Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

He turned to Hakandra. ‘There’s another kind of machine in one of the Wheel tents,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll take any notice, but if I were you I’d have it destroyed.’

‘Oh? Why is that?’

Scarne smiled. ‘There’s too much luck attached to it.’

Marguerite Dom’s sojourn in the gulf of randomness was not an eternity of chaos, as it turned out.

Like everything else, he kept bubbling to the surface of it, re-forming, melting and dissolving again; finding himself in little regions of stability, finding himself to be a wandering ghost in the fog-like limbo, a mote in the foaming sea of nullity, or something incomprehensible in some other of its aspects.

He never felt as if he had been there long, not even when someone plucked at his sleeve and he turned to come face to face with an old colleague.

‘We’re not really here, you know,’ Pawarce told him, looking round himself shiftily. ‘Nobody exists here – except ghosts, like us.’

‘How long have you been here?’ Dom asked.

‘There isn’t any time here. A million years, maybe.’ His face was ugly as he looked at Dom. ‘I’m glad you ended up here too. It serves you damned well right.’

Dom moved away but Pawarce followed him, hanging on to his arm and leaning close. He pointed. ‘See that, Marguerite? Over there?’

Dom followed his finger. In the mist, so faint he wasn’t sure if he saw it or not, was an arch, like a faded rainbow.

‘What is it?’

‘Up there, where real things exist, people play games. Well, not people, exactly. Beings, cleverer than us. Sometimes when they play, new worlds and universes are formed. Sometimes you can walk into them. I’ve been waiting a long time to see if that one would form. Now it’s ready. But we have to go now or it will separate. Do you see it, Marguerite? A new world, a chance to start over somewhere else! To exist again!’

Dom hung back. ‘What will it be like?’

Pawarce pulled a face. ‘Who knows, till we get there?’

‘That’s right, who knows?’

Together they walked towards the dimly shining arch.

It was only a small mugger in a cheap bar. Cheyne Scarne was thumbing in coins and winning, winning, winning.

His luck was draining away by weeks, days, hours, but still it was fun. He smiled wryly as the sparks came up and the tokens came tinkling out of the play slot.

A small, dapper man came up to him. ‘Say, how do you do that?’ ‘Luck.’

He turned away from the machine, unwilling to get into conversation, and sat down at a table near the bar. Curiously, he never won jackpots. Jackpots weren’t really good luck; they changed the recipient’s life, not always for the better.

It amused him, too, to think that his winnings were paid out by the Galactic Wheel now; were the subject, probably, of accounts at the centre of the galaxy. So far, though, there had been no outward sign of the galactics’ take-over. And he had been unable to prise anything out of the Wheel men he knew.

What would happen, he asked himself, if the Hadranics should break through the Legitimacy’s newly constituted defence line? Would the Galactic Wheel move to prevent the invasion so as to protect its pitch? He suspected not. They were more subtle, more practical. They would simply make sure that their property remained profitable in the new set-up. They might even encourage an invasion, if it meant more business.

Contemplating the possibility brought Scarne a sense of unreality. Sometimes he had the feeling that the whole sequence of events he had suffered, beginning with his first being picked up by the SIS, was the result of a game being played elsewhere in the universe. It was better not to think about it.

Every so often Scarne glanced at the door, in expectation of yet one more piece of luck.

Why not? It should happen, he told himself. At first he had been expecting, and now he was only hoping, that his luck would rub off enough so that Cadence Mellors would somehow find her way out of that work camp and back to him. According to his luck, he should see her walking through a door somewhere, some day. That was why he spent so much of his time in bars.

He took a swallow of his drink, and then looked up again. A girl had just entered the bar; for a moment he thought it was Cadence. At a glance the resemblance was remarkable, and it was not just a matter of physiognomy. Like Cadence, she was no longer very young; a little faded, more than a little jaded by life. But it was not Cadence.

She smiled. He smiled.

He continued staring at her, feeling familiar pangs.

His luck was running out. But it was still working for him. Within limits.

She was not Cadence.

But she would do.

Age of Adventure

Annihilation Factor

Collision with Chronos

Empire of Two Worlds

Sinners of Erspia

Star Winds

The Fall of Chronopolis

The Forest of Peldain

The Garments of Caean

The Grand Wheel

The Great Hydration

The Pillars of Eternity

The Rod of Light

The Soul of the Robot

The Star Virus

The Zen Gun

The Knights of the Limits

The Seed of Evil

Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008) was born in Birmingham and began writing science fiction in his early teens. After serving in the RAF, he took up freelance writing on features, serials and picture strips, mostly in the juvenile field, before returning to straight SF. He was a regular contributor to the influential New Worlds magazine and an early voice in the New Wave movement.

Enter the SF Gateway…

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.