Barrington J Barley - The Grand Wheel

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The

GRAND WHEEL

Barrington

Bayley

DAW BOOKS, ING.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, POBLISHER

1301 Avenue of the Americas New York, N. Y. 10019

Cover art by Don Maitz.

FIRST PRINTING, AUGUST 1977

123456789

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

Chapter One

There was a concave stripper in the game.

Cheyne Scame, as he shuffled the deck preparatory to dealing, covertly sized up

the player sitting opposite him across the green baize table. The stripper was

not much over twenty-five years of age; with his pale face and thin nose, he had

an icy sort of self-assurance about him. Earlier he had introduced himself as

Skode Loder, from off-planet, a newcomer to lo- one of the new breed of players

who never stayed long in one spot.

Scame had already gauged Loder to be a card mechanic, but he hadn't been sure

just what his particular gimmick was. Now that he held the deck in his own

hands, he knew even that.

Several of the trump cards had been finely shaved on their short edges, so that

the stripper-or, now that he knew the secret, Scame himself-could on his deal

drop them out of the pack and distribute them whichever way he wanted. The job

had been artfully performed: the slight concavities made no perceptible dent.

But Scame had found the right touch, the slight difference in pressure, that

made the trick work.

Loder, he noted, wore a slim, gold ring on the third finger of his left hand.

That was it, of course. There was a blade vibrator in the ring.

It was too obvious, in fact, almost blatant, as if the sharp were advertising

his trade. Scarne had known of stripper blades that were totally invisible,

being embedded in the flesh of the finger and anchored to the bone.

Loder was gazing back at him, a sardonic smile 5

playing on his lips. Scame was in a dilemma. In the past hour he had been nearly

cleaned out by this mechanic. He could now expose him and get his money back.

But he hesitated. In too many ways, it didn't add up.

The sharp had walked into a game between professionals. For his victim he had

chosen Cheyne Scame, who as well as being an experienced gambler was also a

professor of randomatics-in other words he was one ' of the hardest men in the

solar system to take for a ride. Everything else was wrong for this situation,

too. The place: not some unfranchised shack but a Wheel house, where to be

caught cheating could mean being banned from every Wheel establishment in a

hundred light-year radius. The game: Opus, a game for professionals, one of the

only two card games to utilize all seventy-eight cards of the ancient Tarot pack

(the other was Kabala, a game whose rules were so abstruse only a handful of

people had succeeded in mastering it).

Who would try to pull off such a stunt? Nobody but a fool.

Skode Loder was too expert to be a fool.

Another of the players spoke, good-naturedly. "Eh, don't give us any riffle-

stack, Cheyne. Come on, deal us a fair hand."

Scame had automatically been shuffling and reshuffling while he thought the

matter over. He glanced again at Loder. He could almost imagine that the man

knew-and was laughing at him.

He came to a decision. Squaring up the deck, he laid it in the center of the

table, then pushed his remaining chips into the stakes circle. He took out his

bank card and threw that in, too.

"Time for me to leave," he said. "But first let's cut for what's left, Loder."

Loder bent his head to read the amount printed on the bank card. He sat stock-

still for a moment. Then he shrugged.

"Why not?"

The others looked on with interest, making no comment, as Loder covered Scame's

stake. He cut the deck, glancing at the card he drew before laying it face down.

Scame in turn cut, showing the card to Loder. It was the queen of wands.

Loder smiled, and revealed his card. It was the card known as the universe: a

trump, one of the major arcana, the elaborate picture symbolism that had been

devised in antiquity to depict cosmic mysteries. It showed a naked female

dancing within an oval wreath, a flaming wand in each hand.

The card was probably stripped, Scame thought. That just about summed up

everything. A stripped universe.

There was a time-honored loser's prerogative. Scarne reached out and picked up

one small chip. "Okay?"

Loder nodded. Scame stood up.

"Another time, perhaps."

The black-jacketed seneschal bowed to him as he emerged from the card room.

Scame had a reason for knuckling under to Loder's depradations. There was one

thrilling explanation that did make sense.

For some tune he had been trying to find his way to the inside of that vast,

circumspect organization known as the Grand Wheel, controllers of chance and

probability, in the gaming sense over the whole of man-inhabited space. He knew

that in a less sophisticated phase of its history the Wheel had practiced a

rough-shod method of recruitment. It would engineer the ruin of the prospect,

leaving him bankrupt, threatened with imprisonment or violence; thus he would be

made to feel the Wheel's power even while forced to accept its protection,

caught in a closed system from which there was no escape.

These days the Wheel had no need to take such measures. But it had a well-known

love of tradition.

Scame believed Loder was a Wheel operative, going through ancient motions. If

Scame had behaved like a hick, denouncing Loder and showing that he understood

events only in a simplistic sense, then his opportunity would be gone; he would

be deemed too inflexible. Only if he gave some sign that he recognized the

hidden level in the game, might there be a further contact.

It was conceivable, of course, that Loder had somehow learned of Scame's long-

term object and was perpetrating a double-bluff.

He could only wait and see.

A walk along a blue and gold corridor brought him to a balustraded balcony which

overlooked the main gaming area. The tables and fermat machines were busy,

bringing in the Wheel its eternal percentages. On one wall a huge numbers

display flashed out sequences of multicolored digits. Over the exit the Grand

Wheel's emblem, a spoked gold wheel revolving slowly, glittered.

The background music mingled with the calling of bets and made a meaningless din

in his ears. He descended the stairway and wandered among the gaming machines.

Idly he stopped at a table with a surface of colored squares. He put Loder's

chip on the pale green. The table-top flickered and surged. The chip went down.

"Hello, Cheyne. Anything upstairs worth getting into?"

Scame turned on hearing the voice of Gay Mill-man, an acquaintance. "No,

nothing," he said, and walked on.

Centuries ago, he reflected, an establishment like this one would have been

filled with simpler mechanical devices, of which the roulette wheel, he

supposed, was the archetype.

But that was before the advent of randomatics, the modem science of chance and

number, had rendered all such devices obsolete. They were now regarded as

primitive, almost prehistoric. Scame could have

walked into any old-style casino or gambling arcade and, armed with the

randomatic equations, would have been guaranteed to win, moderately but

consistently, over the space of an hour or two.

Randomatics rested on certain unexpected discoveries that had been made in the

essential 'mystery of number. It had been discovered that, below a certain very

high number, permutating a set of independent elements did not produce a

sequence that was strictly random. Preferred sub-structures appeared in any

'chance' run, and these could be predicted. Only when the number of independent

elements entered the billions-the so-called 'billion bracket'-did predictability

vanish. This was the realm of 'second-order chance', distinguished from first-

order chance in that it was chance in the old sense: pure probability,

unadulterated by calculable runs and groupings.

The mythical system once sought by cranks and eccentrics became, therefore, a

scientific fact. To meet this challenge the fermat, a new class of machine able

to operate beyond the billion bracket, arose. Early versions had been

comparatively crude affairs, following, perhaps, the path of a single molecule

in a heated gas or counting out exploding atoms. As the randomatic equations,

refined and extended, pushed back the billion bracket still further these, too,

became obsolete. These days all formats worked on the sub-atomic level, by

manipulating the weak nuclear interaction, intercepting neutrinos, processing

exotic artificial particles, or even tapping the source of true randomness below

the quantum level. The innards of some of them were Wheel secrets.

Making for the exit, Scame paused in the foyer, where there stood a row of a

small type of fermat called the mugger. Muggers held a special fascination for

Scame, perhaps because of their ubiquity. Wherever one turned there was a

mugger. They existed in their billions, all treated by Wheel mathematicians as a

single stochastic organism with terminals spread over a hundred star systems.

Not bad, Scame thought, for

something that had evolved from the ancient fruit machine, or one-armed bandit.

He fumbled in his pocket for a coin and pressed it into the mugger. He touched

the go bar: a cloud of colored dots twinkled silently on the gridded screen. It

was like watching a structureless proto-galaxy, speeded up. Number, he thought.

Number was what it was all about. What everything was all about. Number, plucked

out of some unfathomable sub-universal source.

The sparks settled. Scame scanned the grid slots.

Gold. Gold. Gold. And gold all along the line.

Stupefied, he stared at the golden points. As he did so, a soft conspiratorial

voice issued from the base of the mugger.

"Jackpot. You have won the jackpot."

Scame glanced around him. The Legitimacy government had long outlawed Wheel

jackpots, though rumors persisted that they were still operated illegally -

rumors which, given the nature of the odds, were hard to confirm. Some said the

jackpot was an enormous sum of money. Others that it granted a secret wish.

The soft voice spoke again, directing him. "Take hold of the silver handles

below the pay-off groove. The jackpot will then be delivered."

Scame broke out in a sweat as he looked for the handles, which to the

uninitiated were merely part of the mugger's florid decoration. Nervously he

closed his fingers round them, his head reeling to think of the odds against

this happening. One jackpot, perhaps, per billions, trillions of throws? It

seemed impossible. Impossible? No, he reminded himself, nothing was impossible

in a world of random numbers. Only improbable.

And then the jackpot hit him and it was nothing he could have guessed at or

expected. The Wheel house dwindled from his consciousness. He was standing on

the edge of a precipice. Below him was a raucous,

roaring, boiling sea. Then the ground vanished from under his feet. He was

falling. Down, down, down.

He was sinking, drifting, swimming through a vast shifting foam-like sea out of

which abstract entities formed and dissolved without rhyme or order. He came to

understand that he had dropped out of the realm of solid reality. He was in the

awful other reality, the one he had been contemplating, dimly and theoretically,

instants earlier. The gulf of pure randomness that underlay all of existence.

The Great Profundity:

a sea of non-causation, on which the universe of cause-and-effect, of structure,

order, space and materiality, floated like scum on turbulent water. Number.

The universe was made of number. The ancient Greeks had been the first to guess

at that fact. Modem science, aided and abetted by randomatics, had confirmed it.

And here it was: the source from which number flowed in an endless, utterly

irrational stream. Before there was the atom, before there was the elementary

particle, before there was h, the quantum of action, there was number.

Scame understood the randomatic equations now in a way he never had before. But

even those equations were dissolving, breaking up. Everything dissolved in this

foam sea. It was a universal solvent beyond the wildest alchemical dreams,

breaking down substance, idea, being itself. Even Scame's own consciousness was

dissolving, in ecstacy and terror, into the endless flux....

Then it all vanished and substance returned. The silver handles were cool in

Scame's sweating hands. The formats glittered and flashed, ranked silver and

red. Vastoess.

His experience had fouled up his sense of orientation. The impression of

vastness, in particular, lingered, attaching itself to everyday objects. The

blue wall to his left was, at a guess, the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

The fermat before him was a ti-

tanic construction soaring thousands of miles into the air. Above, the roof ...

he glanced up, and quickly looked away again, seeing a titanic moving assemblage

of folds and color alongside one of the fermats. It was a woman in a tan robe,

thumbing in a coin, touching the go bar, thumbing in a coin, touching the go

bar, on and on.

The vast perspective was not all. Everything around him seemed to have been

translated from the concrete to the abstract, as though every vestige of meaning

had been sucked out of the world. His consciousness had become over-sensitized.

Sounds were hard to recognize, floating in the air around him without any

identifiable source. Even the formerly pleasant music coming from the

softspeakers had lost its tune-fulness; it skirled on, atonal, surrealist,

arbitrary.

A voice boomed to him across great cavities.

"YOU ALL RIIIGHT, CHEYNEEEE?"

He made an effort at recognition. It was Gay Mill-man, his face so huge as to

make his expression unreadable.

"YOU LOOK PAAAALE ..."

Scame spoke. "YES I'M ALL RIIIIGHT . . ." Each vibration of his voice was like

the beat of a drum. He turned away from Millman and headed for the street,

forcing himself to overcome his fear that he would fall over and topple

thousands of miles to the floor.

Walking to the exit was like crossing space to another planet. Each step was a

stride that crossed a continent. But eventually he stood outside, where he tried

to normalize his sense of size and distance. It had been raining and the street

was wet. He tried to tone down the sound of the traffic in his mind, and looked

up at the black sky of lo. The towers of the town were outlined sharply against

the big soft globe of Jupiter. It was too much. He closed his eyes painfully.

"A moment if you please, friend."

Scame opened his eyes again. A thousand-mile-across face ballooned into view.

Thin nose, pale skin,

jaunty eyebrows all smeared from horizon to horizon.

Like a telescope suddenly refocusing, his vision became normal. The face was

human size. "Skode Loder," Scame muttered. "You want me?"

"His twin, as a matter of fact. Skode is still upstairs." The other flicked his

fingers and conjured a card into his hand, giving it to Scame. It was an

introduction card, of the type used to make formal contact. A spoked gold wheel

revolved slowly, given perpetual motion by electrolytic molecular printing.

"Will you be at home at ten tomorrow?" "I suppose so."

"Be there." The tone of his voice, the ritualized summons from the Grand Wheel,

all implied a certainty that Scame would be on call. Loder turned abruptly and

mounted the steps into the gaming house.

Scarne set off down the street, still too bewildered to form any definite

feelings. The illusion of giantism might have disappeared-if it could be called

an illusion, size being relative-but the jackpot, the vision of ultimate

probabilities, was still vivid in his mind. He was trenchantly aware that behind

the glistening street, behind the moving cars and the glittering signs fronting

the buildings, lay the almost mystic gulf of non-causation, invisible to the

senses, invisible to the unaided mind, on which the world floated without

apparent support. Pacing the sidewalk like a stricken man, he came to a comer

where there was a news-vendor stand. A flash-sign glowed above the delivery

slot: BIG DEFEAT IN HOPULA CLUSTER. LEGITIMACY FORCES REEL BEFORE HA-DRANIC

HAMMER-BLOWS. But even this horrifying war news failed to catch his attention,

and he passed by, walking through a ghost world.

Chapter Two

When Scame awoke six hours later it was dawn. Atop the highest tower of the town

the artificial sun was kindling, casting daylight into the streets and through

the windows of his living room.

Blearily he rose, still feeling slightly disorientated. More than that, his

nerves were beginning to twitch in a way he knew would be indicative of much

worse things to come unless he gave himself a needed fix.

He unlocked a cabinet and took out what appeared to be an ordinary deodorant

spray. The atomizer hissed as he spray-injected a dose of the drug it contained

into his jugular vein.

Rapidly his nerves steadied. On one occasion he had tried to defy the addiction,

letting the withdrawal symptoms continue. It had been an experience he did not

intend to go through again.

He decided he had better get in touch with Magdan, his contact. He opened a wall

closet and swished aside the clothes hanging there, then placed a small stool in

the space he made. He climbed in, sat down, and closed the door behind him,

reaching as he did so for the switch that activated his secret holbooth.

The darkness of the cupboard vanished. He was sitting on an ordinary chair in a

small, windowless room. The walls were decorated with blue and gold fretwork: it

was a standard holbooth room. The chair facing him was, however, empty.

He waited, until Magdan, his Legitimacy controller, appeared suddenly in the

chair about a minute later. He wore a satin dressing gown and was rubbing his

eyes. Evidently Scame had got him out of bed.

"This is a hell of a time to be calling, Scame," the hologram image of Magdan

said with a scowl. "There'd better be a good reason for it."

"There is." Briefly Scarne recounted the events of the previous night, the game

with Skode Loder and the subsequent approach. "This kind of thing is

traditional," he explained. "So there you are: I think I've got my foot in."

Magdan showed none of the expected delight. "About time. I was beginning to

write you off. How much did this mechanic take off you?"

"Everything. About two hundred thousand." At that, Magdan became angry. "Hell,

that was government money," he exploded. "I have to account for everything you

throw down the drain."

"It was fun," Scame admitted. "I can't honestly see that I owe you anything.

Besides, I thought I just explained: the Wheel wouldn't have made contact until

I was destitute. They have a high regard for tradition." He paused. "By the way,

did you know the Wheel does still run mugger jackpots?"

"So what's new?" Magdan grunted, sulking into his thoughts for a moment.

"I hit one last night. After the game." Magdan showed interest. "Well! That

wasn't exactly coincidence, was it?"

"I don't know . . ." Scame said doubtfully. "The Wheel doesn't fix its muggers.

I'm sure of that."

"Oh, certainly. Like your Tarot cards weren't stripped."

"That was different," Scame told him. "The house didn't do the sharping. A

player from outside did it- a hired freelance or a Wheel employee from another

level, somebody the house doesn't know anything about. There was something

unusual about this jackpot, too." He ruminated, trying to find words to describe

his experience. "I had a vision. A vision of randomness-pure randomness, below

every level maths can reach." He stopped. There was little point

in trying to convey abstract ideas to this beefy secret serviceman.

"What are you trying to suggest?" Magdan asked slowly.

"Maybe the Wheel are using their new equations. The luck equations."

"And they steered you a jackpot by sheer luck?" "Yes. Then they wouldn't have to

fix it." "It's quite a thought," Magdan conceded. He became thoughtful. "When

this is all over we'll have you debriefed over that jackpot. They can be

psychologically damaging-that's one reason why they're outlawed." He frowned,

sinking his chin into his chest, thinking hard. "I'm still inclined to think the

mugger was rigged, though. I don't have your belief in the Wheel's

fastidiousness. When did you say they're calling?" "At ten."

"Meantime I'm closing this connection down. We don't want it traced. When you

have something for us, call one of the numbers you've already memorized." "The

antidote," Scarne said. "Huh?" Magdan looked up at him, sharply. "If you're

leaving me without a personal controller, I want the antidote. I'm as good as

inside. I've done enough to deserve it."

Magdan pulled an ugly face, expressing derision. "Forget it. You'll get the

antidote when you deliver the luck equations, and not a minute before."

He rose from his seat. Scame began to get desperate. "Don't leave me without a

link-man," he pleaded. "The Wheel could take me literally anywhere. What if I

need to renew my supply?" "Call one of the numbers."

"I might not be able to call a number! Or perhaps your agent won't be able to

reach me." Scame's tone became wheedling. "Give me the antidote. You needn't

worry about my reneging. I'm on your side."

Magdan cast his eyes upwards. "Oh, sure. Look, you know the score, Scame, or at

least you ought to

by now. You're not our only hook in the water, you know. Come through with the

goods and you'll be all right. After all, people like you never do anything

without an incentive, do they?"

As Magdan turned to go Scame surged to his feet in a sudden fury. "You goddamned

bastard," he choked. He threw himself at Magdan. Their two forms tussled, the

scanners integrating their hologram images and causing them to respond to one

another like physical objects. The holbooth system was nothing if not pure

communication.

Abruptly Magdan vanished, quickly followed by the holbooth room itself. Scarne

found himself back in the darkened clothes closet, threatening empty air.

Nothing happened when he tried the activating switch again. Magdan had dissolved

the secret hol-booth connection, as he had said he would. Scame stepped from the

closet shaking with reaction. One day he'd get even with Magdan, he promised

himself savagely, but futilely. In fact, he was aware that he would not have the

courage physically to attack the controller in the flesh.

When it came to method, he thought as he padded to the bathroom, there was

little to choose between the Legitimacy and the Grand Wheel. Magdan had chosen a

hell of a way to ensure his loyalty. The drug his men had forcibly addicted him

to was a specific drug, one synthesized exclusively for use on him. The antidote

was equally specific. Neither it, nor the drug itself, could be obtained from

anyone but bis masters, the Legitimacy's secret intelligence service.

In the bathroom mirror he examined his face carefully. Its lines were continuing

to deepen, his incipient middle age being accelerated by the ravages of the

drug.

Wearily he washed, dressed, and then breakfasted on coffee and synthetic fluffed

eggs. There was time to wait before his appointment with the Wheel callers. He

tried to relax, attempting to soothe himself by playing with a favorite curio: a

pair of cubical white dice,

the faces bearing black dots from one to six. They were centuries old, quite

valuable as an antique. Loaded with tiny movable internal weights, with a little

expertise-it was all in the wrist action-they could be made to come up with any

number to order. Or, again by means of the right shake, they could be converted

into even-weighted dice safe for inspection.

He shook the dice in his hand and threw a seven. He threw four more sevens, then

switched to eleven.

In a games-conscious civilization the weighted dice were but one item in a long

colorful history of cheating devices. Cheating at cards, for instance, was a

science all of its own; it had a tradition of ingenuity that made it almost

honorable in some eyes. Locaters, shiners, marked cards of inexhaustible

variety, strippers both concave and convex, change-cards whose surfaces mutated

and could assume the value of any card in the deck-the mechanics of it was

endless, not to speak of sleight of hand, which in some practitioners had

reached almost superhuman levels.

The ultimate in cheating devices was probably the hold-out robot, given its name

from the ancient (but still used) hold-out machine, a device strapped to the arm

which delivered either a set of cards or a cold deck into the hand. The hold-out

robot was a proxie player, a nearly undetectable man-like robot who entered play

but remained in touch with its owner who looked through its eyes and partly

controlled it. More than a mere waldo, the hold-out proxie had its own brain and

such a sublime sense of touch that it never needed to use trick shuffles or any

other gimmick. It could take a deck in its fingers and count the cards down by

touch alone, cutting to obtain any card it wanted. It could keep track of every

individual card through shuffles and deals and so always knew what everybody was

holding.

Hold-out robots had gone out of fashion recently, though. It was becoming easier

to detect them. The

last one Scame had heard about had been smashed to pieces, right there in the

card room.

At ten the annunciator toned. Scame, who had become increasingly more nervous

during the past half hour, checked the door monitor. Two men stood outside, both

snappily dressed. One was big, with an air of restrained violence: the heavy.

The other was smaller, more like a functionary.

He let them in. The heavy looked around the apartment in a cool, professional

manner. "Is this place bonded?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Right. We don't have to worry about it."

The other spoke, ildly but firmly. "We're here to take you to see some people.

Professor Scame. Don't expect to be back in a hurry. Unless you have any

substantial objections, I suggest we leave now."

Scame coughed, found his voice. "Where are we going?"

"Earth. The planliner leaves in half an hour."

"Could you tell me exactly what I'm wanted for?" Scame asked, stumbling over the

words. The Wheel man made no direct answer, but merely stared at him. Do you not

understand your good fortune? his eyes seemed to say. You're being taken into

the employment of the Grand Wheel. You'll be a Wheel man, like me, a member of

the most powerful brotherhood in the human world.

Scame picked up the-hold-all he had already pre-prepared. "I'm ready," he said.

A car was waiting in the street below. Scame sat in the back, sandwiched between

his two escorts, while they rode through the town.

"What are your names?" he asked boldly.

The smaller man gestured to his companion, then to himself. "Caiman. Hervold."

"We're going to Earth, you say. At least you can tell me where on Earth."

"Just Earth." Hervold smiled wryly. "We just do our job, that's all."

"Of course." Scame peered out of the car window, watching the buildings speeding

past.

The shuttle wooshed skywards, leaving lo's miniature landscape laid neatly out

below. The towers of Maintown jutted up like a crop of metal whiskers. The

atmosphere plant on the outskirts looked like an Earth-type stadium, exhaling

the gases of life.

In less than a minute they were above the shallow atmosphere and in darkness.

The shuttle pushed its passenger tube into the hull of the planliner; there were

clinking sounds and sudden, small movements. Then smoothly and imperceptibly the

inertial engines took hold, hurling the planliner on a brief geodesic to Earth.

The planliner was about half full. Scame shared a seat with Hervold and Caiman

in the large, comfortable lounge. È he remembered correctly, the journey would

take around an hour at this time of the year.

He pulled a sealed deck of cards from his pocket. "Care to play?"

"No thanks," Hervold said. A servit entered the lounge and began wheeling

between the zigzag rows of seats, offering drinks and smokes. Hervold beckoned

the machine over. As he did so, Scame noticed a piece of jewelery dangling from

his wrist: a little wheel of gridded gold.

"I'll bet you feel good to wear that," Scame ventured.

Hervold glanced at the trinket and scowled. "Sure."

Scame realized he had been personal. Wheel people were touchy about the emblem

of their order.

The other's gaze focused on his throat. "I see you're not travelling alone,

either," he said. "You believe in Lady. That's interesting."

Scame fingered the image of Lady, goddess of luck, that hung from his neck.

"It's not that I'm religious," he explained. "I don't believe in Lady as an

actual being. More as an impersonal force or principle."

"Don't we all," Hervold replied sardonically, tum-

ing to the servit. He brought green-tinted jamboks for the three of them.

The Wheel men were unwilling to talk further. Scame drank his jambok. Then he

fell into a reverie.

In a half doze, he seemed to see the wheel symbol spinning dizzily, throwing off

probability in all directions. The wheel, most ancient of man's symbols, sigil

of chance, image of eternity. The Wheel of Fortune, the Tarot pack called it.

Elsewhere it was known as the Wheel of Life. The randomatic equations also had a

cyclic form, as had the equations used in most formats.

The Grand Wheel had probably chosen the symbol fortuitously to begin with, back

in the days when it had been no more than a semi-criminal gambling syndicate,

before it had developed into a political and ideological power well able to

withstand the onslaughts of its arch-enemy, the Legitimacy government. It might

once have signified no more than a roulette wheel or some such device. But now

it had come to mean much more. It was curious, Scame thought, how the Grand

Wheel had swallowed itself in its own symbolism, as if hypnotized by its own

mystique, delving, for instance, into the arcana of the Tarot pack, and

generally indulging in the mystico-symbolism that it was so easy to associate

with the laws of chance.

Had the world always been like this, be wondered? Hustlers and hold-out robots,

instantly addictive drugs administered by government agencies, a perpetual

struggle between law and hazard. Had civilization always been dichotomic? Or

would one side, the Legitimacy or the Grand Wheel, eventually vanquish the

other? Probably not, Scame thought. The Wheel was scornful of, rather than

antagonistic to, the Legitimacy's obsession for predictability and control, for

eradicating chance hazard. It did not seek to replace the government, merely to

tap mankind's gambling instinct which the Legitimacy abhorred. And the

Legitimacy would never rid society of the Grand Wheel, either; its tentacles

were too deep. Indeed, the Legitimacy itself could scarcely do without the Grand

Wheel anymore. By now the proliferous gaming houses, the interstellar numbers

service, the randoma-tic sweepstakes, were only froth on the Wheel's activities;

the Wheel alone, for instance, had the ability to keep the huge interstellar

economy running smoothly, applying to the stock and commodity exchanges the same

randomatic principles that governed the fermat networks.

Scarne awoke with a start, realizing that he must have dozed off. They had

reached parking orbit and the passengers were splitting up, some going to Luna

and some to Earth. A trifle blearily, he followed Hervold and Caiman into the

Earth shuttle for the short hop. As he took his seat he saw that the shuttle was

accepting passengers from another planliner, too. They were mostly military

officers; they seemed, like him, in low spirits and short of sleep.

He sat back while the shuttle steadily filled up with uniformed men. Caiman

stirred. He looked at the officers with an expression that showed increasing

disgust.

Finally he spoke for the first time since lo. "Just look at those punks," he

said loudly. "Did you ever see such a pack of deadbeats?" He took something from

his breast pocket and handed it to Scame. "Here, just take a look at this.

Doesn't it make you sick?"

Scame shook loose the tiny, infinitely foldable news-sheet into readable size

and scanned the headlines. The sheet had been printed on lo. It told in detail

of the Hopula disaster, of Legitimacy forces falling back across hundreds of

light years, of man being forced out of territories he had believed were his.

"The goddamned Hadranics are coming closer every day," the Wheel heavy said in a

hard-edged voice. "It's time those Legit generals started putting some guts into

it, because in a few years they could be right here in Sol."

Chapter Three

The desert was bone-yellow. In the south a sun of a much brighter yellow, the

color of sulphur, hovered a third of the way between the horizon and the

meridian, looking down on the temporary installations like a baleful eye.

A thin-faced youth, aged fifteen or sixteen, stared at the sun with sullen fear.

Suddenly he shivered and tore his gaze away. "I'm cold!" he yelped in a cracked

voice. "Get me a cloak, you!"

The burly crewman he had addressed looked at him disdainfully. "Tell me, sonny,

have you ever shaved?"

The youth flushed and rounded on Hakandra. «My price is doubled!" he croaked. "I

won't take insults!"

Hakandra moved his hand placatingly. "Forget it, Shane. It was just a silly

remark."

"Nevertheless it has doubled my price. Or do you think you can do without my

services? All right then, do without them. I renounce my obligations as of now.

Perhaps the sun is due to explode tomorrow, in the next hour, the next minute.

Perhaps it has already begun to explode-I won't tell you."

"Are you gonna let yourself bum up too?" the crewman grunted, and walked away.

Hakandra scowled after his retreating back, making a mental note to put in a

disciplinary memo. He slipped off his own cloak and draped it round the

shoulders of the shivering boy. In fact the air was not at all cold. The lad was

suffering from nerves, as usual.

"Let's get back to the ship," he said. "No use our hanging around here."

They set off up the slope towards the starship which rested on the crest of the

hill. "Do you get any murmurs?" Hakandra asked quietly. "No, it's quiet."

The youth walked in silence for a while, and then started whining. "Can't we

leave this Godforsaken hole? I don't like it here ... how much longer?"

"No, Shane, we're not leaving. We've a great deal of work to do yet. And please

don't let me hear any more talk about increasing your fee. That was all agreed

back in Sol."

"You want my power to dry up, don't you? You're all of you going the right way

about it to make my power dry up; it's not absolutely reliable, you know. Where

would you be then?"

"Probably quite safe," Hakandra replied in a level voice. "But you're not going

to dry up, Shane-you're not stupid. You know how important all this is." He

stopped, looking around him at the ochre sun and purple sky. "This is where the

outcome of the war will be decided. Victory or defeat."

They entered the big starship, riding an elevator up through its many decks.

Hakandra sent Shane to rest in his quarters. Then he made bis way to the corn

room.

Every day at about this time he spent a few minutes talking to other workteams

scattered about the Cave. As he entered the room the techs were accepting nar-

rowbeams from here and there, holding them on-line. Hakandra sat down before a

holo screen and had one put through to him. On the screen a lean face emerged,

wearing a peaked uniform hat bearing Legitimacy markings. It was the leader of

team Dl.

The team leader's face was bleak, wavering slight- ly, the narrowbeam

vacillating over the vast distance. "There's been a nova on the outward

side," he told Hakandra. "Team K5 was there-without a cold-sen-

ser." ;

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TheGRANDWHEELBarringtonJ.BayleyDAWBOOKS,ING.DONALDA.WOLLHEIM,POBLISHER1301AvenueoftheAmericasNewYork,N.Y.10019COPYRIGHT(c),1977,BYBABBINGTONJ.bayleyAllRightsReserved.CoverartbyDonMaitz.FIRSTPRINTING,AUGUST1977123456789PRINTEDINU.S.A.ChapterOneTherewasaconcavestripperinthegame.CheyneScame,asheshuffle...

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Barrington J Barley - The Grand Wheel

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