They pressed themselves into one another’s arms.
During the next few days Scame continued bis training at the Make-Out Club. Soma kept him off the numbers machine; but he practised on the other identity machines, gradually improving bis performance.
He was not always sure if he was engaged in pure practice runs or actual games without outside players. Sometimes, though, Soma used him on club business, holding the bank in in-the-flesh games or entering as an additional player. Scarne slowly learned how the Grand Wheel operated from the inside.
None of the club’s real business, however, seemed to warrant the process Soma was putting him through. It was as if Scame was being tested against some other more advanced standard.
Soma’s own remarks came seldom, but as far as they went he seemed satisfied with Scarne’s progress. “You’re more of a technician than a pure gambler,” he said to him once.
“Is that bad?” Scame asked. “Not at all. It means maybe we can use you. There are two kinds of players, the technician and the instinctive player, the guy that takes all the risks, who has flair. Take a partnership game, like bridge. A technician won’t give away anything, but he won’t bring in much, either. He’s the main defence. But he has to be complemented by an offensive player, a real gambler who takes the initiative. They need each other.”
“Why does that mean, you can use me? Use me for what?” Soma makes it sound as if they’re trying to get into something, he thought. But the Wheel already is everything.
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The nearest Soma came to giving an answer was two days later, when he called Scarne to his office. “I put in a report about what you told me happened on the jackpot,” he said. “Also about the incident on the numbers machine. You’re to go to Luna. There are people there want to talk to you.”
“The mathematical cadre?”
“I guess so.” Soma paused, then looked at Scame with burning black eyes. “All I know is I’m to send you to the demesne of Marguerite Dom. You’re going right to the top.”
Chapter Six
Luna was an old, quaint, well-worn environment favored by the wealthy and successful. Everything there seemed to be hundreds of years old. The sun-burnished towns and cities were luxuriously ancient, built in a rococo style fashionable half a millennium ago, and the planet’s dry, dead surface was crisscrossed with an antiquated tracked transport system.
As before, Scame travelled with a two-man escort. The conservationist-minded local government had steadfastly refused to install a modem atmosphere plant, and the shuttle descended through vacuum until entering the landing bay at Tycho, the oldest and largest of Luna’s cities.
Tycho was not their destination, however; they left the shuttle and walked through concourses until coming to the track station adjoining the landing bay. Scame found time to revel in the magnificence of the station’s baroque, cavernous interior, which glowed in the unique lunar light falling through the high-47
vaulted roof. Visiting Luna always made him feel good.
His escort guided him through the bustling main area to where a private carriage waited on a small siding, tucked away under the lower edge of the cascading roof. Within, the carriage was plush and luxurious, upholstered with purple velvet.
Immediately they had seated themselves it surged into motion, shooting through the big track tunnel cut through the wall of Tycho crater and emerging onto the arid landscape beyond. Rapidly the terrain sped by. Half an hour later, as the track carriage came over the lip of a range of low hills and began a descent to the plain below, he caught his first glimpse of what he was assured was the private manse of Marguerite Dom, chairman of the Grand Wheel. Most of what he saw of the manse was pure indulgence, totally non-functional: a wandering maze of gables, domes and belvederes.
The track carriage slowed as it approached the looming manse. Shuffling into the shadow of an overhanging roof, it coasted through an air lock and came to a stop in what appeared to be a reception foyer. The carriage doors clicked back; they stepped out.
The two Wheel men with Scame seemed nervous and tense. This is probably their Mecca, Scame thought.
An automatic glass door opened; a tall Negro entered the foyer. His teeth flashed in a polite smile.
“Mr. Scame?”
“Here he is,” said one of the Wheel men. “Delivered as per schedule.”
The Negro spoke to them, pointing to a door at the further end. “Go through there and take some refreshment. You will be informed.” He turned to Scame. “This way, if you please.”
Scame followed him through the glass door. They paused while the floor sank beneath their feet. When it steadied they were standing on a circular mosaic which resembled the center of a three-dimensional
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spider’s web. Passages, trellised arbors, crooked stairways both ascending and descending, radiated from it in all directions. It was an architectural fancy, a folly.
The Negro tamed to him again. “We are ready to see you now. But perhaps the journey has fatigued you. Would you prefer to rest, to refresh yourself?”
Scarne steeled his nerve. “No. Now will be fine.”
They walked down a corridor into the deepening silence of the rambling house. Finally the Negro opened a timber door and entered a wood-panelled room, glancing at Scame to follow.
Five men, of all races and ages-one of them was scarcely more than a boy-sat around a horseshoe-shaped table. A sixth place was empty, while yet another chair, evidently intended for Scame, stood in the gap of the horseshoe.
Here he was, facing the Grand Wheel’s mathematical cadre at last-and he felt like an amateur. These people were all special, he realized; some of them prodigies, probably, gathered from all over man-inhabited space. Wordlessly he lowered himself into the solitary chair, aware that the interrogators were subjecting him to a chilling scrutiny. The tall Negro, lank and self-controlled, walked around the table and took up the vacant sixth place. Somehow it took Scame by surprise to learn that he, too, was a cadre member.
“Now,” the Negro said, speaking in a deep, well-modulated voice, “tell us about this jackpot.”
Self-consciously Scame began slowly to repeat the account he had given to Jerry Soma. They stopped him before he got beyond the third sentence.
His new listeners were of different mettle from the club manager. Merely verbal descriptions did not satisfy them at all. They wanted mathematics, the language of pure thought. The inquisition became arcane, almost bizarre, as they forced Scame to sharpen and redefine every item of bis experiences, probing and testing every concept he put forward as he plunged, in memory, back into what had happened
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while he held the handles of the mugger, and later, while he was under the identity machine.
When the account was finally finished they put him to yet another examination. They fired prodigious equations at him from all directions, giving him but scant seconds to solve them in his head. They were testing out the limits of his ability.
After an hour of the hardest work Scarne had ever known, it was over. He was asked to wait in an adjoining room.
He left, and found himself in a long, narrow, musty-smelling annex lined with shelves. It was given a vault-like appearance by the deep alcoves which punctuated the walls at intervals, and which also contained nothing but shelves, all loaded with files and papers. He was, apparently, in some sort of ill-ordered data library.
Bending his ear to the door he had just closed, he heard the murmur of voices. He crossed to one of the shelves, pulled out a file, opened it and scanned its contents with frantic speed. It contained a dissertation on some particularly abstruse point in randomatics.
Replacing it, he looked at another and then another. This was a storeroom of papers in randomatics, a kind of cellar, probably, of past and discarded work emanating from the cadre which was now discussing him in the next room.
His heart beat rapidly. He dashed up and down the annex, looking wildly at the shelves. But there was no ordering system evident, nothing to tell him where he might look to find a clue to the rumored luck equations.
He calmed down. It was highly unlikely that any reference to the equations-presuming they existed at all-would be found here, he reasoned. Glancing through the files, he finally settled on one whose meaning, at a cursory inspection, baffled even him. It was a prime example of rarefied speculative thought, containing no explanatory text at all. It might, he decided, keep an average mathematician guessing for a
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while. Taking a pen from his breast pocket he photographed several pages with its hidden vid recorder.
He was still handling the file when the door opened and the tall Negro walked in. Calmly Scarne replaced it on the shelf and turned to meet him.