The shuttle wooshed skywards, leaving lo’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. Scame shared a seat with Hervold and Caiman in the large, comfortable lounge. � 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, Scame noticed a piece of jewelery dangling from his wrist: a little wheel of gridded gold.
“I’ll bet you feel good to wear that,” Scame ventured.
Hervold glanced at the trinket and scowled. “Sure.”
Scame 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.”
Scame 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 sardonically, tum—
21
ing to the servit. He brought green-tinted jamboks for the three of them.
The Wheel men were unwilling to talk further. Scame 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, sigil 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 formats.
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, Scame 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, be 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, Scame 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
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Wheel anymore. By now the proliferous 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.
He sat back while the shuttle steadily filled up with uniformed men. Caiman stirred. He looked at the officers with an expression that showed increasing disgust.
Finally he spoke for the first time since lo. “Just look at those punks,” he said loudly. “Did you ever see such a pack of deadbeats?” He took something from his breast pocket and handed it to Scame. “Here, just take a look at this. Doesn’t it make you sick?”
Scame shook loose the tiny, infinitely foldable news-sheet into readable size and scanned the headlines. The sheet had been printed on lo. It told in detail of the Hopula disaster, of Legitimacy forces falling back across hundreds of light years, of man being forced out of territories he had believed were his.
“The goddamned Hadranics are coming closer every day,” the Wheel heavy said in a hard-edged voice. “It’s time those Legit generals started putting some guts into it, because in a few years they could be right here in Sol.”
23
Chapter Three
The desert was bone-yellow. In the south a sun of a much brighter yellow, the color of sulphur, hovered a third of the way between the horizon and the meridian, looking down on the temporary installations like a baleful eye.
A thin-faced youth, aged fifteen or sixteen, stared at the sun with sullen fear. Suddenly he shivered and tore his gaze away. “I’m cold!” he yelped in a cracked voice. “Get me a cloak, you!”
The burly crewman he had addressed looked at him disdainfully. “Tell me, sonny, have you ever shaved?”
The youth flushed and rounded on Hakandra. �My price is doubled!” he croaked. “I won’t take insults!”
Hakandra moved his hand placatingly. “Forget it, Shane. It was just a silly remark.”
“Nevertheless it has doubled my price. Or do you think you can do without my services? All right then, do without them. I renounce my obligations as of now. Perhaps the sun is due to explode tomorrow, in the next hour, the next minute. Perhaps it has already begun to explode-I won’t tell you.”
“Are you gonna let yourself bum up too?” the crewman grunted, and walked away.
Hakandra scowled after his retreating back, making a mental note to put in a disciplinary memo. He slipped off his own cloak and draped it round the shoulders of the shivering boy. In fact the air was not at all cold. The lad was suffering from nerves, as usual.
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“Let’s get back to the ship,” he said. “No use our hanging around here.”
They set off up the slope towards the starship which rested on the crest of the hill. “Do you get any murmurs?” Hakandra asked quietly. “No, it’s quiet.”
The youth walked in silence for a while, and then started whining. “Can’t we leave this Godforsaken hole? I don’t like it here … how much longer?”
“No, Shane, we’re not leaving. We’ve a great deal of work to do yet. And please don’t let me hear any more talk about increasing your fee. That was all agreed back in Sol.”
“You want my power to dry up, don’t you? You’re all of you going the right way about it to make my power dry up; it’s not absolutely reliable, you know. Where would you be then?”
“Probably quite safe,” Hakandra replied in a level voice. “But you’re not going to dry up, Shane-you’re not stupid. You know how important all this is.” He stopped, looking around him at the ochre sun and purple sky. “This is where the outcome of the war will be decided. Victory or defeat.”
They entered the big starship, riding an elevator up through its many decks. Hakandra sent Shane to rest in his quarters. Then he made bis way to the corn room.
Every day at about this time he spent a few minutes talking to other workteams scattered about the Cave. As he entered the room the techs were accepting narrowbeams from here and there, holding them on-line. Hakandra sat down before a holo screen and had one put through to him. On the screen a lean face emerged, wearing a peaked uniform hat bearing Legitimacy markings. It was the leader of team Dl.
The team leader’s face was bleak, wavering slightly, the narrowbeam vacillating over the vast distance. “There’s been a nova on the outward side,” he told Hakandra. “Team K5 was there-without a cold-senser.” ;
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“No survivors, then?” Hakandra responded after a moment, bis heart sinking.