The Grand Wheel

His eyes glittered as they roved over his co-members. ‘Well, gentlemen, you have called this meeting, as is your right – or some of you have. Now, put your business.’

The first to speak was the tall, smooth, engaging Holt. ‘The business of the meeting is already known to you, Chairman. Some of us are doubtful about the coming project.’

‘So. And why?’

‘Think what we stand to lose!’

‘What has the Wheel come to?’ Dom said suavely. ‘I find it difficult to take you seriously. Are you afraid now of a little gamble? In my view, the odds are favourable.’

Pawarce, a thick-set man with hard, brutal eyes, took up the argument. ‘There’s another angle to this caper. Supposing this Pendragon animal is smarter than he seems? It could be that we are still being hustled – railroaded into playing a game where we’re out of our depth.’

This point had not escaped Dom. Essentially, he could only answer it in a pragmatic sense. ‘That is something we have to assess for ourselves as we proceed,’ he said. ‘If we feel suspicious, we can always withdraw. So far, I see nothing to indicate that we are being tricked. Safeguards can be arranged – are being arranged. I believe our opponents are as interested in testing our performance as we are in testing theirs.’

‘Then why don’t we play for smaller stakes, to begin with?’ Pawarce demanded harshly.

‘They are not interested in playing for pennies,’ Dom said mildly. ‘Come, gentlemen! Life was a gamble since the first amoeba crawled up out of the slime. Besides, if you want a better reason for abandoning your caution, consider this: the stakes we are putting into the game may shortly be valueless. I have recently received information from the Legitimacy which makes clear the imminent possibility of total defeat at the hands of the Hadranics. Think of that, when you tremble to risk what we have.’

But when the argument was over, minds remained unchanged. Attitudes had already been firmed up before the meeting took place. They took a vote. It was six to six.

Dom felt a sudden impatience with the dissenters. ‘Go and join the Legitimacy, you creeping tortoises,’ he thought. ‘Build a shell round yourselves, like them’. He rose from his place and stepped to the other side of the chamber, laying his hand on the dust-encrusted casing of a machine standing there.

‘The matter must move forward,’ he said stonily.

Everyone gazed at the machine in fascination. ‘Velikosk’s roulette?’ Pawarce rasped in a hushed tone. ‘But that thing hasn’t been used for fifty years.’

‘What matter? It is still in good order, and there is precedence. Unless someone wishes to change his vote.’

They all sat as if paralysed. With a nervous smile Dom lifted a flap of metal and slapped a switch. When he returned to his wrought-iron chair, to which the machine was connected as it was to all the others, he was calm. Gracefully, he sat down.

The Velikosk roulette machine hummed as it went into action. A flicker of light ran round the edge of the table, momentarily pausing at each man in turn. Hands gripped the table in unbearable nervous tension. Dom, however, was relaxed, facing whatever the future might bring with practised imperturbability.

Faster and faster ran the ghostly nimbus. Then, abruptly, it ceased to be. And the chair over which it had last flickered was empty. Its occupant had disappeared, sucked into the gulf of pure randomness that underpinned the universe.

This was the fifth time, Dom believed, that the Velikosk machine had been put to the purpose of resolving differences of opinion among the council of the Grand Wheel. Until recently no one had even remotely understood how it worked – Velikosk had never been able to explain it to anybody. Even now it was doubtful if it could be repaired should it break down, in which case a tradition would die.

The empty chair had been Pawarce’s.

‘I believe the vote will now prove to be six to five, gentlemen,’ Dom intoned calmly. ‘Shall we formalize it, or would you prefer to leave it at that?’

SEVEN

At the end of its descent from the orbiting team ship the planetary lander, a long gondola with a lifter engine at each end, settled on to the crumbling terraces amid a skirl of dust. When the air had settled, the door opened. Hakandra, followed by his constant companion, Shane the cold-senser, stepped out.

This planet was not unlike the one he had recently left, he thought as he looked about him. Dry and bleached-looking. The sky was a very pale blue, as though all the real colour had been seared out of it. Interesting how most of the planets that bore – or had borne – life in the Cave followed the same dehydrated pattern.