The Grand Wheel

Although the High Command had now assigned him permanently to the project, he felt he would have been better employed in doing what he had originally been doing – helping to set up the defensive pattern that was designed to prevent the Hadranics from crossing the Cave. He knew, by now, that the chances of any immediate usefulness coming out of the alien machine were infinitesimal. This latest result, spectacular though it was, merely demonstrated how little they understood the machine, and the High Command’s insistence that they continue the work on the spot, instead of moving the machine further back, was a kind of reflex action that symptomized the Legitimacy’s refusal to let anything go.

Isolated though he was from the mainstream of activity, Hakandra still heard how things were going in the Cave, over the narrowbeam. And the news was that there was very little time. The attempted evacuation of the far side of the Cave had failed when the thin defensive screen collapsed. There were horrifying tales of massacre. And the Hadranic forces were now poised to invest Caspar.

‘Everything would be different,’ Hakandra said, ‘if we had more time.’

On the bed, Shane muttered and whimpered.

ELEVEN

‘Here it comes,’ Jerry Soma said.

He and Cheyne Scarne were sitting in a small cocktail lounge aboard the Wheel transport Disk of Hyke. The big ship was moving into the Cave of Caspar; as it did so, it had briefly intercepted a narrowbeam transmission from one of the big military bases there. The communications-room was now putting through the decoded signals to anyone who cared to hear them.

Soma hunched over the small speaker unit, listening to the stream of disconnected messages. Much of it was machine talk – one computer reporting to another. But there were enough verbal messages, many of them informal, to tell the tale.

‘Goddam,’ Soma said, almost gloating. ‘Just hear it. What a mess.’

‘I wonder how people are taking this in solsystem,’ Scarne tendered.

‘Closing their eyes to it, that’s how they’re taking it,’ Soma said. ‘Going around in a dream. The real truth won’t hit them until they find themselves under siege.’

He switched off the speaker. ‘I heard something interesting just there. Something about an alien randomness machine. Maybe we’ll be investigating that.’

‘You think the Hadranics will really get across the Cave?’

‘Sure they will. Then the war will really start.’

Scarne spoke with difficulty. ‘The Wheel ought to help. Instead of …’

He tailed off. Instead of making matters worse, was what he meant.

For civilization was being threatened on two sides. If the Hadranics didn’t make mankind their property, Marguerite Dom would gamble it away.

Perhaps contact with the Legitimacy had affected his attitudes, Scarne thought. Everything seemed crazy to him now: a civilization practically run by gamblers, reckless enough to throw it on to the gaming-table.

Earlier he had talked the matter out with Soma. Although contemptuous of Scarne’s newly-revealed background, he remained cordial and had been forthcoming. Where Dom was concerned, he was quite specific.

‘Dom has a need for real hazard,’ he had said. ‘It goes right to the core of his being. It’s a mystical thing with him. Religion, almost.’

Yes. Scarne recalled what Dom himself had said. Not formal laws, but hazard and contingency, lay at the basis of existence. Therefore a life lived contingently was the true life.

To the Legitimacy, of course, such an outlook was insane. They were on the side of formal laws. And yet Dom was vindicated: for here was the Grand Wheel setting out to meet others of like nature, gamblers who controlled, possibly, civilizations larger and more powerful than anything mankind had seen.

Soma noticed his pensiveness. ‘You’re looking glum, Cheyne,’ he said. He leered. ‘Missing Cadence, eh? You’re going to have to show your worth before the Chairman gives you another woman.’

The medallion on Scarne’s lapel chimed, informing him that Dom wanted him. He finished his drink, rose from his seat and left without another word.

Crossing a spacious hallway, he glanced at the murals depicting Lady, Johnny Diceman, the Queen of Cups, and other members of the ill-organized gamblers’ pantheon. How long, he wondered, before this mythical lore crystallized into a formal religion? Another century or two? He was certain that already Marguerite Dom believed, quite literally, in the existence of these supernatural personages.

How did Dom really see the coming contest? As an exercise in the worship of Lady?