‘No, you haven’t heard of him. Perhaps you never will, but believe me, if he had time for tournament play he’d be high on the Grand Masters list. So far on this cruise he’s won one game, I’ve won one, and we’re on the eighty-fourth move of the third.’ The paraphernalia arrived and the Tellurians set the game up rapidly and unerringly, each knowing exactly where each piece and pawn belonged.
‘You have each lost two pawns, one knight, and one bishop —in eighty-three moves?’ Thlasoval marveled.
‘Right,’ Cloud said. ‘We’re playing for blood. Across this board friendship ceases; and, when dealing with such a pure unadulterated tiger as she is, so does chivalry.’
‘If I’m a tiger, I’d hate to say what he is.’ Joan glanced up with a grin. ‘Just study the board, Master Thlasoval, and see for yourself who is doing what to whom. I’m just barely holding him: he’s had me on the defensive for the last forty moves. Attacking him is just like trying to beat in the side of a battleship with your bare fist. Do you see his strategy? Perhaps not, on such short notice.’
Joan was very willing to talk chess at length, because the fact that Fairchild’s Chickladorian manager was a chess Master
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was an essential part of the Patrol’s plan.
‘No … I can’t say that I do.’
‘You notice he’s concentrating everything he can bring to bear on my left flank. Fifteen moves from now he’d’ve been focussed on my King’s Knight’s Third. Three moves after that he was going to exchange his knight for my queen and then mate in four. But, finding out what he was up to, I’ve just derailed his train of operations and he has to revise his whole campaign.’
‘No wonder I didn’t see … I’m simply not in your class. But would you mind if I stay and look on?”
‘We’ll be glad to have you, but it won’t be fast. We’re playing strict tournament rules and taking the full four minutes for each move.’
‘That’s quite all right. I really enjoy watching Grand Masters at work.”
Master though he was, Thlasoval had no idea at all of what a terrific game he watched. For Joan Janowick and Neal Cloud were not playing it; they merely moved the pieces. The game had been played long since. Based upon the greatest games of the greatest masters of old, it had been worked out, move by move, by chess masters working with high-speed computers.
Thus, while Joan and Storm were really concentrating, it was not upon chess.
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14: Vesta the Gambler
Joan was handling the card games, Cloud the wheels. The suggestion that it would be smart to run honest games had been implanted in the zwilnik’s minds, not because of the cards, but because of the wheels; for a loaded, braked, and magnetized wheel is a very tough device to beat.
Joan, then, would read a deck of cards, and a Lensman or a Rigellian would watch her do it. Then the observing telepath would, all imperceptibly, insert hunches into the mind of a player. And what gambler has ever questioned his hunches, especially when they pay off time after time after time? Thus more and more players began to win with greater or lesser regularity and the gambling fever—the most contagious and infectious disorder known to man—spread throughout the vast room like a conflagration in a box-factory. And Storm Cloud was handling the wheels. ‘Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, before the ball enters Zone Green,’ the croupiers intoned. ‘The screens go up, no bets can be placed while the ball is in the Green.’
If the wheels had not been rigged, Cloud could have computed with ease the exact number upon which each ball would come to rest. In such case the Patrol forces would not, of course, have given Vesta the Vegian complete or accurate information. With her temperament and her bank-roll, she would have put the place out of business in an hour; and such a single-handed killing was not at all what the Patrol desired.
But the wheels, of course, were rigged. Cloud was being informed, however, of every pertinent fact. He knew the exact point at which the ball crossed the green borderline. He knew its exact velocity. He knew precisely the strength of the magnetic fields and the permeabilities, reluctances, and so on, of all the materials involved. He knew just about how much braking force could be applied without tipping off the players and transforming them instantly into a blood-thirsty mob. And finally, he was backed by Lensmen who could at need interfere with the physical processes of the croupiers without any knowledge on the pan of the victims. Hence Cloud did well enough—and when a house is paying
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thirty-five to one on odds that have been cut down to eight or ten to one, it is very, very bad for the house.
Vesta started playing conservatively enough. She went from wheel to wheel, tail high in air and purring happily to herself, slapping down ten-credit notes until she won.
‘This is the wheel I like!’ she exclaimed, and went to twenties. Still unperturbed, still gay, she watched nine of them move away under the croupier’s rake. Then she won again.
Then fifties. Then hundreds. She wasn’t gay now, nor purring. She wasn’t exactly tense, yet, but she was warming up. As the tenth C-note disappeared, a Chickladorian beside her said:
‘Why don’t you play the colors, miss? Or combinations? You don’t lose so much that way.’
‘No, and you don’t win so much, either. When I’m gambling I gamble, brother … and wait just a minute …’ the croupier paid her three M’s and an L … ‘See what I mean?’
The crowd was going not-so-slowly mad. Assistant Manager Althagar did what he could. He ordered all rigging and gimmicks off, and the house still lost. On again, off again; and losses still skyrocketed. Then, hurrying over to the door of a private room, he knocked lightly, opened the door, and beckoned to Thlasoval.
‘All hell’s out for noon!’ he whispered intensely as the manager reached the doorway. ‘The crowd’s winning like crazy— everybody’s winning! D’you s’pose it’s them damn Patrolmen there crossing us up—and how in hell could it be?’
‘Have you tried cutting out the gimmicks?’
‘Yes. No difference.’
‘It can’t be them, then. It couldn’t be anyway, for two reasons. The kind of brains it takes to work that kind of problem in your head can’t happen once in a hundred million times, and you say everybody’s doing it. They can’t be, dammit! Two, they’re Grand Masters playing chess. You play chess yourself.’
‘You know I do. I’m not a Master, but I’m pretty good.’
‘Good enough to tell by looking at ’em that they don’t give a damn about what’s going on out there. Come on in.’
‘We’ll disturb ’em and they’ll be sore as hell.’
‘You couldn’t disturb these two, short of yelling in their ear or joggling the board.’ The two walked toward the table. ‘See what I mean?’
The two players, forearms on table, were sitting rigidly still, staring as though entranced at the board, neither moving so
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much as an eye. As the two Chickladorians watched, Cloud’s left forearm, pivoting on the elbow, swung out and he moved his knight.
‘Oh, no … no!’ Shocked out of silence, Thlasoval muttered the words under his breath. ‘Your queen, man—your queen!’
But this opportunity, so evident to the observer, did not seem at all attractive to the woman, who sat motionless for minute after minute.
‘But come on, boss, and look this mess over,’ the assistant urged. ‘You’re on plus time now.”
‘I suppose so.’ They turned away from the enigma ‘But why didn’t she take his queen? I couldn’t see a thing to keep her from doing it. I would have.’
‘So would I. However, almost all the pieces on that board are vulnerable, some way or other. Probably whichever one starts the shin-kicking will come out at the little end of the horn.’
‘Could be, but it won’t be kicking shins. It’ll be slaughter— and how I’d like to be there when the slaughter starts! And I still don’t see why she didn’t grab that queen …’
‘Well, you can ask her, maybe, when they leave. But right now you’d better forget chess and take a good, long gander at what that Vegian hell-cat is doing. She’s wilder than a Radelgian cateagle and hotter than a DeLameter. She’s gone just completely nuts.’
Tense, strained, taut as a violin-string in every visible muscle, Vesta stood at a wheel; gripping the ledge of the table so fiercely that enamel was flaking off the metal and plastic under her stiff, sharp nails. Jaws hard set and eyes almost invisible slits, she growled deep in her throat at every bet she put down. And those bets were all alike—ten thousand credits each—and she was still playing the numbers straight. They watched her lose eighty thousand credits; then watched her collect three hundred and fifty thousand.