“This is Sol Leppo. I talked to you when you were at Alazahad Machine out on Beacon Way. You were asking about a man with a dog. I said I’d get back if I heard anything. Okay, I think I can tell you where he went. . . .”
8
A mood of exhilaration gripped the camp, infecting even the work detail hired to handle the brunt of the digging and clearing. In addition to Zeke and Lou, they were Shayne, a burly Canadian, Nailikar, of some distant Asiatic ancestry, and Chas Ryan, the crew’s foreman. When they weren’t at work down the “Hole,” bringing up the excavation debris, playing cards, or catching up on movie fare over chilled cans of Olympus home-brewed beer, they asked questions of the scientists about background to the work and listened with widening interest to accounts of ancient Terran constructions and their mysteries, and theories concerning Earth’s turbulent history in recent times. They even came up with speculations of their own. Chas wondered if the Technolithic culture might have had foreknowledge of whatever had befallen them, and erected their huge, virtually indestructible monuments as a testimony of who they were and when they had existed, written in language that any advanced race coming later would eventually be able to decode. Hamil confirmed that many scientists thought the same thing and believed they had made beginnings in unraveling the code. Zeke thought that the “gods” of Biblical and other ancient creation stories might have been space beings. But that wasn’t really original. From time to time, the media would air some new angle or other on notions heard for years that the tussles between good and fallen “angels,” or the Greek Olympians and Titans, and so on, were accounts of ancient power struggles and rebellions involving other-worldly visitors, described by early humans who had no other way of interpreting what they were witnessing. Kieran had expected a comparatively drab interlude of staying out of circulation while the heat died down in Lowell. On the contrary, in every aspect, the company and the subject were proving a new source of fascination for his ever-restless curiosity.
* * *
It was a variation of an old puzzle, guaranteed to split opinions down the middle and generate controversy at a vicarage afternoon tea party. Kieran laid three cards facedown on the long table in the messroom of the inflatable-frame cabin. “Okay, it’s simple,” he told Chas Ryan and Harry Quong, sitting opposite him on the bench seat that ran along one wall. “Just one of them’s a king. Which one?”
“You mean just make a guess?” Harry checked.
“Yes,” Kieran said. He hadn’t shown the faces and then made elaborate passes or flourishes; this obviously wasn’t the classic three-card trick.
“And you know which one, right?” Chas queried.
“Of course.”
Harry shrugged, ran his eye over the row, then pointed. “That one.”
Kieran looked inquiringly at Chas. “Good enough for me,” Chas responded. “I’ll say that one too.”
“Fine. Well, I know it isn’t this one.” Kieran turned over one of the other two cards to reveal it as the three of diamonds. “The question is this: For the best chance of being right, what should you do? Stay with your choice? Change to the other one? Or doesn’t it matter?” He sat back to let them ponder. Juanita was in a foldaway chair in the corner, going through some papers. The others were either away down the Hole, busy in the Juggernaut lab, or otherwise out on some chore around the camp.
“It can’t make any difference,” Harry said. “There’s two cards left. It’s fifty-fifty. Stick or change. It doesn’t matter.”
Chas hesitated for a moment longer, than nodded. “I agree. It’s not gonna change your odds.”
Kieran gave them a few seconds to reconsider, smiling waggishly. “Actually, it does,” he said. “You should change your bet. The odds of winning are twice as good.” This was where the fun part started. Even mathematicians often couldn’t see it—and they tended to be the most belligerent in defending their view. The interesting challenge, Kieran had found, was picking the right way of explaining it, depending on his judgment of the personality he was dealing with. An argument or analogy that made the answer immediately clear to one person would be unfathomable to another.