The Grand Wheel

When it came to method, he thought as he padded to the bathroom, there was little to choose between the Legitimacy and the Grand Wheel. Magdan had chosen a hell of a way to ensure his loyalty. The drug his men had forcibly addicted him to was a specific drug, one synthesized exclusively for use on him. The antidote was equally specific. Neither it, nor the drug itself, could be obtained from anyone but his masters, the Legitimacy’s secret intelligence service.

In the bathroom mirror he examined his face carefully. Its lines were continuing to deepen, his incipient middle age being accelerated by the ravages of the drug.

Wearily he washed, dressed, and then breakfasted on coffee and synthetic fluffed eggs. There was time to wait before his appointment with the Wheel callers. He tried to relax, attempting to soothe himself by playing with a favourite curio: a pair of cubical white dice, the faces bearing black dots from one to six. They were centuries old, quite valuable as antiques. Loaded with tiny movable internal weights, with a little expertise – it was all in the wrist action – they could be made to come up with any number to order. Or, again by means of the right shake, they could be converted into even-weighted dice safe for inspection.

He shook the dice in his hand and threw a seven. He threw four more sevens, then switched to eleven.

In a games-conscious civilization the weighted dice were but one item in a long and colourful history of cheating devices. Cheating at cards, for instance, was a science all of its own; it had a tradition of ingenuity that made it almost honourable in some eyes. Locaters, shiners, marked cards of inexhaustible variety, strippers both concave and convex, change-cards whose surface mutated and could assume the value of any card in the deck – the mechanics of it was endless, not to speak of sleight of hand, which in some practitioners had reached almost superhuman levels.

The ultimate in cheating devices was probably the holdout robot, given its name from the ancient (but still used) hold-out machine, a device strapped to the arm which delivered either a set of cards or a cold deck into the hand. The hold-out robot was a proxie player, a nearly undetectable man-like robot which entered play but remained in touch with its owner who looked through its eyes and partly controlled it. More than a mere waldo, the hold-out proxie had its own brain and such a sublime sense of touch that it never needed to use trick shuffles or any other gimmick. It could take a deck in its fingers and count the cards down by touch alone, cutting to obtain any card it wanted. It could keep track of every individual card through shuffles and deals and so always knew what everybody was holding.

Hold-out robots had gone out of fashion recently, though. It was becoming easier to detect them. The last one Scarne had heard about had been smashed to pieces, right there in the card-room.

At ten the annunciator toned. Scarne, who had become increasingly more nervous during the past half-hour, checked the door monitor. Two men stood outside, both snappily dressed. One was big, and had an air of restrained violence: the heavy. The other was smaller, more like a functionary.

He let them in. The heavy looked around the apartment in a cool, professional manner. ‘Is this place bonded?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Right. We don’t have to worry about it.’

The other spoke, mildly but firmly. ‘We’re here to take you to see some people, Professor Scarne. Don’t expect to be back in a hurry. Unless you have any substantial objections, I suggest we leave now.’

Scarne coughed, found his voice. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Earth. The planliner leaves in half an hour.’

‘Could you tell me exactly what I’m wanted for?’ Scarne asked, stumbling over the words. The Wheel man made no direct answer, but merely stared at him. Do you not understand your good fortune? his eyes seemed to say. You’re being taken into the employment of the Grand Wheel. You’ll be a Wheel man, like me, a member of the most powerful brotherhood in the human world.

Scarne picked up the hold-all he had already prepared. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

A car was waiting in the street below. Scarne sat in the back, sandwiched between his two escorts, while they rode through the town.

‘What are your names?’ he asked boldly.

The smaller man gestured to his companion, then to himself. ‘Caiman. Hervold.’

‘We’re going to Earth, you say. At least you can tell me where on Earth.’

‘Just Earth.’ Hervold smiled wryly. ‘We just do our job, that’s all.’

‘Of course.’ Scarne peered out of the car window, watching the buildings speeding past.

The shuttle whooshed skywards, leaving Io’s miniature landscape laid neatly out below. The towers of Maintown jutted up like a crop of metal whiskers. The atmosphere plant on the outskirts looked like an Earth-type stadium, exhaling the gases of life.