He gobbled a breakfast tab and looked at his hands. They were shaking. He was playing with big trouble, and he was afraid.
Calming himself, he dialed Myra’s number. She appeared on the screen, looking awake and unafraid, and they exchanged light banter for a moment or two before Mantell explained that he had called to arrange a date for lunch with her at the Pleasure Dome.
“Meet you there in ninety minutes,” she said. “Outside the ninth-level dining hall.”
“Right.”
He broke the contact and started to dress. He killed the better part of an hour pacing tensely around his room, then went downstairs and found a cab to take him to the Pleasure Dome.
Myra met him there on time, to the minute, and once again they took the table near the window, drawing much attention from the service-robots. They had a brief, nervous lunch: chlorella steak and fried diamante potatoes, with splits of golden Livresae beer. They had replaced the freeform table with a crystal-topped affair in which strange green-hued horned fish swam proudly and serenely. Neither Mantell nor the girl said very much. Both seemed to be under a sort of cloud.
Myra said finally, breaking a long silence, “Ben called you this morning, didn’t he?”
Mantell nodded. “That man seems to have taken a liking to me. I guess something in my psychprobe chart must have impressed him.”
She laughed softly and drained her beer, all but the foam. “Something in your psychprobe chart impressed everybody who saw it, Johnny. We can’t figure out why you let yourself drift so long on Mulciber.”
“I told you. Pressure of circumstances.”
“According to your chart, you’re the sort who pushes circumstances around to suit himself, not the other way.”
Mantell laughed cynically. “Maybe Dr. Harmon is getting senile, then. I haven’t been doing much pushing around. I’ve been getting pushed.”
“It’s puzzling, then. According to the chart there’s a real and solid core of toughness in you. Ben spotted that in a flash, the second old Harmon brought your graphs in from the lab for him to look at. That guy Mantell’s got something,” Ben said. “Ican use him.”
“I guess I hide my self-reliance well, then,” Mantell said. He was remembering the shambling unshaven figure who was himself, weaving drunkenly over the shining sands of Port Mulciber, pleadingly cadging cheap drinks from sympathetic tourists. He wondered where that alleged core of toughness had been hiding all those lost years of beachcombing.
They fell silent for another few moments, while Mantell spun conflicting thoughts in his mind. Then he said, “Last night, just before you said good night, you made a strange remark. You ”
Terror suddenly appeared on her face, altering it for a flashing microsecond into a white mask of fear. She said, “That was just—a sort of a joke. Or a hope. Ill tell you more about it some day—maybe. I asked you not to be impatient.”
“I can’t help it. That’s a lousy thing to do—I mean, dropping a lead that way and then not following through. But I won’t try to push you. I’m starting to discover that you can’t be pushed.”
“There’s a good boy,” she said. She fingered the empty split of beer and said, “I want another of these beers. Then I’ll take you up and give you the five-chip guided tour of the Dome’s other amusement areas.”
They had another beer apiece and left, Myra flashing her pass to take care of the check and the suave robot headwaiter nodding understandingly.
They moved past the barriers into the lift tube and rode upward one stop, to the tenth level. There they emerged in a hall lined with black onyx and gleaming chalcedony. Voices shrilled in noisy cacophony farther ahead down the corridor.
“There are eight casinos on this floor,” Myra said. “They operate twenty-four hours a day.”
Suddenly she turned down a narrower corridor; Man-tell followed and the corridor opened out abruptly into a room the size of the ballroom they had visited the night before.
He was blinded by myriad pinwheeling lights. Spirals of circling radiance danced in the air. Noise, gaiety, color bombarded him. Richly dressed Starhavenites were everywhere.
“Most of these people are professional gamblers,” Myra whispered to him. “Some of them practically live in here, around the clock. Last month Mark Chantal had a run of luck on the rotowheel table and played for eight days without stopping. Toward the end he had a couple of companions feeding him lurobrin tablets by the bushel to keep him awake and fed. But by the time he decided to quit he had won eleven million chips.”
Mantell whistled appreciatively. “I’ll bet the house must have hated that!”
“The house is Ben Thurdan,” Myra said. “He didn’t hate it. He was here cheering Chantal on for the last two days of the run. That’s the way Ben is.”
Mantell glanced dizzily around the crowded hall. Gaming devices of every sort were in profuse evidence, ringed round the gleaming concourse. Some of the tables were tended by robots, others by attractive young women with sweet voices and daring costumes. In the back of the big casino Mantell saw a row of card tables; sleek-faced house operators waited there, willing to take on all comers in any kind of game.
“What shall we play?” Myra asked.
Mantell shrugged. “How do I pick one game out of all this?”
“Go ahead. The rotowheel? Swirly? Or should we try our luck at radial dice?”
Mantell licked his hps and picked out a table almost at random. “Let’s start over here,” he said, indicating the green baize surface of a nearby radial dice table.
It did not seem overcrowded. Four or five smartly dressed gamblers clustered around it, studying the elaborate system of pitfalls and snares that inhibited the free fall of the dice, making alterations in the system and placing their bets.
The house man was a robot. He waited, his metal face frozen in a perpetual cynical smile, his complex circuity computing the odds as they changed from one moment to the next.
Mantell frowned thoughtfully as he stared at the board. He drew a ten-chip bill from his wallet and started to put it down. Suddenly Myra touched his arm.
“Don’t bet yet,” she murmured tensely. “There’s going to be trouble.”
Slowly, he turned to follow her gaze. He was aware that the big room had become strangely quiet. Everyone was apparently staring with keen intensity at a newcomer who had just entered.
Mantell studied him. The stranger was remarkably tall—six feet eight, at a conservative estimate—and his face was chalk-pale. A livid scar ran jaggedly across his left cheek, standing out in odd contrast against his colorless skin. He was skeleton thin and wore black-and-white diamond-checked harlequin tights and a skin-tight gray-and-gold shirt.
A glittering blaster was strapped to his side just above his left hip. He was an arresting figure, standing quietly alone near the entrance.
“Who is he?” Mantell asked.
“Leroy Marchin. Everyone thought he left Starhaven more than a month ago. He shouldn’t be here. Oh, the idiot! Stay here.”
She started across the floor toward the other. Ignoring her order, Mantell followed him. The silence in the room shattered, finally, as a croupier began his droning chant once again. Myra seemed to have forgotten all about Mantell, now that Marchin, whoever he was, had arrived.
As Mantell drew near the pair he heard Marchin say, “Hello, Myra.” His voice was deep but without resonance; it sounded hollow.
“What are you doing here?” Myra demanded. “Don’t you know that Ben—?”