The Grand Wheel

He came to a decision. Squaring up the deck, he laid it in the centre 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 sad stock-still for a moment. Then he shrugged.

‘Why not?’

The others looked on with interest, making no comment, as Loder covered Scarne’s stake. He cut the deck, glancing at the card he drew before laying it face down.

Scarne 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, Scarne thought. That just about summed up everything. A stripped universe.

There was a time-honoured loser’s prerogative. Scarne reached out and picked up one small chip. ‘Okay?’

Loder nodded. Scarne stood up.

‘Another time, perhaps.’

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

Scarne had a reason for knuckling under to Loder’s depradations. There was one thrilling explanation that did make sense.

For some time 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 practised 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. Scarne believed Loder was a Wheel operative, going through ancient motions. If Scarne 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 Scarne’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 number display flashed out sequences of multi-coloured digits. Over the exit glittered the Grand Wheel’s emblem, a slowly revolving spoked gold wheel.

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 coloured 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?’

Scarne turned on hearing the voice of Gay Millman, 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 modern science of chance and number, had rendered all such devices obsolete. They were now regarded as primitive, almost prehistoric. Scarne 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.