Starman's Quest by Robert Silverberg (best book club books of all time .TXT) 📕

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.[86]

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."

[87]

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!"[88]

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[89] 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[90] 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[91] 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."

Alan frowned. "Then why don't you? You could get rich!"

"I am rich," Hawkes said in a tone that made Alan feel tremendously foolish. "If I got much richer too fast I'd wind up with a soft burn in the belly from a disgruntled[92] customer. Look here, boy: how long would you go back to that casino if one player took 80% of the pots, and a hundred people competed with you for the 20% he left over? You'd win maybe once a month, if you played full time every day. In a short time you'd be broke, unless you quit playing first. So I ease up. I let the others win about half the time. I don't want all the money the mint turns out—just some of it. It's part of the economics of the game to let the other guys take a few pots."

Alan nodded. He understood. "And you don't want to make them too jealous of you. So you made sure you lost consistently for the final half hour or so, and that took the edge off your earlier winning in their minds."

"That's the ticket!"

The Undertube pulled out of the station and shot bullet-like through its dark tunnel. Silently, Alan thought about his night's experience. He saw he still had much, very much to learn about life on Earth.

Hawkes had a gift—the gift of winning. But he didn't abuse that gift. He concealed it a little, so the people who lacked his talent did not get too jealous of him. Jealousy ran high on Earth; people here led short ugly lives, and there was none of the serenity and friendliness of life aboard a starship.

He felt very tired, but it was just physical fatigue; he felt wide awake mentally. Earth life, for all its squalor and brutality, was tremendously exciting compared with shipboard existence. It was with a momentary pang of something close to disappointment that he remembered he would have to report back to the Valhalla in several days; there were so many fascinating aspects of Earth life he still wanted to explore.[93]

The Undertube stopped at a station labelled Hasbrouck. "This is where we get off," Hawkes told him.

They took a slidewalk to street level. The street was like a canyon, with towering walls looming up all around. And some of the gigantic buildings seemed quite shabby-looking by the street-light. Obviously they were in a less respectable part of the city.

"This is