"Huh?"
"I can't go in there with you. I've got an A card, and that's a Class C
joint."
"You mean even gambling places are classified and regulated and
everything?"
Hawkes nodded. "It has to be that way. This is a very complicated
society you've stumbled into, Alan. Look: I'm a first-rate gamesman.
That's not boasting; it's empirical truth proven over and over again
during the course of a fifteen-year career. I could make a fortune
competing against beginners and dubs and has-beens, so they legislate
against me. You make a certain annual income from gambling and you go
into Class A, and then you can't enter any of the lower-class joints
like the Atlas. You slip under the Class A minimum three years in a row
and you lose your card. I stay over the minimum."
"So I'll have to go after Steve myself. Well, in that case, thanks for
all the help, and if you'll show me which Shoot I take to get to the
Atlas----"
"Not so fast, son." Hawkes grasped Alan's wrist. "Even in a Class C dump
you can lose plenty. And you can't just stand around hunting for your
brother. Unless you're there as a learner you'll have to play."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"I'll take you to a Class A place tonight. You can come in as a learner;
they all know me. I'll try to show you enough about the game so you
don't get rooked. Then you can stay over at my place and tomorrow we'll
go up to the Atlas and look around for your brother. I'll have to wait
outside, of course."
Alan shrugged. He was beginning to realize he was a little nervous about
the coming meeting with Steve--and perhaps, he thought, a little extra
delay would be useful. And he still had plenty of time to get back to
the _Valhalla_ after he saw Steve, even if he stayed in the city
overnight.
"Well?" Hawkes said.
"Okay. I'll go with you."
This time they took the Undertube, which they reached by following a
glowing sign and then an underground passageway. Alan rode down behind
Hawkes on the moving ramp and found himself in a warm, brightly-lit
underground world with stores, restaurants, newsboys hawking telefax
sheets, milling swarms of homebound commuters.
They reached the entrance to a tube and Hawkes handed him a small oval
object with figures engraved on it. "That's your tube-token. It goes in
the slot."
They passed through the turnstile and followed signs indicating the West
Side Tube. The tube was a long sleek affair, windowless, shaped like a
bullet. The tube was already packed with commuters when they got aboard;
there were no empty seats, of course, and everyone seemed to be jostling
everyone else for the right to stand upright. The sign at the end of the
tube said, _Tube X#3174-WS_.
The trip took only a few minutes of seemingly effortless gliding, and
then they emerged far on the other side of the giant city. The
neighborhood they were in was considerably less crowded; it had little
of the mad hubbub of the downtown district.
A neon sign struck his eyes at once: SUPERIOR GAMES PARLOR. Under that
in smaller letters was: CLASS A ESTABLISHMENT. A robot stood outside, a
gleaming replica of the one he had tussled with earlier in the day.
"Class A only," the robot said as they came near. "This Games Parlor is
for Class A only."
Hawkes stepped around him and broke the photo-contact on the door. Alan
followed him in.
The place was dimly lit, as all Earther pleasure-places seemed to be.
Alan saw a double row of tables spreading to the back of the parlor. At
each table was an earnest-looking citizen hunched over a board, watching
the pattern of lights in front of him come and go, change and shift.
Another robot glided up to them. "May I see your card, please?" It
purred.
Hawkes passed his card before the robot's photonic scanners and the
robot clicked acknowledgement, stepping to one side and letting Hawkes
pass. It turned to Alan and said, "May I see your card, please?"
"I don't----"
"He's with me," Hawkes said. "A learner."
A man in a dirty gray smock came up to them. "Evening, Max. Hinesy was
here already and told me you weren't coming in tonight."
"I wasn't, but I changed my mind. I brought a learner along with
me--friend of mine name of Alan Donnell. This is Joe Luckman, Alan. He
runs this place."
Luckman nodded absently to Alan, who mumbled a greeting in return.
"Guess you want your usual table?" Luckman asked.
"If it's open," Hawkes said.
"Been open all evening."
Luckman led them down the long aisle to the back of the big hall, where
there was a vacant table with one seat before it. Hawkes slid smoothly
into the seat and told Alan to stand behind him and watch carefully.
"We'll start at the beginning of the next round," he said.
Alan looked around. Everywhere men were bent over the patterns of lights
on the boards before them, with expressions of fierce concentration on
their faces. Far in the corner Alan saw the pudgy figure of MacIntosh,
the Keeper of the Records; MacIntosh was bathed in his own sweat, and
sat rigid as if hypnotized.
Hawkes nudged him. "Keep your eyes on me. The others don't matter. I'm
ready to get started."
_Chapter Nine_
Hawkes took a coin from his pocket and dropped it in a slot at the side
of the board. It lit up. A crazy, shifting pattern of colored lights
passed over it, restless, never pausing.
"What happens now?"
"You set up a mathematical pattern with these keys," Hawkes said,
pointing to a row of enamelled studs along the side of the machine.
"Then the lights start flashing, and as soon as they flash--at random,
of course--into the pattern you've previously set up, you're the winner.
The skill of the game comes in predicting the kind of pattern that will
be the winning one. You've got to keep listening to the numbers that the
croupier calls off, and fit them into your sequence."
Suddenly a bell rang loudly, and the board went dead. Alan looked around
and saw that all the other boards in the hall were dark as well.
The man on the rostrum in the center of the hall cleared his throat and
sang out, "Table 403 hits us for a hundred! 403! One hundred!"
A pasty-faced bald man at a table near theirs rose with a broad grin on
his face and went forward to collect. Hawkes rapped sharply on the side
of the table to get Alan's attention.
"Look here, now. You have to get a head start. As soon as the boards
light up again, I have to begin setting up my pattern. I'm competing
against everyone else here, you see. And the quickest man wins, usually.
Of course, blind luck sometimes brings you a winner--but not very
often."
Alan nodded and watched carefully as Hawkes' fingers flew nimbly over
the controlling studs the instant the tables lit for the next round. The
others nearby were busy doing the same thing, but few of them set about
it with the air of cocky jauntiness that Hawkes wore.
Finally he stared at the board in satisfaction and sat back. The
croupier pounded three times with a little gavel and said, "103
sub-prime 5."
Hastily Hawkes made a correction in his equation. The lights on the
board flickered and faded, moving faster than Alan could see.
"377 third-quadrant 7."
Again a correction. Hawkes sat transfixed, staring intently at the
board. The other players were similarly entranced, Alan saw. He realized
it was possible for someone to become virtually hypnotized by the game,
to spend days on end sitting before the board.
He forced himself to follow Hawkes' computations as number after number
was called off. He began to see the logical pattern of the game.
It was a little like astrogation, in which he had had the required
preliminary instruction. When you worked out a ship's course, you had to
keep altering it to allow for course deflection, effects of planetary
magnetic fields, meteor swarms, and such obstacles--and you had to be
one jump ahead of the obstacles all the time.
It was the same here. The pilot board at the croupier's rostrum had a
prearranged mathematical pattern on it. The idea of the game was to set
up your own board in the identical pattern. As each succeeding
coordinate on the graph was called out, you recomputed in terms of the
new probabilities, rubbing out old equations and substituting new ones.
There was always the mathematical chance that a pattern set up at random
would be identical to the master control pattern--but that was a pretty
slim chance. It took brains to win at this game. The man whose board was
first to match the pilot pattern won.
Hawkes worked quietly, efficiently, and lost the first four rounds. Alan
commiserated. But the gambler snapped, "Don't waste your pity. I'm still
experimenting. As soon as I've figured out the way the numbers are
running tonight, I'll start raking it in."
It sounded boastful to the starman, but Hawkes won on the fifth round,
matching the hidden pattern in only six minutes. The previous four
rounds had taken from nine to twelve minutes before a winner appeared.
The croupier, a small, sallow-faced chap, shoved a stack of coins and a
few bills at Hawkes when he went to the rostrum to claim his winnings. A
low murmur rippled through the hall; Hawkes had evidently been
recognized.
His take was a hundred credits. In less than an hour, he was already
seventy-five credits to the good. Hawkes' sharp eyes glinted brightly;
he was in his element now, and enjoying it.
The sixth round went to a bespectacled round-faced man three tables to
the left, but Hawkes won a hundred credits each on the seventh and
eighth rounds, then lost three in a row, then plunged for a heavy stake
in his ninth round and came out ahead by five hundred credits.
So Hawkes had won four times in nine rounds, Alan thought. And there
were at least a hundred people in the hall. Even assuming the gambler
did not always have the sort of luck he was having now, that meant most
people did not win very often, and some did not win at all.
As the evening went along, Hawkes made it look simple. At one point he
won four rounds in a row; then he dropped off for a while, but came back
for another big pot half an hour later. Alan estimated Hawkes' night's
work had been worth more than a thousand credits so far.
The gambler pushed his winnings to fourteen hundred credits, while Alan
watched; the fine points of the game became more comprehensible to him
with each passing moment, and he longed to sit down at the table
himself. That was impossible, he knew; this was a Class A parlor, and a
rank beginner such as himself could not play.
But then Hawkes began to lose. Three, four, five rounds in a row slipped
by without a win. At one point Hawkes committed an elementary mistake in
arithmetic that made Alan cry out; Hawkes turned and silenced him with a
fierce bleak scowl, and Alan went red.
Six rounds. Seven. Eight. Hawkes had lost nearly a hundred of his
fourteen hundred credits. Luck and skill seemed to have deserted him
simultaneously. After the eleventh consecutive losing round, Hawkes rose
from the table, shaking his head bitterly.
"I've had enough. Let's get out of here."
He pocketed his winnings--still a healthy twelve hundred credits,
despite his late-evening slump--and Alan followed him out of the parlor
into the night. It was late now, past midnight. The streets, fresh and
clean, were damp. It had rained while they were in the parlor, and Alan
realized wryly he had been so absorbed by the game that he had not even
noticed.
Crowds of home-going Yorkers moved rapidly through the streets. As they
made their way to the nearest Undertube terminal, Alan broke the
silence. "You did all right tonight, didn't you?"
"Can't complain."
"It's too bad you had that slump right at the end. If you'd quit half an
hour earlier you'd be two hundred credits richer."
Hawkes smiled. "If you'd been born a couple of hundred years later,
you'd be a lot smarter."
"What is that supposed to mean?" Alan felt annoyed by Hawkes' remark.
"Simply that I lost deliberately toward the end." They turned into the
Undertube station and headed for the ticket windows. "It's part of a
smart gambler's knowhow to drop a few credits deliberately now and
then."
"Why?"
"So the jerks who provide my living keep on coming back," Hawkes said
bluntly. "I'm good at that game. Maybe I'm the best there is. I can feel
the numbers with my hands. If I wanted to, I could win four out of five
times, even at a Class A place."