His first impulse was to turn and run. There was no explaining it,
no rationalizing the feeling of dread and danger that struck him
as he walked into the room. The feeling swept over him with almost
overpowering intensity; something was unbearably wrong here.
Jeff walked in slowly, closing the door behind him. The door seemed
to be pulled tight shut, sucked out of his hand. That was when the
tension in the air struck Jeff like an almost physical force, and his
mind filled with dread.
No one noticed him. He stared around himself curiously. He watched
the Nasty Frenchman shoulder his way through the crowd. One of Silly
Giggin's particularly maddening nervous-jazz arrangements was squawking
from a player somewhere in the room, and the air itself was filled with
a jagged rattle of conversation that rose above the music.
Most of the faces were new to Jeff. There were tired, old ones, marked
indelibly with lines of fear, lines of hunted hopelessness. There
were faces with tight, compressed, bloodless lips; faces with eyes
full of coldness and cynicism, and faces radiating sharp, perverted
intelligence.
Crowds leaned tensely around the tables and watched the cards with
eager, calculating eyes. Side bets were made as the hands were opened.
Other groups huddled on the floor and watched the dice with beady,
avaricious eyes.
The music jangled and scraped, and little bursts of harsh laughter
broke out to compete with it. And through it all ran the chilling
inescapable feeling of error, of something missed, something gone
horribly wrong.
He moved slowly through the room and searched the faces milling around
him. His eyes caught Blackie's, far across the room, for the barest
instant, and the chill of something gone wrong intensified and sent a
quiver up his spine. He stopped a passerby and motioned at the nearest
dice huddle. "How do you get in?" he asked.
The man shrugged, looking at him strangely. "You lay down your money
and you play," he snapped. "If you got no money, then you've got the
next job's payoff to bet with. 'Smatter, Jack, you new around here?"
And the man moved on, shaking his head.
Jeff nodded, realization striking. What would be more natural to a
group of people teetering from day to day on the brink of death? The
need for excitement, for activity, would be overpowering in a dismal
prison-place like this. And with the huge sums of money yet unearned to
bet with--Jeff shuddered. Cut-throat games, yes, but could they really
explain this strange tension he sensed? Or had something happened,
something to change the atmosphere, to pervade every nook and cranny of
the room with an air of explosive tension?
Jeff started moving toward the Nasty Frenchman. The little man was
gulping coffee in the corner. He sucked on a long, black cigar and
appeared to be in deep conversation with a bald-headed giant who leaned
against the wall. Jeff spotted Blackie again. She was across the room
on her knees. She faced a little buck-toothed man, as she swiftly
rolled the three colored dice. Her eyes followed them, quick and
unnaturally bright.
Jeff shook his head. Panmumjon was a high-speed, high-tension game--a
game for the steel-nerved. Its famous dead-locks had often led to
murder, as the pots rose higher and higher. The girl seemed to be
winning. She rolled the dice with trance-like regularity, and the
little buck-toothed man's face darkened as his money pile dwindled.
Across the room a corner crap game was moving swiftly, with staggering
sums of money passing from hand to hand; the card games, though slower,
left the mark of their tension on the players' faces. Jeff still
stared, until he had seen every face in the room. Paul Conroe's face
was not one of them.
No, he had not expected that. But what had happened? It was maddening
to stand there, to feel the tension in the room, sense that it was
growing until it seemed to pound at his temples. No one else seemed to
notice it. Was he the only one aware of the change in the air, in the
sounds, even in the color of the light against the walls? Something was
impelling him, urging him to run, to get away, to leave the room now
while he could. Yet when he tried to analyze the creeping, poisonous
fear, tried to pin it down, it wriggled away into the fringes of his
mind, and mocked him.
Finally, he reached the corner of the room. His ear caught the Nasty
Frenchman's nasal voice, and he froze as he stared at the little man.
"I tell you, Harpo, I heard it with my own ears. You never saw Schiml
so excited. And then Shaggy Parsons was saying that the whole unit was
being split up--that's the A unit. I saw him when I was going through
this afternoon. He was all excited, too."
"But why split it up?" The huge bald-headed man called Harpo growled,
his heavy lips twisting in disgust. "I don't trust Shaggy Parsons for
nothin', and I think you hear what you want to hear. What's the point
to it? Schiml's coming along fine in the work he's using us in--"
The Nasty Frenchman turned red. "That's just it: we've been in and
we're going to be out, right out in the cold. Can't you get that
straight? Something's going to break. They're onto something--Schiml
and his boys--something big. And they've got a new man, somebody
they're excited about, somebody that's been knocking walls down just by
looking at them, or something--"
Harpo made a disgusted noise. "You mean, the old ESP story again. So
maybe they go off on another spook hunt. They'll get over it, same as
they did the last time or the time before."
The Nasty Frenchman's voice was tense. "But they're _changing things_.
And changes mean trouble." He glanced at Jeff and his eyebrows went
up. "Look, they get on a line of work, they assign men to different
parts of a job, they get work lined up months in advance. Then all of
a sudden something new comes along. They get excited about something
and they toss out a couple dozen workers, add on a couple dozen new
ones, change the fees, change the work. And they end up handing the
best pay to somebody who's just come in. I don't like it. I've been in
this place too long. I've had too many tough, lousy jobs here to just
get pushed aside because they don't happen to be interested any more
in what they were doing to me before. And they never tell us! We never
know for sure. We just have to wait and guess and hope."
The little man's eyes blazed. "But we can pick up some things, a little
here, a little there--you learn how, after a while. And I can tell you,
something's wrong, something's going to happen. You can even feel it in
here."
Jeff's skin crawled. That was it, of course. There was something wrong.
But it hadn't happened yet. It was going to happen. He stared at a
huddled group around a panmumjon game, watched the bright-colored dice
cubes roll across and back, across and back. A newcomer, the Nasty
Frenchman had said, someone who had come in and disrupted the smooth
work schedule of the Center, someone who had the doctors suddenly
excited. Someone whom they were planning to use--on a spook hunt.
What kind of a spook hunt? Why that choice of words? Could Conroe
conceivably be the newcomer they had been talking about? It didn't seem
possible that it could have happened so suddenly if Conroe were the
one--but who? And what did this have to do with the ever-growing sense
of impending danger that pervaded the room, right now?
Jeff's eyes wandered to the dice game, and the fear in his mind
suddenly grew to a screaming torrent. _Go away, Jeff. Don't watch,
don't look--_He scowled, suddenly angry. Why not look? What was there
so dangerous in a dice game? He moved over to the nearby huddle and
watched the moving cubes in fascination. _No, Jeff, no, don't do it,
Jeff--_With a curse, he dropped to his knees and reached out for the
dice.
"You in?" somebody asked. Jeff nodded, his face like a rock. The voice
had stopped screaming in his ear, and now something else grew in his
mind: a wild exhilaration that caught his breath and swept through his
brain like a whirl-wind. His eyes sparkled and he pulled money from his
pocket. He laid the bills on the floor and his hands closed on the dice.
He faced a little, pimple-faced man with beady black eyes and he raised
the three brightly colored dice, rolling into the familiar pattern.
The dice deadlocked in four throws. He sweated out seven more with new
dice. Then Jeff saw a break in the odds, boosted the ante on his next
throw and caught his breath as the man facing him matched it.
The dice rolled, fell into deadlock again, and the crowd around them
gasped, moved in closer around them. The third set of dice was brought
out, for the attempts at dead-lock-breaking. Then a fourth set
followed, as the complex structure of the game built up like a house
of cards. Then Jeff's dice at last rolled the critical number, and the
structure began to break apart--throw after throw falling faster and
faster into his hands.
Four or five people moved in at his side with side bets and began to
collect along with him, as he moved into another game, built it up.
This one he lost cold, but still he played on, his excitement growing.
And then, suddenly, pandemonium broke loose in the room. Eyes glanced
up, startled, at the two men, far across the room, who stood facing
each other, eyes blazing.
"Throw them down! Go on! Throw them, see how they land!"