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however, staying within the precincts of the Make-Out Club.
For only a few seconds Scame shared the cubicle with the silent presence of the girl. Then she slid open the door panel and they entered a tidy, comfortable room with a bathroom just off it. “Well, this is it. Hope you’ll be okay here.” She moved around the room, turning on sidelights. “There’s just about everything you need.”
“No holbooth,” Scame said, looking around. She waved to an occasional table with an instrument on it. “There’s a vidphone, but it only serves the club, I’m afraid.” She looked apologetic. “Jerry doesn’t want you calling anybody outside. Your attention has to be on the job.”
He threw his hold-all on the bed and sat down beside it. “I couldn’t follow everything Soma was saying. What did he mean by weighted games?” Her eyes widened. “You don’t know much, do you?” “Maybe not,” he said irritably. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“These days the Wheel is like one of those ancient secret societies,” she told him. “Only bigger, grander. They don’t just make money-that’s centuries in the past. The Wheel opens up all kinds of routes to people. But you can only get it by winning, by combining chance and skill. Some people never even guess the possibilities are there. You, for instance.”
“All right!” Scame was exasperated, not liking to be told what a numbskull he was. “But what’s a weighted game?”
“One where the Wheel takes less than a fifty per cent chance of winning. It’s just a way of showing that you’re making progress. That the Wheel sees you as an individual, not merely as one of a statistical mass. The Wheel likes to gamble, too.” “But it’s not just money that’s involved?” “Not always. There are other things besides money. There are life experiences-the Wheel can provide those. Some people want to change their lives alto-36
gether, to become somebody else, somebody completely different. The Wheel can arrange that. There are techniques for changing people’s personalities, giving them new abilities and opening new doors for them. If you can put up the stake, play and win, you can choose what kind of person you’ll be, what kind of life you’ll live. Have you ever known someone to disappear without trace? It could be that’s what happened to them.”
“What would the stake be in such a case?” Scame 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?” Scame 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,” Scame said. He deliberated somberly. “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?”
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“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 cigarro from a box on the dresser, and sat on the bed with Scame 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
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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?”
Scame 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 on a losing streak. 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, rumors apart.
It was hard, too, to find empirical evidence of 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
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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. Scame believed her scornful disclaimers. Belief hi 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.”