Perhaps the reward of changed consciousness came only to the winner. Because Dom, of course, won. Two hours later the Wheel master sat back silently,
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eyes glazed, drawing meditatively on his cigarette holder and blowing out puffs of smoke.
“You play well, Scarne,” he said at length. “One day, perhaps, you will be able to beat me.”
Scame felt that he had passed the final test. Whatever the scheme was that was afoot, he was hi it.
“How did you like it?” Dom murmured. “Your first game?”
“It was taxing-but satisfying. Very satisfying. To tell you the truth I’ve never been sure if I was equal to it.” Scame, in fact, felt drained.
Dom inclined his head in’an abbreviated nod. “It sorts out the men from the boys, all right. If you can play Kabala you can play anything-and that’s an established fact. That’s why we need men like you.”
Dom rose, pushing away his chair and stretching, so that he seemed to loom over Scame. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Come with me.”
Full of anticipation, Scame followed. Dom led him to even deeper levels of the manse. They went down in an elevator (Scame experiencing an embarrassed, privileged nervousness to be sharing the cubicle with so unique a personage), and then down a winding staircase to a concrete cellar.
The denouement was not what he had expected. At one end of the cellar, fed by dozens of pipes and cables and surrounded by humming machinery, stood a glass tank filled either with a liquid or a dense gas-it was hard to tell which. It provided a murky, brownish-purple environment which was inhabited by a flapping, aquatic-looking shape.
Dom stepped before the tank and gazed into it with an ironic expression. “The sequence of events that have led to your coming here began with the arrival in Sol of this creature,” he told Scame. “We call him Pendragon-just a name, no particular significance. As for his origin, it hardly matters; he’s been everywhere. He really is travelled-like all hustlers.” Dom was chuckling, as though at some joke known to himself. Scame peered closer. The creature, resembling no
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it? Or perhaps it’s to represent the wheel of the galaxy. As yet we’re not sure whether they are restricted to this galaxy only, or if they actually originate from outside. That’s why we’ve tried to get Pendragon to tell us something about Andromeda, but his knowledge of that quarter is sketchy.”
“Then your game,” Scarne said quietly, “is with them.”
“Yes!” Dom’s eyes became lustrous. “A game with the Galactic Wheel-that’s what this is all about. With the help of Pendragon we eventually made contact. Now we’re on the verge of setting something up.”
“Are the Hadranics anything to do with this? I heard this training programme was something to do with the war.”
Dom shook his head. “We’re not interested in them. We’re thinking on a bigger scale. We aren’t the sort of people to stay huddled in our own little comer, collecting pennies, now we know what’s going on out there in the wider world. If this Galactic Wheel exists we want a piece of it. I think we’ve got what it takes to get it.”
“How do you know you can play your way inside this galactic thing?” Scarne asked. “You might just stay punters. How intelligent are they? How much experience have they got? Do you even know any of this?”
Dom moved his shoulders in a sinuous motion. “They could be millions of years old for all we know,” he admitted. “But we’ve a thousand years of experience ourselves. I think we’re out of the kindergarten stage. After all, Pendragon made the mistake of underestimating us.” He leaned closer. “I taught him to play Kabala, you know. Offered him his freedom if he could beat me. But he’s quite hopeless at it. Can barely play at all.”
There was a sudden surge of movement at the back of the tank. The fluid roiled and became congested. A bunch of plastic plaques, oblong in shape, were flung towards them to splatter against the near wall of
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the tank, spinning and tumbling in the murk, displaying the colored Tarot figures etched on them: Pendragon’s special pack.
“And if this game comes off,” Scame said, “what will the stakes be?”
Dom’s expression became veiled. The hint of a smile played at the corners of his mouth. “That,” he said, “is the big question.”
After Scame had left for Luna, Marguerite Dom received a briefer, rarer visitor.
Historically the interview was unique, though since it was held in secret it would remain unrecorded. Never before had a meeting taken place between the Chairman of the Grand Wheel and the Premier of the Legitimacy. And even now it would have seemed unthinkable, to the public mind, that the Premier should have been the one to make the move, to request the meeting, and to travel to the demesne of Marguerite Dom.
Dom reposed himself in his main lounge to await the Premier’s arrival, permitting himself feelings neither of triumph nor of curiosity. When Premier Mheert entered, he found him to be a fair copy of the personality profile he had already studied: a white-haired man of about Dom’s age, with flinty blue eyes, a strong, prominent nose, and a face that displayed an obdurate, committed character.
They wasted no time in dispensing pleasantries. Mheert, his subdued tone expressing how burdensome he found the necessity for his visit, told Dom that the war situation was grave. Every effort would be needed to beat back the Hadranics. War production would have to be expanded. For this, industry would have to be re-directed. Otherwise there was a possibility of total military collapse.
The Legitimacy, regrettably, did not have enough practical power to achieve the necessary rationalization. Too much commercial influence-the huge stock and commodity exchanges, the banks, the commercial
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houses-was under the aegis of the Grand Wheel. To avert catastrophe, therefore, the Legitimacy had need of an unprecedented cooperation from the Wheel.
Dom listened to this argument coolly, and when the Premier had finished he fitted another purple cigarette into his long holder, blowing out fragrant streamers. The Grand Wheel was not a government, he pointed out, and had none of the responsibilities of a government. The conduct of the war was, entirely and absolutely, a matter for the Legitimacy.
Mheert was shocked and indignant at his refusal. “Do you not understand the consequences? We have our backs to the wall. We are all in this together!”
Dom made a proposal of his own. “You’re asking us to bail you out because you can’t handle this thing on your own,” he said. “You’re asking me, in effect, to save humanity for you. All right, we’ll cooperate on the industrial side-if you can meet the price. Something reciprocal and condign.”
“And what is that?” asked Mheert suspiciously. “The Legitimacy becomes our property.” Mheert snorted, aghast. “You want to own mankind!”
“Yes!” Dom’s eyes blazed. “If we pull it out of the fire, it belongs to us. We are not for hire, Premier. I’m putting you the same deal you just put to me. � you want to hold off the Hadranics, move over.”
“It is impossible. You cannot simply take over the government. There would be chaos.”
Dom’s expression mellowed. “We don’t want to be the government. We want the Legitimacy to stay on in that role. The only difference will be that you’ll be in thrall to us. You’ll make a secret covenant with us. Nobody will know about it for the present, maybe not ever. I don’t even say we’ll necessarily ever invoke that covenant. But it will be there if we want to.”
“To destroy everything we have tried to achieve-to plunge humanity into disorder, superstition, random activity!” Mheert spoke with passion-the passion of a man who had spent his life trying to construct a
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civilization that was durable, in control of itself, and not subject to the contingencies of nature. Always the fight had been against nature’s tendency to disorder, to chance and hazard. Mheert saw mankind as fighting a perpetual war against these destructive natural forces-and he saw the Grand Wheel as merely an extension of the same forces, capitulating to them by reason of its evil philosophy and threatening any hope for the future.
“It won’t be so bad,” Dom said boldly. “The basic ideology of you people is that you can build a civilization so solid that it will always be able to resist the shocks of chance. That’s a rigid concept; and anyway it can’t be done. In the long run you can’t go against nature, any more than King Canute could stop the tides. We all come under the law of accident. The gambler learns to live with it, but the Legitimacy thinks it can build a kind of seige civilization, a rigidly controlled shell isolated from accident.” He shook his head sadly. In a way he admired the Legitimacy for its obstinacy; but he was sure that, come what may, the Grand Wheel would outlive it-just as it had preceded it.