Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

Dom nodded slowly. Scarne found himself wondering, not for the first time, why Dom seemed to trust the galactics when they were in a position to perpetrate all kinds of trickery on him. But suddenly the answer came to him. For decades Dom had managed the Grand Wheel, and he knew the ethics and habits by which such organizations operated. The Galactic Wheel would not cheat him – or so he believed. It could, Scarne told himself, be another case of occupational delusion.

Ever since the incident with the failed gun, Scarne had been feeling unwell. Now his head began to ache; he felt as if he was stifling in the hot atmosphere of the hut.

Hot? It had not seemed hot when he entered a few minutes ago. He put his hand to his brow. He was feverish.

The skull-headed galactic took the deck from the shuffling-machine, laid it on the table and invited Dom to cut.

As Dom reached for the cards a choking pain seized Scarne in the chest. He fell off his chair, clutching the region of his heart, and then passed out.

He must have been unconscious for only moments, because when he came round Dom and the alien were both helping him back on to his chair. He realized he had suffered a minor heart attack. He sat breathing in gasps, the pain subsiding.

The two players returned to their places. Dom had already drawn a trump card: the Wheel, one of the most powerful in the pack. Now the galactic cut: the Six of Planets.

Blearily gazing at Marguerite Dom in the first moments of his triumph, Scarne was reminded of the Wheel Chairman as he had first met him. There was the same insouciance , the same charm, the over-powering presence, the fastidiousness as to dress; but within it all, hidden from the casual eye, there was the reptilian coldness. Dom was a predator on a large scale, a suave intellectual giant empty of shame or any sense of guilt.

Deftly the galactic inserted the deck in the shuffling-machine again. Scarne became aware of tingling pains in various parts of his body. He put his hand to his neck, the site of one of these pains. A large nodule had suddenly formed there.

He was sprouting instant cancers.

The air of the hut was suffocating him. He sensed that he was dying, rapidly and inexplicably. He forced himself to his feet. ‘Excuse me,’ he mumbled. ‘I… need some fresh air.’

Dom glanced up to him. ‘I wouldn’t go outside if I were you. There’s a lot of interstellar debris in the Cave.’

‘What… do you mean by that?’

Dom shrugged. Scarne staggered to the door, pushed it open, and stepped outside.

He walked a few steps away from the hut, feeling giddy, and looked towards the horizon which was so close that this might have been a toy planet. Then he looked up at the sky; if he had not done so at that moment he might never have seen it.

In fact he was never quite sure afterwards that he had. It was no more than a glimmer, a faint flash as the meteor whizzed through the planetoid’s shallow atmosphere.

The odds against it must have been billions to one. The meteor fell down from space and sheared off Scarne’s left arm.

He stood staring stupidly at the blood-spouting stump. Then, as he felt his knees buckling, he turned to the door and fell back into the hut. The alien rose calmly and came over to him, reaching out to him with his long arms and lifting him into his chair. The creature inspected the stump; Scarne felt him tie something on the flesh.

‘The bleeding has stopped,’ the galactic announced. In a thoughtful tone he added: ‘You are very unlucky.’

‘Yes,’ said a dazed Scarne.

In his shock, his thoughts were calm, piecing it all together. He could see clearly exactly how – and why – Dom was using him.

Luck was not probability, but it acted through probability. It was, so to speak, quantities of probability, a quantitative average throughout the universe. And, like any other fixed quantity, it could only be concentrated or increased at the cost of a diminution elsewhere.

For someone to be made lucky, someone else had to be made unlucky. Dom was using him as the ‘negative pole’ of the process of attracting luck.

So I end up as a dupe, Scarne thought dismally. And Dom, charming, ambitious Dom, wins.

It was the second round: the galactic cut first. The Star Blaze, a reasonably good card, a member of the Minor Superior Set.

Dom cut. The Neutron Ring, a lower card in the same set. Dom frowned, clearly taken aback.

And Scarne suddenly began to feel physically better. He looked at his severed stump. The blood was coagulating with unusual rapidity, sealing off the stump. Soon he would be able, if he wished, to remove the alien’s tourniquet.

‘We cut once more,’ the galactic said to the nonplussed Dom.

The alien shuffled the cards in the machine. Scarne noticed that his cancers had undergone spontaneous remission: the lumps had disappeared. A sense of well-being was flowing through him. He looked at Dom, and saw that the Wheel master had become unnaturally pale.

Dom’s gaze flickered around the hut, resting ferally for a moment on Scarne. Hastily he cut, but did not show or look at the card, motioning instead for the alien to cut for his card.

The galactic cut, and with no outward reaction displayed his card. It was the Dissolver, a card whose surface was made up of a close-grained tracery, or hatchwork, in which images formed according to how it was held. And it was the highest card in the entire deck.

Dom’s face became rigid as he saw the card. He bent to look at his own, then let it drop to the table from limp fingers. It was a card called the Trivia, showing a single drooping flower. It belonged to no set, no suit or grouping, and was the lowest card of the deck, being assigned no positive value.

Something bad was happening to Dom. He tried to rise from his chair but could not; it was as if his abdomen had congested and seized up. His flesh was almost bubbling as the rogue cells of cancer attacked his body at ferocious speed. His skin began to rot. He was falling apart before their eyes.

Rising, Scarne stared down at him, feeling pity but also indignation. ‘You tricked me,’ he accused the dying man. ‘Tried to sacrifice my life for your own ends.’

From his doubled-up position Dom peered up at him. ‘But your life is mine, Cheyne,’ he groaned. ‘You owe it to me. Don’t you remember? A gambling debt. I told you I would remind you of it.’

Remembering the duel, Scarne stepped back. Was Dom trying cynically to justify his treachery, or did he really believe in such a system of morality?

His inner debate was cut short. Dom gave a great groan of agony and fell from his chair. Neither Scarne nor the alien went to his assistance, and while they watched his body began to disintegrate, to dissolve.

In a few seconds not a trace of it remained.

‘He has been drawn into pure randomness,’ the galactic told Scarne. ‘It is sometimes a consequence of the process he was using.’

‘You knew about it?’

The alien rose, put away the cards, and moved the table to one side. ‘It quickly became evident. Were we generous, we might have warned him of the dangers of trying to force luck. If it is manipulated, then it is no longer luck in the proper sense; it becomes a physical force, involving, like all physical forces, action and reaction. The swing of the pendulum can come swiftly.’

‘His good luck turned to bad, in like proportion,’ Scarne observed.

‘That is why we never use any luck-manipulating process.’ While he spoke, the alien seemed to be tidying up the hut, as if preparing to leave. ‘Luck is perhaps the most powerful force that exists, and for that reason the most dangerous. It is in fact the basic force, or glue, that forms entities out of the preternatural randomness. Probability came later.’