They began with a modest half-credit bet. Snelz threw twenty. Heller declined to make a second bet that he could beat it. He threw fifty-one. He won. Ah, well. Good strategy. Heller was to win for a while.
“Let’s bet one credit,” said Snelz. “I feel lucky.”
Heller took the dice. Now dice players have a routine all their own, all unnecessary. They take the six dice in their cupped palms; they shake them on the right side of their head; they shake them on the left side of their head; then they tap one set of knuckles or the other on the table and send the dice bouncing onto the board with a sort of shovel motion. And they sing to the dice as they do it. Heller did all this. But he had two wrinkles of his own. He blew onto the palmed dice first and then shook them and he shook them longer and harder than I have seen dice shaken before. His hands sort of blurred in the shake—very, very fast!
Heller threw a sixty-two. Against his own advice, he said, “One credit to a hundred says you can’t beat that. I frankly advise you to decline.”
“No, I’ll take it,” said Snelz. He placed the dice carefully in his palm. When he shook them, he didn’t permit them to roll about. He banged his knuckles on the table.
I thought, hey, this is early to start winning. The bang on the table, of course, settled the lead pellets into the goo in the hollow. The dice rolled out a ten!
Oh, I thought. Clever boy. He’s carrying out the strategy.
“Ouch,” said Snelz. “Looks like I better up my stakes to recover my loss. Two hundred credits all right with you for this next bet?”
Of course, it was really Heller’s turn, as he didn’t have the first throw, to set the stake for the first bet. But he shrugged, overlooking the irregularity, looking as tolerant as you would look at an amateur who didn’t quite know the rules.
Snelz threw. It was a fifty. Any dice player can add up the points at a glance if he is expert and I thought Snelz made an error by calling “Fifty!” instantly in a loud voice. I guessed Snelz was too excited to mask his expertise. “Fifty credits to fifty credits says you can’t top it.”
Heller was in the swing of it now. He blew upon the dice. He shook to the right and shook to the left and as he did it, he sang:
Money for my honey
Booze for my cruise,
Fly them over fifty
And don’t let this spacer lose.
He threw and cried, “Fifty-five!” after the dice stopped rolling. He picked up the money with an easy sweep.
Snelz said, “You certainly are lucky. I know I am just a beginner at this, but I am afraid I will have to double my bet again. Four hundred credits all right with you?
“Actually,” said Heller, “doubling is a devil’s game. I advise against it.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to insist,” said Snelz.
Heller shrugged. He picked up the dice. He blew on them quite a long time. Then he sang:
Don’t reimburse the purse,
Of the loser we won’t nurse.
Fly a winning number
And win the universe.
His shake had been extremely hard. The roll was expert with a back spin. “Forty! Try and beat it. Ten credits to three hundred and seventy-five says you won’t.”
Snelz put the dice very carefully in his palm, blew on them, pretended to shake them. He sang:
Dicies balm and calm,
Don’t cramp the champ.
Better up the forty
And put money in my camp!
He threw. “Thirty-five!” Heller raked in the money.
Good. Snelz was following the strategy. Any moment now, he would turn the game around and start to win. And that would be the end of Officer Heller’s ability to buy favors, and off to Earth we’d go.
There was a knock on the door. A guard tiptoed in and whispered to me: “Dr. Crobe just sent up word that if you didn’t see him at once, you’d be real sorry.”
Well, I should have expected it. I was supposed to take Heller back to him, and what was it now, seven days? and we hadn’t gone near him. I didn’t want to leave this game. But Snelz would bring it off. How could he lose with those dice? I left.
But the second I started to go down the tube, I also started to get sick at my stomach. A bad feeling of pain with a bit of nausea.
I found Crobe in his foul office. He left off scraping some cells from a severed foot. He raised his head and leveled his scummy eyes down his beak nose.
“You,” he said, “are up to something. You have not brought that special agent back here for bugging.”
I felt very ill. “I’ve been busy.”
“I have a direct order from Lombar Hisst to fix up this special agent. You have not brought him back. You are up to something.”
I had to sit down. I really was feeling ill. Maybe it was that severed foot. It looked green in the green glowplates. It was putrefying.
“Officer Gris,” said Crobe, “do you know of any way to prevent me from reporting this to Lombar Hisst?”
My stomach gave a new turn. I could hardly lift my head. But in my field of view, there lay his filthy hand, palm up. It was unmistakable.
Feebly I reached into my tunic and got out my wallet. I only had about thirty-five credits in it. I pulled out a ten.
Crobe took the ten, then reached over and took the rest of the money out of the wallet. “Thirty-five credits.” he counted. “Won’t do.” He threw them aside.
It was a lot of money. For the dungeons of Spiteos. They never had any money down here. But I realized that I would shortly have thousands. “Make it a hundred. I’ll pay the rest later.”
Crobe picked up his gummy scraping knife and pointed it at me. “You’re really up to something, Officer Gris. Do you realize the danger to me personally if I don’t follow out Lombar Hisst’s orders?”
I was too sick to think straight. The pains were like dagger stabs!
“Two hundred,” said Crobe.
Oh, no! But I was about to be rich. I hurt. I wanted out. I nodded numbly.
Crobe picked up the thirty-five credits and counted them again. “Then you’ll owe me a hundred and sixty-five and you’ll pay me tomorrow or up to Hisst I go!”
I managed to say, “All right,” and then I got out of there. When I got into the tube and started going up I suddenly felt completely well! Mysterious. What was this odd illness?
Reasoning that my recovery was probably an anticipation of Snelz’s winnings, I got back into the room.
Heller was just finishing a song. He threw the dice expertly. “Sixty-five!” And he scooped up the bet money.
It took me a moment to register the scene. Snelz was sitting there tense. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. The pile of money in front of Heller was huge!
I glared at Snelz. He was carrying this losing streak too far! He had better turn this tide around and quick!
Snelz said, “I bet a thousand!”
Heller put the dice in his palm, cupped his hands, blew into them long and hard. He sang:
Conserve your nerve,
You made the parade,
Roll a high number
And complete the ambuscade!
He was shaking those dice so hard I couldn’t really find any shape in his hands. He knocked his knuckles on the table. “Seventy!”
Snelz looked stunned. He stammered, “I decline to make a second bet.”
“Wise boy,” said Heller.
Snelz picked up the dice for his throw. Who could beat seventy? He looked at each die very carefully. He was looking for the spots.
“You don’t think I switched dice on you, do you?” said Heller.
“No,” said Snelz in a little tiny voice. “These are the same dice.”
Heller laughed. He said, “I’m so glad. Duels can get so final and as an ex-Marine, you’re probably a good shot.”
Snelz looked like somebody in torment. The joke Heller had made was far too near home for him. He probably couldn’t win a duel with Heller if he had the odd
s of a blastcannon. Snelz placed the dice very carefully in his palm. I knew what he was doing. He was taking an awful chance but he was covertly arranging the dice to shoot a seventy-two! All twelves! With a shock, I saw that his money was very low. His money? My money. Snelz sang:
Don’t bust through the crust,
Put a flag on the crag,
Please, please, a high number!
And bring home the swag!
He threw. The dice stopped. He looked at them like he was seeing a zitab snake. “Sixteen,” he whispered.
Heller raked in the credits. “I shouldn’t tell you to stop playing as I’m the winner. But you ought to think about it. I had no intention of trying to clean you out.”
Snelz was in a total spin. From the looks of him, he couldn’t figure what had gone wrong. He was in desperation. “I’ve got just twelve hundred credits left,” he said. “I’m going to bet all of it.”
“Oh, no,” groaned Heller.
“Oh, yes!” cried Snelz. And he pushed out the last of my money, the last of five thousand credits!
He put the dice in his palm with great care. He blew on them prayerfully. He began to shake them lightly. He sang:
Don’t bruise with bad news,
I’ll cry if I die,
Give me a HIGH number,
A total in the SKY!
He tossed them ever so gently, hoping not to disturb the lead pellets in them. They came to a stop. He didn’t even call the number. It was eight! Almost anything could beat it.
Heller said, “No second bet possible, as you’re out of money. So I’ll just roll.”
He hardly bothered to shake them. He didn’t even sing. He just tossed them on the table. “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “Forty-nine.” He picked up the money, cleaning the board. “I really shouldn’t take your money. I could be accused of laundering a beginner.”
I anxiously awaited Snelz’s “I’ll take it back.” But he didn’t. Factually, by the codes, he couldn’t. Heller was just being very polite. “I started the game,” said Snelz, trying not to look at me.
“There’s an awful lot of money here,” said Heller, mounding it up. And indeed there was: you could have bought every officer in Spiteos with it and a hunting preserve as well! He didn’t count it. He wadded up all five thousand and held it out to Snelz. “You better take it back.”
I silently screamed, take it, take it, you idiot!
Snelz was collapsed into himself. Then he put the expected bright face on it. “Fast gotten, fast gone,” he said. He collected the dice. He picked up his cap. He said the polite thing, “Thank you for a nice game, Officer Heller.” He got out of there.
Heller shrugged. He dropped the money into his kit bag. There was too much of it and he had to stuff it in. He yawned and picked up some of the papers from the console. Perfectly relaxed, he began to read. Maybe it was the yawn. It meant so little to him. And the horror of this evening’s misadventure hit me.
I was in debt almost a year’s pay. No! With Crobe’s hundred and sixty-five it topped a year’s pay. You can’t draw more than a year’s pay in advance. I was not only broke. I was in debt! I couldn’t even buy a chank-pop!
And then a second wave hit me. I was drawing four paychecks. That year’s pay was for all four. If I lost the additional three it would take me five years of no money to get square with the boards. If I were to be taken off Mission Earth, losing those extra checks, I could get cashiered for debt! I couldn’t move. I felt paralyzed.
A half an hour later, the Countess Krak was smuggled in. She and Heller embraced shamelessly. She was quite bright, wearing silver. She filled the whole place with a radiance. She was extremely beautiful. I hated her! Heller could and would hang around forever now! I was sunk!
PART FOUR
Chapter 9
In midafternoon of the following day, I stood on the high ramparts of Spiteos. Before me stretched the Great Desert, a panorama of awesome if grim beauty. Once it had been a garden land, a verdant productive area of the ancients, splendid with trees and fields and flowers, vibrant with life. Robbed of humus and soil, devoid of life and even hope, it had become a naked, vast expanse of yellow sands, minerals and white salt, more of a tomb than a living land.
And yet, for all that, there was a sort of noble majesty in it; it stretched two hundred scorching miles to mountains which, in the afternoon’s blistering sun, barriered the stretches of death from the civilized world of Voltar.
Sun-dancers, two-hundred-foot pillars of dust, rose with lazy grace in the blistering thermal currents of the desert floor to be twisted by the flame-tongued wind. The dust contained bright flecks of sparkling mica, flashes of feldspar and the poisonous green salts of copper. Six of them were going now, their tops almost stationary, their desert-connected bottoms moving this way and that, sometimes toward each other, sometimes away: they simulated a chorus line, dancing gracefully in a parody of a glittering review, or more like the writhing of grief-torn mourners singing a song of death.
A fitting funeral scene: Crobe had just told me he was going to turn me in. I was contemplating throwing myself off the tower to plunge down thousands of feet into the chasm which held the bones of ancients and the more recent smashed remains of luckless Apparatus personnel who had erred.
When one is deep in the throes of the self-pity that goes with contemplated suicide, one does not enjoy being interrupted.
“Oh, there you are,” came Snelz’s voice behind me. “I was searching everywhere.” Too bright a voice, inadequately solemn for my mood and the deathly desert scene.
He came within range of the corner of my eye. He was wearing brand-new black gloves. He was wearing a brand-new black uniform. He was carrying a couple of small boxes in one hand and he had a tattered old book in the other.
“You look down,” he said. “Can’t have that.” And he took a chank-pop from a box of them. I noticed the label on the box: it was from one of the most expensive shops in Commercial City. He didn’t pop it: it would have been a silly thing to do in this wind anyway. “No?” he said. “Then have a puffstick.” And he opened the lid of the other box: they were the fourteen-inch puffsticks, the kind affected only by the rich. Equally silly to try to use one in this blistering wind.
I contemplated how I would go about throwing him off the rampart. It didn’t even lighten my gloom. I thought, can’t you just go away and let someone be quietly miserable?
He shoved the boxes into the wide grenade pockets of his tunic. He took the tattered book from under his arm. “I know,” he said, opening the book, “that you are just dying to find what must have happened.”
I hadn’t slept trying to figure it out. But I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. If I gave him a slice-blow on the back of the neck while putting out my foot, I could probably spin him off the rampart and into the depths.
“After I left last night,” said Snelz cheerfully, “I went all over Camp Kill looking for a specialist in crooked dice. I finally found one. Unfortunately I had to pay him some of your cut of Heller’s purchases today to find out. I knew you would be dying to know. He gave me this book.”
You’re going to die telling me, I thought. Just as soon as I find enough energy in this heat to deliver the slice-blow and put out my foot.
“It says here,” said Snelz, “that those are known as ‘thudder dice.’ Because if you shake them real hard and listen real close you can hear the lead pellets in them thud.” He took the dice out of his pocket and shook them near my ear. “Hear the thud?”
Like the thud you are going to make when you hit bottom down there, I thought.
“My friend told me that a lot of people have been killed trying to use thudder dice. So we were lucky!”
Five-thousand-credits-owed lucky, I thought. I might as well hear him out. Then kill him.
“It seems they have a goo in them that momentarily positions the lead pellet. But it says here in this paragraph,
WARNING: Do not use these dice more than a f
ew throws.
It seems that the goo in them warms up and melts when you blow on the dice too much. And when they are shaken very vigorously for a prolonged period, the lead pellet in them also develops friction heat in moving rapidly. The insides of the dice get quite hot and the lead pellet won’t stick in one place anymore. So they just behave like regular dice all the time.”
He put the book up so I could see the reference. I didn’t bother to read it. “So Heller,” continued Snelz, “just thought it was a regular dice game and he didn’t have any suspicions. So he won’t be after our hides. Isn’t that nice? He’s just a good dice player and kind of lucky. So he won’t be pestering me and I won’t have to tell him whose dice they are or how you tried to set him up.”