Robert Asprin - No Phule Like an Old Phule

So why make things any tougher than you have to?"

"You can't assume just because things have been easy lately that it's always going to be like that," insisted Thumper.

"Hey, I'm just trying to give you a clue," said. Sharky. "If you play along with the other guys, everybody's happy. Make too many waves, nobody's gonna be happy-and they're gonna know whose fault it is."

"All right, I understand you," said Thumper, with a nod and a smile. He didn't say what he was thinking. He didn't have to. His actions would do the talking for him, when the time came.

"The slots, huh?" Tullie Bascomb shook his head in disbelief at what the security monitors were showing. "Most of the guys who think they can beat the house by playing some kind of homemade system go for blackjack," he said.

"Or poker, if they think they can win steady enough to cover the house percentage."

Doc grinned. "That's for sure. Only suckers play the quantum slots-they're the worst bet in the joint. You showed us that, back when the captain first brought us to Lorelei."

"Yeah," said Bascomb. "I guess the captain-didn't tell his old man that, though. look at him pumping the tokens into into those machines!"

"Yeah, I saw him pretty near knock down two white haired little old ladies who tried to horn in on a machine he'd been priming," said Doc. "He's got the Fever, all right."

"Well, he's a grown man," said Bascomb. "And 1 guess he can afford to lose a few bucks. Hell, I doubt we could put a serious dent in his bankroll if we set up a row of thousand-dollar-a-'pull machines. That doesn't mean I'm not tempted, though..."

"Nab, what's the point? At that price, nobody but Victor Phule could ever afford to play 'em," said Doc. "And what would the payouts have to be...?"

"High enough to make a billionaire's palms sweaty," said Bascomb. "Right now, I think he's just playing on principle-he thinks the payouts are too generous, and he's trying to prove the point. To really get him hooked, we'd need to offer something big-even a million bucks is probably small potatoes, when you're talking about someone who's used to supplying armaments to entire planets." Doc rubbed his chin and leaned forward to point at Victor Phule's image on the security monitor. "What if we did set up a bank of machines for nobody but Pop Phule to play? Offer him a jackpot that'll make even his mouth water-title to the whole darn casino, for example-but at impossibly long odds. Once he's thrown enough tokens down the slot, then he'll have to admit that we aren't giving away money."

"You've got an evil mind," said Bascomb, chuckling.

"Only one problem I can see with it. We don't own the casino-Omega Company does, and we can't offer a prize we aren't able to deliver if somebody does win it. Not even on Lorelei, where the house rules and the laws of the land are pretty damn close to one and the same."

"So we make the odds so impossible that he can't possibly win, is all," Doc insisted. "Let's say he's got to get five simultaneous jackpots on five different machines... or some other combination that only comes up once in a trillion times."

Bascomb shook his head. "It's tempting, you know, Doc? But we can't do anything as screwy as that without getting the captain to sign off on it. I don't care if we would be setting those crooked slots to teach his father a lesson-bad business is bad business, even when you keep it in the family."

"I guess you're right," said Doc.

"In fact, has anybody gotten in touch with Captain Jester? He'd want us to tell him that his father's here, I'm pretty sure of that."

"I got his OK before showing the old man the books," said Bascomb, snapping his fingers. "But this is a new wrinkle, and I'm not sure whether he'd go along with it. Guess the only thing to do is get him on the horn and ask."

"Right," said Doc. He pressed one of the studs on his wrist chronometer and nodded. "It's midafternoon at Zenobia Base, so he's likely to be in reach of a vidphone. Do you want to call him, or shall I? Or shall we just send a priority message and let him get back to us?"

"Seeing that it's during his business hours, I think we better tell him this in person," said Bascomb. "And since I'm in charge of the gambling end of the business, I guess I ought to be the one to make the call. You want to talk to him, too? He might have a few questions you can answer as well as I can."

"Sure, why not?" said Doc. He waved a hand in the direction of the monitor. "One good thing-our main problem's not going anywhere. Except maybe to the cashier's window for another batch of tokens."

"Let's hope he makes that particular trip a lot of times," said Bascomb, with a thin smile. He gestured toward a door, and the two men went to the office to place a call to Captain Jester.

"YOU FARKING SLUGS DISGUST ME!" roared a voice that seemed far too loud for an ordinary human's vocal apparatus. Thumper jerked his eyes open, awaking from the utterly exhausted sleep he'd been in a fraction of a second before. He automatically checked the time: Five in the morning. The drill instructor, Sergeant Pitbull, was right on time, fully dressed and ready to eat raw recruits for breakfast. Thumper had last seen him only six hours before, when he'd put the squad of new legionnaires to bed with threats and curses.

Thumper still hadn't figured out how the drill instructor managed to stay alert and fit on what must be even less rest than the recruits were getting, but he'd come to take it for granted. Every task he demanded of the recruits-including some that at first had seemed impossible-Sergeant Pitbull could perform better than any of them, despite being at least ten years older. Even Thumper, who had already learned that he was in better physical condition than almost all his fellow recruits, couldn't beat the sergeant in any direct competition-especially in hand-to-hand combat where the sergeant seemed to have a bottomless repertory of dirty tricks. Even in an outright sprint where Thumper was sure he had the advantage, Sergeant Pitbull had somehow managed to make him trip and fall before he got three steps from the start.

Worst of all, it seemed as if the sergeant was always angry. One night, after lights out, the whispered conversation in the bunkhouse got to the subject of whether anyone could remember hearing a friendly remark pass Pitbull's lips. The closest anyone could come was, "THAT'S RIGHT, WAY TO STOMP HIS WORTHLESS CIVY ASS!" when a hulking recruit named Crunch put Spider in the infirmary with a dislocated shoulder during judo practice. And while Crunch was probably right that the sergeant meant-it as a compliment on his judo technique, most of the other recruits agreed with Spider's heated protestation that congratulating one of the recruits for injuring another wasn't his idea of a "friendly word." Then Sergeant Pitbull slammed the door open and bellowed, "SHUT UP, YOU STINKING BUGS!" (He seemed never to have learned to speak softly.) In the utter silence that followed this remark, he continued, "WHEN I TURN THE LIGHTS OUT, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO FARKING SLEEP, NOT YAMMER LIKE A BUNCH OF SCHOOLGIRLS! THERE'LL BE PUNISHMENT DETAIL FOR THE WHOLE FARKING SQUAD!" After that, even Crunch conceded the point. Pitbull had been as good as his word-next morning, there were a hundred extra push-ups for everyone.

But this was another morning, which meant another chance for Pitbull to deal out arbitrary punishment.

Thumper and all his buddies scrambled out of their bunks and came to attention. There was just a glimmer of a chance that today they might manage to avoid extra pushups or some other equally unpleasant task. Not much of a chance, but Thumper had gotten in the habit of grasping at even minuscule chances. Along the way, he'd gotten much better at push-ups than he'd ever imagined being. It wasn't what he'd seen himself doing when he'd dreamed of joining the Legion, but if his experience so far was any indication, push-ups were a significant component of Legion life.