Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

Wishom gaped. He had not expected to be criticized. ‘The controlled production of novae might itself be of military interest,’ he said. ‘An enemy fleet might be lured into a position where the exploding sun would destroy it. Or a nova could be used as a safety screen behind which to withdraw.’

Hakandra smiled indulgently. The scientist plainly had no grounding in military matters. ‘Your suggestions are naïve,’ he told Wishom. ‘No commander, Hadranic or otherwise, concentrates his forces in space. Neither will Hadranic ships get close to any Caspar sun if they can help it. Only if they were to set up planetary bases, as we are doing, would the capability prove useful.’

Seeing Wishom’s rueful expression, he smiled again. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be discouraging. I realize you’ve already worked miracles. I realize, too, that your discoveries have implications going far beyond our present situation here in Caspar… How much further do you think you can go?’

‘It’s all a matter of time.’

‘Time…’

Hakandra tried hard not to show his gloom.

Although the High Command had now assigned him permanently to the project, he felt he would have been better employed in doing what he had originally been doing – helping to set up the defensive pattern that was designed to prevent the Hadranics from crossing the Cave. He knew, by now, that the chances of any immediate usefulness coming out of the alien machine were infinitesimal. This latest result, spectacular though it was, merely demonstrated how little they understood the machine, and the High Command’s insistence that they continue the work on the spot, instead of moving the machine further back, was a kind of reflex action that symptomized the Legitimacy’s refusal to let anything go.

Isolated though he was from the mainstream of activity, Hakandra still heard how things were going in the Cave, over the narrowbeam. And the news was that there was very little time. The attempted evacuation of the far side of the Cave had failed when the thin defensive screen collapsed. There were horrifying tales of massacre. And the Hadranic forces were now poised to invest Caspar.

‘Everything would be different,’ Hakandra said, ‘if we had more time.’

On the bed, Shane muttered and whimpered.

‘Here it comes,’ Jerry Soma said.

He and Cheyne Scarne were sitting in a small cocktail lounge aboard the Wheel transport Disk of Hyke . The big ship was moving into the Cave of Caspar; as it did so, it had briefly intercepted a narrowbeam transmission from one of the big military bases there. The communications-room was now putting through the decoded signals to anyone who cared to hear them.

Soma hunched over the small speaker unit, listening to the stream of disconnected messages. Much of it was machine talk – one computer reporting to another. But there were enough verbal messages, many of them informal, to tell the tale.

‘Goddam,’ Soma said, almost gloating. ‘Just hear it. What a mess.’

‘I wonder how people are taking this in solsystem,’ Scarne tendered.

‘Closing their eyes to it, that’s how they’re taking it,’ Soma said. ‘Going around in a dream. The real truth won’t hit them until they find themselves under siege.’

He switched off the speaker. ‘I heard something interesting just there. Something about an alien randomness machine. Maybe we’ll be investigating that.’

‘You think the Hadranics will really get across the Cave?’

‘Sure they will. Then the war will really start.’

Scarne spoke with difficulty. ‘The Wheel ought to help. Instead of…’

He tailed off. Instead of making matters worse, was what he meant.

For civilization was being threatened on two sides. If the Hadranics didn’t make mankind their property, Marguerite Dom would gamble it away.

Perhaps contact with the Legitimacy had affected his attitudes, Scarne thought. Everything seemed crazy to him now: a civilization practically run by gamblers, reckless enough to throw it on to the gaming-table.

Earlier he had talked the matter out with Soma. Although contemptuous of Scarne’s newly-revealed background, he remained cordial and had been forthcoming. Where Dom was concerned, he was quite specific.

‘Dom has a need for real hazard ,’ he had said. ‘It goes right to the core of his being. It’s a mystical thing with him. Religion, almost.’

Yes. Scarne recalled what Dom himself had said. Not formal laws, but hazard and contingency, lay at the basis of existence. Therefore a life lived contingently was the true life.

To the Legitimacy, of course, such an outlook was insane. They were on the side of formal laws. And yet Dom was vindicated: for here was the Grand Wheel setting out to meet others of like nature, gamblers who controlled, possibly, civilizations larger and more powerful than anything mankind had seen.

Soma noticed his pensiveness. ‘You’re looking glum, Cheyne,’ he said. He leered. ‘Missing Cadence, eh? You’re going to have to show your worth before the Chairman gives you another woman.’

The medallion on Scarne’s lapel chimed, informing him that Dom wanted him. He finished his drink, rose from his seat and left without another word.

Crossing a spacious hallway, he glanced at the murals depicting Lady, Johnny Diceman, the Queen of Cups, and other members of the ill-organized gamblers’ pantheon. How long, he wondered, before this mythical lore crystallized into a formal religion? Another century or two? He was certain that already Marguerite Dom believed, quite literally, in the existence of these supernatural personages.

How did Dom really see the coming contest? As an exercise in the worship of Lady?

Scarne passed on, heading for Dom’s apartments, savouring the particular atmosphere which the Disk of Hyke shared with no other Wheel establishment he had ever visited (including the roving gaming-ships which plied the fringe worlds) – the sense of special activity, the peculiarity in the acoustics which lent every sound a feeling of echo and distance. The transport was massive, a private world of its own. Aboard were all the people Dom wanted for the jaunt: the mathematical cadre, some council members, certain technicians. And, of course, his team of trained players.

Events had moved suddenly. Word had come that the game was arranged, and a time bracket set. The venue (chosen by the host, as was his right) came as a surprise: not some place well outside man-controlled space, towards the heart of the galaxy, perhaps, the probable home of the Galactic Wheel – but the Cave of Caspar, at the present time heavily invested by Legitimacy forces. The location made Scarne feel uneasy; no one knew the reason for it.

Entering the section of the ship set aside as Dom’s domain, he fought to calm himself. Each time he was called to Dom’s presence he found it harder to reconcile the various feelings he had for the man, fascination, even a certain degree of loyalty, fighting with feelings of disgust and the belief that he alone was in a position to sabotage the potential disaster.

The door to the chairman’s quarters closed behind him. Instantly he was enveloped in the oddly illusory quality of Dom’s apartments, where nothing that one looked at directly was what it had seemed to be out of the corner of the eye. He kept his eyes downcast, not wanting to be distracted by the visual tricks, to glimpse corridors that became blank walls, to be attacked by colourful monsters that turned out to be still-life paintings.

Like all Dom’s domiciles, the apartments had been meticulously constructed according to his personal tastes. Scarne walked through an arrangement resembling a set of Chinese boxes: one room opened on to a smaller room which opened on to a yet smaller room, and so on until the series ended in Dom’s favourite interior: a minute room in which all space was cunningly used, and which could comfortably contain no more than two people.