The Grand Wheel Read online

  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.

  FIVE

  The cards in Scarne’s hand each carried two symbols: a number and a geometrical figure, either a triangle, a square, a pentagon or a six-pointed star. It was the combination of the two that gave the card its value – in fact, each card had three values, according to the situation it found itself in. There were no such things as suits: neither numbers nor figures could be grouped together. They had to be set off one against the other by a process of rapid mental arithmetic.

  Scarne had come across a deck similar to this one before, but the game he was playing was entirely new, and superbly difficult. It was a game within a game, a game whose rules were themselves subject to the game. Any player could, if he held the right cards, change the rules of the game, his own cards, his opponents’ cards, the other players. Nothing could be known with certainty. The rules were hierarchical, each subject to others in an ascending series, producing dizzying problems of strategy.

  Scarne was sweating, his powers of calculation stretched to the limit. The cards he was holding had just had their relative values suddenly inverted by a switch in the method of counting. The past hour’s hard playing had been for nothing.

  And now worse disasters were piling up. The cards were mutating in his hand, taking on even lower values. He reached out to pick up another card from the pile, but as he did so he saw that the faces of the other players were changing, too, becoming different personalities.

  They laid their cards face up on the table, left their chairs and walked away. Then Scarne noticed that his own hand, frozen over the deck, was unfamiliar, dark brown in colour. Without realizing it he, too, had become someone else.

  At that moment the small room faded. Scarne was sitting in a bucket seat in the Make-Out, gripping two silvery rods in his hands. Cadence was lifting the inductor cap from his skull. She rolled away the games machine.

  ‘I lost,’ Scarne gasped hoarsely.

  Sitting behind him in the corner, Soma grunted. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t win them all.’

  ‘Who the hell was I playing?’

  ‘Nobody. You were playing a computer. You did pretty well, for a first game.’

  Scarne took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Is that game actually played here in the club? Played that well?’

  ‘We’re all being hard on you to begin with.’ Jerry Soma stood up and stretched, his lank form stepping across the room. ‘We have to get your measure, Cheyne. We have to see how far you can stretch your mind.’ He gestured to Cadence. She opened a wall panel and wheeled out another identity machine.

  The machines were something new to Scarne. Soma had told him they were used for playing games whose elements transcended physical reality, like the one Scarne had just played. In other words they blotted out the physical perception of the world and replaced it with fictional, constructed environments induced into the brain electrically. The principle was similar to that used in dispensing mugger jackpots. But Soma had been circumspect when Scarne had asked to what extent the machines were used in the club.

  ‘This machine is probably the nearest we can get to that experience of yours with the jackpot,’ Soma told him. ‘The nearest I know about, anyway.’ He frowned. ‘You’ll lose your identity entirely, so keep a cool head.’

  ‘Who will I become?’ Scarne asked apprehensively.

  ‘Not who. What.’

  Before Scarne could open his mouth to speak again Cadence had jammed another skull-cap on his head and guided his hands to the silver bars, completing the circuit.

  For an instant Scarne lost consciousness. When he awoke it was with only a vague recollection of his previous existence.

  He was a number.

  He was number 1413721. As a number, he was like an amoeba, able to arrange himself in any pattern of which that number was capable: all its factors, arrays and subsets. When these were arranged in columns they were like his limbs, which he could put out and withdraw at will.

  Consciousness of being 1413721 was really all the consciousness he had. He knew that he even had a degree of rarity: he was one of the few numbers to be both a square and a triangular number. But he could sense, in a kind of void or nullity all around him, countless other numbers, many of them more powerful than he, with all kinds of extraordinary properties.

  The numbers were jostling for position.

  The game was about to begin.

  But while number 1413721 waited to discover the nature of this game, he became aware of a massive presence which circled them all like a cosmic snake, and he shrank back. The presence was of a creature of second-order chance; as such, it was infinitely superior to the merely rational numbers gathering to begin play. It was capable of swallowing them all, and there was no escape from it.

  This great serpent, this incalculable dragon, was pi, a transcendental number, yielding, when expressed in decimal notation, an infinite table of random numbers. As awareness of this transcendental entity overwhelmed his own awareness, 1413721 experienced terror. He began to disintegrate, to decay like an unstable particle …

  Babbling and shaking, Scarne felt the skull-cap snatched from his head. His hands were unable to let go the silver bars and gripped them compulsively as if in electric shock.

  Cadence prised them loose. Scarne swung round in his bucket seat. Soma, wearing the monitor cap, looked stunned.

  Tearing the monitor cap from his head, the Wheel man stood up and towered over Scarne. His voice was harsh. ‘What did you think you were doing, Scarne? What happened to you in there, for Lady’s sake?’

  ‘I don’t know. I got scared.’

  ‘Scared? Scared of what?’ Soma seemed angry and impatient.

  ‘Pi. I got swallowed up by pi.’ Scarne tried to stop shaking
. ‘I was a number. Just an ordinary little rational number, and then I met up with pi.’

  Soma calmed down and became thoughtful. He paced the training-room.

  ‘Have you ever experienced anything like this before?’

  ‘Like being a number?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Scarne hesitated. ‘Well, as a mathematician I’m used to contemplating mathematical concepts like numbers. Trying to get inside the essence of some particular number, for instance. I suppose that’s what the numbers identity machine does for you.’

  Soma nodded. ‘It identifies your attention with a particular number – any number – but at the same time it removes your own identity. You’re just left with the number.’ He paused. ‘Pi. Fermats use it, don’t they? As a basis for randomness.’

  ‘Most of them. In fact many fermats spend their time calculating pi indefinitely.’ Scarne was alarmed by the puzzlement on Soma’s face. ‘What’s wrong? Wasn’t I supposed to meet pi?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does the machine use that number, itself?’

  ‘I believe pi plays some role in the mechanism. But not in the games arena – the part your mind had access to.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a fault in the machine.’

  ‘More likely your imagination’s overworked.’ Soma shrugged. ‘I’ll have it checked over. Meantime we’ll call it a day. You look overwrought.’

  He glanced back as he strode from the room. ‘See he gets some rest, Cadence.’

  Scarne rose shakily from his chair and followed Cadence to a cubicle which took them back to his apartment. She looked at him sympathetically as she switched on lights for him.

  ‘You do look bushed at that.’

  ‘It’s been a harder day than I realized,’ Scarne admitted. ‘I didn’t sleep much last night, either.’

  ‘You’d better hit the sack. And don’t worry; you did all right.’

  ‘Thanks.’