Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

‘What would the stake be in such a case?’ Scarne asked tartly.

She shrugged. ‘Or there’s power. It’s possible to win power inside the Wheel, a high-ranking position.’

‘You can win influence in the Wheel hierarchy? In a game of chance?’ Scarne was amazed.

‘It’s like an esoteric society,’ she repeated. ‘On the higher circuits there are grades and degrees; you gain them by winning games of greater and greater difficulty. That’s how rank is decided. Hell, you could have got a long way if you really can play Kabala. Not now, though. I think they want you for something special.’

‘Do you have to be in the Wheel hierarchy already to play these games? Or can you come in direct from outside?’

She smiled. ‘Theoretically it’s possible for an outsider to become a member of the inner council just by playing one game. I can’t imagine that happening. But people do try to gamble their way into the lower circuits. We gain control of quite a few Legit officials that way. You have to be able to put up the stake, you see. You must already have power on the outside. If you lose, you owe that power to the Wheel. But if people win they invariably come over to us – so we can’t really lose, whatever happens.’

‘And the Grand Wheel grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger,’ Scarne said. He deliberated sombrely. ‘Suppose the Wheel had a chance to gamble everything it has gained. Do you reckon they’d do it?’

‘I don’t know. How could it happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. The idea had just come to him, out of the blue. But the question was not meaningless. Centuries ago a gambling organization would not, itself, have been composed of gamblers; it would have preyed on them. Today, he intuited, the case was different. They had made a religion of the thrills of hazard and chance.

‘You’ve been in the Wheel a long time, haven’t you?’ he said suddenly, looking up at her. ‘All your life.’

‘Since I was seventeen.’ She took a cigar from a box on the dresser, and sat on the bed with Scarne while she lit it, blowing out a streamer of aromatic smoke. ‘I was living with a man who was an operative. He brought me in as a club girl. Afterwards I just hung around.’

‘Do you think you did the right thing?’ He looked at her curiously.

‘Sure.’ She glanced at him. ‘Life can be hard. Outside, I don’t think I’d have what it takes to weather the knocks. I wouldn’t understand what I understand now. The Wheel teaches you that everything happens by chance. It’s all random, good or bad. So nothing is really your own fault – you couldn’t have done anything about it. Realizing that makes life easier.’

‘You make it sound as if it hasn’t been all that easy,’ he said cautiously.

‘I like to think of the story of two people meeting on a bridge. Suppose there are two people whose lives would be transformed if they were to meet one another. One day they both cross the same bridge in opposite directions. It’s possible that they will both cross at the same moment, and that something will happen to bring them together. Then people say they were “destined for one another”. But that’s all rubbish. They could miss one another by hours, by minutes or seconds, or they could simply pass by without really noticing one another. Out of millions of potentially miraculous meetings, one or two are bound to come off. It’s the law of averages.’ She shrugged again, a trifle sourly. ‘The rest of us miss our chance.’

‘Some people seem to get more than their fair share of coincidences,’ Scarne pointed out. ‘They’re always meeting on bridges.’

He paused. ‘Do you believe in luck?’

‘Luck? No. It doesn’t exist. There’s just chance. People who believe in luck don’t understand the laws of probability. Chance doesn’t mean everybody gets the same . Everybody gets something different; that’s what makes games possible – that’s why life is a game, isn’t it?’ She gazed at him coolly. ‘Probability alone ensures that there are a few who always have fortunate accidents and a few who always have unfortunate accidents. Then there’s the great mass of us in the mediocre middle. Whereabouts are you?’

Scarne laughed. ‘That’s what’s known as the bell-shaped curve.’

‘So Jerry keeps telling me.’

‘But all gamblers believe in luck.’ He fingered his dangling necklace. ‘Lady. Anyone can tell you it comes in runs. You have to know when you’re on a winning streak and when you’re on a loser. People still touch someone they think has luck, to try to get some of it.’

‘But that’s probability again, isn’t it? They learn how to predict probability .’ She nudged him in the ribs. ‘Come on, Professor, I don’t have to tell you this. You’re the randomatician!’

‘That’s just it,’ he sighed. ‘Randomaticians have never decided whether luck exists or not.’

She had put her finger on the point of difficulty. Luck – if it really was a separate universal entity – didn’t contradict probability; it worked through probability. Mathematically, no one had ever succeeded in separating them – as far as he knew, rumours apart.

It was hard, too, to find empirical evidence for the existence of luck. He thought of the really great players, the ones who seemed to know what the cards were, to intuit it, to feel it without working it out. Was that evidence? No, he decided; it had to be some sort of psychic perception, a rudimentary new faculty. Luck didn’t come from within. It struck from outside: the dazzling glances of Lady, lighting on only a few.

What fantastic power it would mean to be able to manipulate luck, he thought. To be able to achieve anything practically by wishing for it. No wonder the Legitimacy wanted it.

But if Cadence knew anything about the new discovery she was keeping that knowledge well hidden. Scarne believed her scornful disclaimers. Belief in Lady was not deeply ingrained in Wheel people on the whole. Oddly enough, Legitimacy people were more inclined to believe in her. She offered the hope of certainty, a quality they craved.

It was depressing to realize how little he knew about the Wheel, in whose shadow he had lived for so long. Much of what Cadence had said was new to him.

‘The Wheel never took much interest in me before,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m not really their type. More a randomatician than a pure gambler, perhaps. But why do they suddenly want me now?’

‘It isn’t just you. They’re pulling in a lot of people like you, people with your kind of talent.’ She spoke in a low, guarded tone. ‘I think it’s something to do with the war.’

‘The war? What does the Wheel want with the war?’

He recalled Caiman’s bitterness and contempt when they had seen the military officers on the Earth shuttle. But Cadence said nothing further and Scarne sat brooding. Perhaps things weren’t going his way after all.

The cards in Scarne’s hand each carried two symbols: a number and a geometrical figure, either a triangle, a square, a pentagon or a six-pointed star. It was the combination of the two that gave the card its value – in fact, each card had three values, according to the situation it found itself in. There were no such things as suits: neither numbers nor figures could be grouped together. They had to be set off one against the other by a process of rapid mental arithmetic.

Scarne had come across a deck similar to this one before, but the game he was playing was entirely new, and superbly difficult. It was a game within a game, a game whose rules were themselves subject to the game. Any player could, if he held the right cards, change the rules of the game, his own cards, his opponents’ cards, the other players. Nothing could be known with certainty. The rules were hierarchical, each subject to others in an ascending series, producing dizzying problems of strategy.