"How?"
"Fer years," he said, "I been living on peanuts. I been runnin' errands
for hard coins. I been--"
"Swiping the take of a Red Cross box," I snapped at him.
"Aw, Mr. Wilson," he whined, "I simply gotta make a stake. I'm a-goin'
to send it back when I win."
"Are you going to win?"
"Can't I?"
For a moment I toyed with the idea of being honest with the Gimp.
Somehow, someone should tell the duffer that all horse players die
broke, or that if he could make a living I'd be out of business.
Gimpy Gordon was one of Life's Unfortunates. If it were to rain gold
coins, Gimpy would be out wearing boxing gloves. His mental processes
meandered because of too much methyl. His unfortunate nickname did not
come from the old-fashioned reason that he walked with a limp, but from
the even more unfortunate reason that he _thought_ with a limp. In his
own unhealthy way he was--could we call it "Lucky" by any standard of
honesty? In this world full of highly developed psi talent, the Gimp
_could_ pick a pocket and get away with it because he often literally
could not remember where and how he'd acquired the wallet for longer
than a half minute. And it was a sort of general unwritten rule that any
citizen so utterly befogged as to permit his wealth to be lifted via
light fingers should lose it as a lesson!
But then it did indeed occur to me that maybe I could make use of the
Gimp.