The Grand Wheel

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 titanic constrction soaring thousands of miles into the air. Above, the roof … the roof … he glanced up, and quickly looked away again, seeing a titanic moving assemblage of folds and colour 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 tunefulness; 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 Millman, his face so huge as to make his expression unreadable.

‘YOU LOOK PAAAALE …’

Scarne 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 Io. 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.’

Scarne opened his eyes again. A thousand-mile-across face ballooned into view. Thin nose, pale skin, jaunty eyebrows all smeared from horizon to horizon.

Then, like a telescope suddenly re-focusing, his vision became normal. The face was human size. ‘Skode Loder,’ Scarne 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 Scarne. 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 Scarne 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 corner where there was a news-vendor stand. A flash-sign glowed above the delivery slot: BIG DEFEAT IN HOPULA CLUSTER. LEGITIMACY FORCES REEL BEFORE HADRANIC HAMMER-BLOWS. But even this horrifying war news failed to catch his attention, and he passed by, walking through a ghost world.

TWO

When Scarne 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 become much worse unless he gave himself the fix he so badly needed.

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.