The Grand Wheel

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 Scarne 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 Scarne, 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 Scarne 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 Scarne 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 Scarne to sharpen and re-define every item of his experiences, probing and testing every concept he put forward as he plunged, in memory, back into what had happened 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 annexe 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 now was discussing him in the next room.

His heart beat rapidly. He dashed up and down the annexe, looking wildly at the shelves. But there was no ordering system, evidently, nothing to tell him where he might look to find a clue to the rumoured 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 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.

The cadre randomatician gave no sign that he saw anything improper in Scarne’s behaviour. ‘We’ve discussed your story, Mr Scarne,’ he said. ‘We found it quite interesting.’

‘But what does it mean?’

‘Your experience can only have been subjective, of course. We think you have a type of mind which has a particularly intuitive grasp of mathematical relations. The jackpot shot must have impinged on the faculty in some way, inducing an hallucination. It’s possible. The incident with the identity machine would be a hangover from that. In many ways you have a fortunate combination of qualities. You will make a good gamesman.’

The negro hesitated, became reflective. ‘You have what we pure theoreticians lack, in fact.’

‘Really? I’ve always considered myself too much of a mathematician, not enough of a player,’ Scarne said dubiously.

A faint smile came to the other’s lips. ‘Jerry Soma’s assessment shows you to be quite talented. You may be just the type of person we are looking for – but that’s by the way, for now.’ He straightened, self-consciously formal again. ‘The Chairman would be pleased if you would join him at breakfast, which he is about to take.’