar numbers service, the randomatic sweepstakes, were only froth on the Wheel’s activities; the Wheel alone, for instance, had the ability to keep the huge interstellar economy running smoothly, applying to the stock and commodity exchanges the same randomatic principles that governed the fermat networks.

  Scarne awoke with a start, realizing that he must have dozed off. They had reached parking orbit and the passengers were splitting up, some going to Luna and some to Earth. A trifle blearily, he followed Hervold and Caiman into the Earth shuttle for the short hop. As he took his seat he saw that the shuttle was accepting passengers from another planliner, too. They were mostly military officers; they seemed, like him, in low spirits and short of sleep.

  He sat back while the shuttle steadily filled up with uniformed men. Caiman stirred. He looked at the officers with an expression that showed increasing disgust.

  Finally he spoke for the first time since Io. ‘Just look at those punks,’ he said loudly. ‘Did you ever see such a pack of deadbeats?’ He took something from his breast pocket and handed it to Scarne. ‘Here, just take a look at this. Doesn’t it make you sick?’

  Scarne shook loose the tiny, infinitely foldable newssheet into readable size and scanned the headlines. The sheet had been printed on Io. It told in detail of the Hopula disaster, of Legitimacy forces falling back across hundreds of light years, of man being forced out of territories he had believed were his.

  ‘The goddamned Hadranics are coming closer every day,’ the
Wheel heavy said in a hard-edged voice. ‘It’s time those Legit generals started putting some guts into it, because in a few years they could be right here in Sol.’

  THREE

  The desert was bone-yellow. In the south a sun of a much brighter yellow, the colour of sulphur, hovered a third of the way between the horizon and the meridian, looking down on the temporary installations like a baleful eye.

  A thin-faced youth, aged fifteen or sixteen, stared at the sun with sullen fear. Suddenly he shivered and tore his gaze away. ‘I’m cold!’ he yelped in a cracked voice. ‘Get me a cloak, you!’

  The burly crewman he had addressed looked at him disdainfully. ‘Tell me, sonny, have you ever shaved?’

  The youth flushed and rounded on Hakandra. ‘My price is doubled!’ he croaked. ‘I won’t take insults!’

  Hakandra moved his hand placatingly. ‘Forget it, Shane. It was just a silly remark.’

  ‘Nevertheless it has doubled my price. Or do you think you can do without my services? All right then, do without them. I renounce my obligations as of now. Perhaps the sun is due to explode tomorrow, in the next hour, the next minute. Perhaps it has already begun to explode – I won’t tell you.’

  ‘Are you gonna let yourself burn up too?’ the crewman grunted. He walked away. Hakandra scowled after his retreating back, making a mental note to put in a disciplinary memo. He slipped off his own cloak and draped it round the shoulders of the shivering boy. In fact the air was not at all cold. The lad was suffering from nerves, as usual.

  ‘Let’s get back to the ship,’ he said. ‘No use our hanging around here.’

  They set off up the slope towards the starship which rested on the crest of the hill. ‘Do you get any murmurs?’ Hakandra asked quietly.

  ‘No, it’s quiet.’

  The youth walked in silence for a while, and then started whining. ‘Can’t we leave this Godforsaken hole? I don’t like it here … how much longer?’