He shook the dice in his hand and threw a seven. He threw four more sevens, then switched to eleven.
In a games-conscious civilization the weighted dice were but one item in a long and colourful history of cheating devices. Cheating at cards, for instance, was a science all of its own; it had a tradition of ingenuity that made it almost honourable in some eyes. Locaters, shiners, marked cards of inexhaustible variety, strippers both concave and convex, change-cards whose surface mutated and could assume the value of any card in the deck – the mechanics of it was endless, not to speak of sleight of hand, which in some practitioners had reached almost superhuman levels.
The ultimate in cheating devices was probably the holdout robot, given its name from the ancient (but still used) hold-out machine, a device strapped to the arm which delivered either a set of cards or a cold deck into the hand. The hold-out robot was a proxie player, a nearly undetectable man-like robot which entered play but remained in touch with its owner who looked through its eyes and partly controlled it. More than a mere waldo, the hold-out proxie had its own brain and such a sublime sense of touch that it never needed to use trick shuffles or any other gimmick. It could take a deck in its fingers and count the cards down by touch alone, cutting to obtain any card it wanted. It could keep track of every individual card through shuffles and deals and so always knew what everybody was holding.
Hold-out robots had gone out of fashion recently, though. It was becoming easier to detect them. The last one Scarne had heard about had been smashed to pieces, right there in the card-room.
At ten the annunciator toned. Scarne, who had become increasingly more nervous during the past half-hour, checked the door monitor. Two men stood outside, both snappily dressed. One was big, and had an air of restrained violence: the heavy. The other was smaller, more like a functionary.
He let them in. The heavy looked around the apartment in a cool, professional manner. ‘Is this place bonded?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Right. We don’t have to worry about it.’
The other spoke, mildly but firmly. ‘We’re here to take you to see some people, Professor Scarne. Don’t expect to be back in a hurry. Unless you have any substantial objections, I suggest we leave now.’
Scarne coughed, found his voice. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Earth. The planliner leaves in half an hour.’
‘Could you tell me exactly what I’m wanted for?’ Scarne asked, stumbling over the words. The Wheel man made no direct answer, but merely stared at him. Do you not understand your good fortune? his eyes seemed to say. You’re being taken into the employment of the Grand Wheel. You’ll be a Wheel man, like me, a member of the most powerful brotherhood in the human world.
Scarne picked up the hold-all he had already prepared. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.
A car was waiting in the street below. Scarne sat in the back, sandwiched between his two escorts, while they rode through the town.
‘What are your names?’ he asked boldly.
The smaller man gestured to his companion, then to himself. ‘Caiman. Hervold.’
‘We’re going to Earth, you say. At least you can tell me where on Earth.’
‘Just Earth.’ Hervold smiled wryly. ‘We just do our job, that’s all.’
‘Of course.’ Scarne peered out of the car window, watching the buildings speeding past.
The shuttle whooshed skywards, leaving Io’s miniature landscape laid neatly out below. The towers of Maintown jutted up like a crop of metal whiskers. The atmosphere plant on the outskirts looked like an Earth-type stadium, exhaling the gases of life.
In less than a minute they were above the shallow atmosphere and in darkness. The shuttle pushed its passenger tube into the hull of the planliner; there were clinking sounds and sudden, small movements. Then smoothly and imperceptibly the inertial engines took hold, hurling the planliner on a brief geodesic to Earth.
The planliner was about half full. Scarne shared a seat with Hervold and Caiman in the large, comfortable lounge. If he remembered correctly, the journey would take around an hour at this time of the year.
He pulled a sealed deck of cards from his pocket. ‘Care to play?’
‘No thanks,’ Hervold said. A servit entered the lounge and began wheeling between the zigzag rows of seats, offering drinks and smokes. Hervold beckoned the machine over. As he did so, Scarne noticed a piece of jewellery dangling from his wrist: a little wheel of gridded gold.
‘I’ll bet you feel good to wear that,’ Scarne ventured.
Hervold glanced at the trinket and scowled. ‘Sure.’
Scarne realized he had been personal. Wheel people were touchy about the emblem of their order.
The other’s gaze focused on his throat. ‘I see you’re not travelling alone, either,’ he said. ‘You believe in Lady. That’s interesting.’
Scarne fingered the image of Lady, goddess of luck, that hung from his neck. ‘It’s not that I’m religious,’ he explained. ‘I don’t believe in Lady as an actual being. More as an impersonal force or principle.’
‘Don’t we all,’ Hervold replied sarcastically, turning to the servit. He bought green-tinted jamboks for the three of them.
The Wheel men were unwilling to talk further. Scarne drank his jambok. Then he fell into a reverie.
In a half doze, he seemed to see the wheel symbol spinning dizzily, throwing off probability in all directions. The Wheel, most ancient of man’s symbols, sign of chance, image of eternity. The Wheel of Fortune, the Tarot pack called it. Elsewhere it was known as the Wheel of Life. The randomatic equations also had a cyclic form, as had the equations used in most fermats.
The Grand Wheel had probably chosen the symbol fortuitously to begin with, back in the days when it had been no more than a semi-criminal gambling syndicate, before it had developed into a political and ideological power well able to withstand the onslaughts of its arch-enemy, the Legitimacy government. It might once have signified no more than a roulette wheel or some such device. But now it had come to mean much more. It was curious, Scarne thought, how the Grand Wheel had swallowed itself in its own symbolism, as if hypnotized by its own mystique, delving, for instance, into the arcana of the Tarot pack, and generally indulging in the mystico-symbolism that it was so easy to associate with the laws of chance.
Had the world always been like this, he wondered? Hustlers and hold-out robots, instantly addictive drugs administered by government agencies, a perpetual struggle between law and hazard. Had civilization always been dichotomic? Or would one side, the Legitimacy or the Grand Wheel, eventually vanquish the other? Probably not, Scarne thought. The Wheel was scornful of, rather than antagonistic to, the Legitimacy’s obsession for predictability and control, for eradicating chance hazard. It did not seek to replace the government, merely to tap mankind’s gambling instinct which the Legitimacy abhorred. And the Legitimacy would never rid society of the Grand Wheel, either; its tentacles were too deep. Indeed, the Legitimacy itself could scarcely do without the Grand Wheel any more. By now the proliferating gaming houses, the interstellar numbers service, the randomatic sweepstakes, were only froth on the Wheel’s activities; the Wheel alone, for instance, had the ability to keep the huge interstellar economy running smoothly, applying to the stock and commodity exchanges the same randomatic principles that governed the fermat networks.
Scarne awoke with a start, realizing that he must have dozed off. They had reached parking orbit and the passengers were splitting up, some going to Luna and some to Earth. A trifle blearily, he followed Hervold and Caiman into the Earth shuttle for the short hop. As he took his seat he saw that the shuttle was accepting passengers from another planliner, too. They were mostly military officers; they seemed, like him, in low spirits and short of sleep.