Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

‘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.’