Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

‘All I need concern myself with,’ Dom continued, ‘is that you will play until your guts hang out – and play to win. That I am fairly confident you will do.’

‘So you’re pardoning me?’

Dom said nothing, puffing at his cigarette-holder, looking enigmatic and self-contained.

‘And what about Cadence Mellors?’ Scarne asked.

‘Silly young woman. This project gave her the only chance she’ll ever get of getting into something big. Now she’s finished. I’m taking your little girl-friend away, Cheyne, as a small punishment for your treachery towards me.’

‘What have you done to her?’

‘Packed her off to a work-camp club on one of the minor worlds. It’s a pretty rough place, I’m afraid. She’ll spend the rest of her days there as a club tart. Until she’s too old. I dare say they’ll end up using her as a cleaner.’

Dom sneered slightly, suddenly derisive and supercilious. Scarne clenched his fists. His feelings were confused. He felt a sudden surge of rage at Dom for his treatment of Cadence. At the same time he was filled with relief – and amazement – that Dom was letting him off so lightly.

Then it struck him. Dom’s total lack of normal feeling. He felt no vindictiveness towards Scarne, no resentment at the role he had played. Everything was a game to Dom, viewed with a slightly amused detachment. There were no loyalties, no recriminations.

‘None of it was the girl’s fault,’ he said painfully. ‘I led her into it – you should be more lenient with her.’

Dom snorted. ‘This sort of thing is your whole weakness, Cheyne. Think straight for once. Here you are worrying about a club girl when the fate of the worlds is at stake – when you stand on the brink of something almost too big to imagine. And not only that, but at the moment when you finally found what you were looking for.’ His eyes glistened. ‘Yes, Cheyne. A mathematical treatment of luck! We have it! Together with a practical technique to put it to use!’

‘Then the mugger jackpot—’

‘One of our practice shots.’

Scarne sighed, pondering.

‘I can make someone so lucky he hits a mugger jackpot first time,’ Dom went on. ‘Or conversely, so unlucky his arm drops off.’

‘You make it sound like magic.’

‘Manipulated luck is magic, more or less.’

‘Do you propose using it when we meet the Galactic Wheel? Is that what makes you so confident?’

Dom paused. ‘Not at first,’ he said. ‘The technique is still under development. Later we’ll probably use it. The important thing is that the galactics, as far as we know, don’t have this technique. We may have something completely original.’

‘Should they discover what you’re doing, they might well accuse you of cheating.’

Dom laughed. ‘Of course it’s not cheating! I never heard of a player yet who claimed it was cheating to be lucky. There are all kinds of charms, tokens and prayers aimed at attracting luck, and no one objects to them. This is the same thing, but applied through scientific method.’

Perplexed, Scarne frowned.

‘Of course, you disapprove of what we’re doing, don’t you?’ Dom said gently.

‘I think you’re taking an insane risk.’

‘Good! I like your attitude – it means you’ll do your utmost to win!’ Dom leaned across, peering closely at Scarne. ‘Yes, I have your measure. You’ll play, and play as never before.’

Scarne looked down at his clenched fists. He felt trapped in this tiny, golden room. Dom was right – he had him where he wanted him, giving his talents to the Wheel in spite of himself. He would play to win, because only in that way could he rescue humanity from the Wheel leader’s mad gamble.

Shane was whimpering, his head down on a table already wet with his tears. Hakandra watched sadly, aware that the boy’s faith in his own ability had been badly eroded.

‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ he said inadequately. ‘You’re in a new situation.’

Shane shook his head. Hakandra put a hand on his heaving shoulder, patting it gently.

He gazed through the window of the tent they shared, looking up into the sky. He could see a star, shining in the fading evening with a steady, cool light. In thirty years, as viewed from here, it would flare up and take on the vivid aspect of a nova.

In fact, the event had already occurred. Thirty years might seem a fair stretch of time in local terms, but when translated into stellar distances it was nothing. A star had gone nova, only thirty light years away, and Shane hadn’t known anything about it: that was the plain, irreducible fact. Hadn’t predicted it, hadn’t even felt it when the explosion came, though he did claim to have received a sudden, dramatic convulsion some hours later – probably that was hysterical in origin, Hakandra thought, since by then the news had already arrived over the narrowbeam.

Self-induced or not, Shane was reacting to his experience – and even more so to his failure – with a typical lack of resilience. Hakandra continued to watch while the youth’s high-pitched sobs subsided into sleepy sniffles under the action of the sedative he had been given. Soon he fell into a drowse.

Wishom entered the tent. He glanced at Shane.

‘Is he all right?’

‘For the moment. Help me get him to his couch.’

Shane’s body was unresisting as they eased it to the bunk bed at one end of the tent. The youth mumbled his way into a deeper sleep.

The scientist straightened and sighed. ‘Well, there doesn’t seem much doubt of it,’ he said, his clipped voice holding a repressed excitement. ‘It was the machine.’

Hakandra paced the floor, looking again out of the window before replying. ‘That machine caused the star to go nova?’

Wishom frowned. ‘It may be going too far to put it quite like that. Cause and effect isn’t the correct law to apply where random effects are concerned. We would have to describe it in synchronistic terms.’

‘Please spare me the sophistries.’ Hakandra waved his hand. ‘I want concepts we can use .’

‘All right. We can definitely say that the machine had something to do with it. The nova coincided with that new jolt we fed in. We believe the machine operated so as to raise the probability of a nova in this area.’

‘My God!’ Hakandra sat down, suddenly weak. ‘We’re playing with fire. It could have been this sun. And Shane…’ He tailed off.

‘That’s what makes me certain the machine was responsible,’ Wishom said. ‘Shane would have predicted it otherwise. It isn’t that the machine’s influence overrides Shane’s talent – it doesn’t. But it produces synchronistic forces that are too wild for him to handle. Poor kid.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Hakandra’s face creased, showing the strain he was under.

His guilt feelings were beginning to get the better of him. He was aware that they were abusing Shane. They were no longer using him as a safety device, to predict novae, but as a research tool. Shane’s cold-senser ability picked up the probabilistic distortion emanating from the machine. Through him, they could know when they were getting a response from it.

The effect on Shane of the weird probability-field was cruel. It was steadily destroying him. Hakandra was not sure how much more of it the boy could take, and he himself was torn in an agonizing conflict of loyalties. The need to see the work through, urgent though it was, flew right in the face of his feeling of responsibility for Shane.

Yet in the end, the requirements of the Legitimacy came before everything.

‘The ability to trigger a nova isn’t quite what we’re after,’ he pointed out. ‘We want to be able to prevent them, to make the Cave safe for us to work in.’