Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

Dom nodded.

Scarne stared in fascination while Dom sorted out his starting team, thinking over what that pile meant. He failed to understand how Dom’s mind could encompass so gigantic and final a fact. But there it was.

When the discarded members had retreated, Dom, with Scarne sitting at his right, looked questioningly at the alien. The creature spoke again, in a cordial tone.

‘We will play for twenty hours, or until your stake is exhausted. The bank cannot be broken – it is inexhaustible. There is only one further point for me to mention. To be able to read an opponent’s facial and bodily expression is held by some players to be part of the game. Since in this case the players are of differing biological species and are strangers to one another it would not normally be possible. We have overcome this difficulty by arranging for visual translation. Your opponents will appear to you to be human beings and vice versa.

‘Let us begin.’

All at once the big alien disappeared, together with the chair on which he had been sitting. Immediately following, the table underwent a transformation. It dwindled, drawing in on itself. The obscuring curtain disappeared. The four men found themselves sitting at a smaller circular table, just large enough to comfortably seat eight people.

Facing them were the alien team, aged perhaps between twenty and sixty. Scarne looked at each of their faces in turn. He could find nothing unusual in them. They were not exactly average human beings – they were average-looking professional card players. They were the sort of people he had been staring at over green baize tables all his life.

The scene was delusively familiar. Even the setting was unremarkable, for the architecture of the domed room was nondescript. It could have been anywhere. It was hard to imagine that so much hung on what would transpire between these eight players in the next few hours.

On the table was a deck of cards that the designing machine had in the intervening minutes newly manufactured. One of the aliens picked it up and inserted it into a shuffling machine. When the shuffled deck was ejected he began dealing it round the table, placing the residue in a shoe dispenser of the type used by the Grand Wheel.

Scarne picked up the ten cards dealt him. They were no ordinary cards. Some carried complicated picture symbolism, like the major arcana of the Tarot. Some of the number cards sported coloured decals which responded to thought. By concentrating, he could change their values.

These shifting cards, an elaboration of the principle of the wild joker, were a feature of the game. Even one’s opponents could, in certain circumstances, change the cards in one’s hand.

Dom was straining at the leash, the excitement already building up in him.

The game began.

Depth after depth.

It was already apparent that Dom had early on anticipated what kind of game they would be called on to play. Mutating cards, changing rules, were features of one of the games Scarne had been taught at the Make-Out Club, under the identity machine.

But here were no machine aids; everything was done by strength of mind. The rules of the game were hierarchical; it constructed itself as it went along in a dizzying spiral of strategy, which made each round a consequence of what had gone before.

The objective of the game was to create a symbolic structure out of the cards according to certain definite laws. There was a range of such structures, each comprising a sufficient number of cards to preclude any other similar system from being assembled from the same deck. To win, a team had finally to hold all the requisite cards and no others, neither one too few nor one too many – and the team leader had to announce the fact without ever having seen what his partners held.

The calling of bets, again the business of the team leader, was a close combination of bluff and intention. At the beginning of a round it was rarely possible to envisage the target system with any accuracy; only later did the outlines of a possible structure take shape. Betting began modestly, leaping prodigiously as events progressed, controlled as much by random influences as by the will of the players. Cards were bought unseen for enormous sums; subtle and pernicious double, treble and quadruple bluffs were perpetrated.

Total concentration was necessary; only someone with complete control over his mental faculties could hope to play a game with so many layers of complexity. As the hours passed Scarne became oblivious of his surroundings; the symbols of the deck enveloped him, seeming to constitute the only reality, a new universe in which he and the other players were trapped and destined to live out their lives.

It was rumoured that Kabala could heighten one’s consciousness. With this game, the promise was kept. Scarne broke new mental ground, his brain working with a speed he had never experienced before. It was like being reborn.

Then, after seven hours, Dom called a break. Scarne brought himself down to earth with difficulty; it was like coming out of a trance.

He was covered with perspiration. So, he noticed, was Dom.

Dom rose, bowing stiffly to the other side of the table.

‘If it’s all the same to you, I would like to play two a side from now on.’

The alien players glanced at one another. As they got the feel of the cards, both sides had by common consent already reduced their teams to three. The leader, depicted by visual translation as young and suave, nodded.

‘That suits us perfectly.’

The solmen took themselves to a buffet on their side of the dome; the aliens retreated to a corresponding facility in their half. Dom’s redundant players, some of whom had been trying to follow the game, gathered round. Dom, however, took a single shot of whisky and spoke only to his co-players.

‘Cheyne,’ he said tensely, ‘you and I are going in together. We’re in trouble.’

Scarne could not help but agree. Although they had won more rounds than the aliens – had constructed more metaphysical systems – the wagering was so complicated that the aliens were actually far ahead of them. Dom’s stock was already one-half depleted.

‘Two points,’ Dom told Scarne. ‘First, we have to concentrate less on systems-building as a target and more on winning side-bets. They can be more important than the ultimate outcome – that’s something they’ve tumbled to sooner than we have. They’ve latched on to the second point well ahead of us, too. The symbols involved in this deck are very potent – much more so than those of the Tarot. It’s possible by means of this game to alter your opponent’s mentality and hence to gain control over it – the team that happens to loses everything . I think they’ve already started building their strategy on that. And some of us have been falling for it. Even you, Cheyne.’

Scarne reflected, thinking over the mental changes he had been experiencing. He nodded soberly.

‘I think you may be right.’

‘We’ve got to win everything back, and then some. Are you ready? Let’s go.’

Scarne downed his whisky and finished his bread roll, then they rejoined the aliens at the table. Each pair of partners now faced one another, and he looked briefly into Dom’s eyes before beginning. It was impossible to tell what the Wheel chief was feeling. Desperation? Fascination? Or only pleasure in the game, still?

It was Scarne’s turn to deal. He sent the cards round the table, ten to a hand, then picked up his own and studied them, the number cards, the stable picture cards, the inner and outer sets.

He suddenly felt the slight mental jolt, like a missed heartbeat, that meant someone was practising thought-change on a card. With surprise he saw that it was one of his own cards that was mutating. He fought back, using his own control to keep the card from transforming. What, he thought, was the object of the manoeuvre? Play had not begun; his opponents had no clue as to the cards he held.