Part 13

“This is bad, Althagar, believe me,” he said. “And I simply can’t figure any part of it . . . unless. . . .” His voice died away.

“You said it. I can’t, either. Unless it’s them two chess-players in there, and I’ll buy it that it ain’t, I haven’t even got a guess . . . unless there could be some Lensmen mixed up in it somewhere. They could do just about anything.”

“_Lensmen?_ Rocket-juice! There aren’t any—we spy-ray everybody that comes in.”

“Outside, maybe, peeking in. Or some other snoopers, maybe, somewhere?”

“I can’t see it. We’ve had Lensmen in here dozens of times, for one reason or another, business and social both, and they’ve always shot straight pool. Besides, all they’re getting is money, and what in all eleven hells of Telemanchia would the Patrol want of our _money_? If they wanted us for anything they’d come and get us, but they wouldn’t give a cockeyed tinker’s damn for our _money_. They’ve already got all the money there is!”

“That’s so, too. Money . . . hm, money in gobs and slathers. . . . Oh, you think . . . the Mob? D’ya s’pose it’s got so big for its britches it thinks it can take _us_ on?”

“I wouldn’t think they could be _that_ silly. It’s a lot more reasonable, though, than that the Patrol would be horsing around this way.”

“But how? Great Kalastho, _how_?”

“How do I know? Snoopers, as you said—or perceivers, or any other ringers they could ring in on us.”

“Nuts!” the assistant retorted. “Just who do you figure as ringers? The Vegian isn’t a snooper, she’s just a gambling fool. No Chickladorian was ever a snooper, or a perceiver either, and these people are just about all regular customers. And _everybody’s_ winning. So just where does that put you?”

“Up the creek—I know. But dammit, there’s _got_ to be snoopery or some other funny stuff _somewhere_ in this!”

“Uh-uh. Did you ever hear of a perceiver who could read a deck or spot a gimmick from half a block away?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. But what stops me is what can we _do_ about it? If the Mob _is_ forted up in that hotel across the street or somewhere beside or behind us . . . there isn’t a damn thing we can do. They’d have more gunnies than we could send in, even if we knew exactly where they were, and we can’t send a young army barging around without anything but a flimsy suspicion to go on—the lawmen would throw us in the clink in nothing flat. . . . Besides, this Mob idea isn’t exactly solid, either. How’d they get their cut from all these people? Especially the Vegian?”

“The Vegian, probably not; the rest, probably so. They could have passed the word around that this is the big day. Anybody’d split fifty-fifty on a cold sure thing.”

“Uh-uh. I won’t buy that, either. I’d’ve known about it—somebody would have leaked. No matter how you figure it, it doesn’t add up.”

“Well, then?”

“Only one thing we can do. Close down. While you’re doing that I’ll go shoot in a Class A Double Prime Urgent to top brass.”

Hence Vesta’s croupier soon announced to his clientele that all betting was off, at least until the following day. All guests would please leave the building as soon as possible.

For a couple of minutes Vesta simply could not take in the import of the announcement. She was stunned. Then:

“Whee . . . yow . . . ow . . . erow!” she yowled, at the top of her not inconsiderable voice. “I’ve won . . . I’ve _won_ . . . I’VE WON!” She quieted down a little, still shell-shocked, then looked around and ran toward the nearest familiar face, which was that of the assistant manager. “Oh, senor Althagar, do you actually want me to quit while I’m _ahead_? Why, I never _heard_ of such a thing—it certainly never happened to _me_ before! And I’m going to stop gambling _entirely_—I’ll _never_ get such a thrill as this again if I live a million years!”

“You’re _so_ right, Miss Vesta—you never will.” Althagar smiled—as though he had just eaten three lemons without sugar, to be sure, but it was still a smile. “It’s not that we _want_ you to quit, but simply that we can’t pay any more losses. Right now I am most powerfully psychic, so take my advice, my dear, and stop.”

“I’m going to—honestly, I am.” Vesta straightened out the thick sheaf of bills she held in her right hand, noticing that they were all ten-thousands. She dug around in her bulging pouch; had to dig half-way to the bottom before she could find anything smaller. With a startled gasp she crammed the handful of bills in on top of the others and managed, just barely, to close and lock the pouch. “Oh, I’ve got to _fly_—I must find my boss and tell him all about this!”

“Would you like an armed escort to your hotel?”

“That won’t be necessary, thanks. I’m going to take a copter direct to the ship.”

And she did.

It was not until the crowd was almost all gone that either Thlasoval or Althagar even thought of the two chess-players. Then one signalled the other and they went together to the private room, into it, and up to the chess-table. To the casual eye, neither player had moved. The board, too, showed comparatively little change; at least, the carnage anticipated by Thlasoval had not materialized.

Althagar coughed discreetly; then again, a little louder. “Sir and madam, please. . . .” he began.

“I told you they’d be dead to the world,” Thlasoval said; and, bending over, lifted one side of the board. Oh, very gently, and not nearly enough to dislodge any one of the pieces, but the tiny action produced disproportionately large results. Both players started as though a bomb had exploded beside them, and Joan uttered a half-stifled scream. With visible efforts, they brought themselves down from the heights to the there and the then. Cloud stretched prodigiously; and Joan, emulating him, had to bring one hand down to cover a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Excuse me, Grand Master Janowick and Commander Cloud, but the Club is being closed for repairs and we must ask you to leave the building.”

“Closed?” Joan parroted, stupidly, and:

“For repairs?” Cloud added, with equal brilliance.

“Closed. For repairs.” Thlasoval repeated, firmly. Then, seeing that his guests were coming back to life quite nicely, he offered Joan his arm and started for the door.

“Oh, yes, Grand Master Janowick,” he said en route. “May I ask why you refused the Commander’s queen?”

“He would have gained such an advantage in position as to mate in twelve moves.”

“I see . . . thanks.” He didn’t, at all, but he had to say something. “I wonder . . . would it be possible for me to find out how this game comes out?”

“Why, I suppose so.” Joan thought for a moment. “Certainly. If you’ll give me your card I’ll send you a tape of it after we finish.”[3]

The two Patrolmen boarded a copter. Joan looked subdued, almost forlorn. Cloud took her hand and squeezed it gently.

“Don’t take it so hard, Joan,” he thought. He found it remarkably easy to send to her now; in fact, telepathy was easier and simpler and more natural than talking. “We had it to do.”

“I suppose so; but it was a dirty, slimy, stinking, _filthy_ trick, Storm. I’m ashamed . . . I feel soiled.”

“I know how you feel. I’m not so happy about the thing, either. But when you think of thionite, and what _that_ stuff means. . . ?”

“That’s true, of course . . . and they stole the money in the first place. . . . Not that two wrongs, or even three or four, make a right . . . but it does _help_.”

She cheered up a little, but she was not yet her usual self when they boarded the _Vortex Blaster II_.

Vesta met them just inside the lock. “Oh, chief, I won—I won!” she shrieked, tail waving frantically in air. “Where’d you go after the club closed? I looked all _over_ for you—do you know how much I won, Captain Nealcloud?”

“Haven’t any idea. How much?”

“One million seven hundred sixty two thousand eight hundred and ten credits! Yow-wow-yow!”

“Whew!” Cloud whistled in amazement. “And you’re figuring on giving it all back to ’em tomorrow?”

“I . . . I haven’t quite decided.” Vesta sobered instantly. “What do _you_ think, chief?”

“Not being a gambler, I don’t have hunches very often, but I’ve got one now. In fact, I know one thing for certain damn sure. There isn’t one chance in seven thousand million of anything like this ever happening to you again. You’ll lose your shirt—that is, if you had a shirt to lose,” he added hastily.

“You know, I think you’re right? I thought so myself, and you’re the second smart man to tell me the same thing.”

“Who was the first one?”

“That man at the club, Althagar, his name was. So, with three hunches on the same play, I’d be a fool not to play it that way. Besides, I’ll _never_ get another wallop like that . . . my uncle’s been wanting me to be linguist in his bank, and with a million and three-quarters of my own I could buy half his bank and be a linguist and a cashier both. Then I couldn’t _ever_ gamble again.”

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because Vegians, especially young Vegians, like me, haven’t got any sense when it comes to gambling,” Vesta explained, gravely. “They can’t tell the difference between their own money and the bank’s. So everybody who amounts to anything in a bank makes a no-gambling declaration and if one ever slips the insurance company boots him out on his ear and he takes a blaster and burns his head off. . . .”

Cloud flashed a thought at Joan. “Is this another of your strictly Vegian customs?”

“Not mine; I never heard of it before,” she flashed back. “Very much in character, though, and it explains why Vegian bankers are regarded as being very much the upper crust.”

“. . . so I _am_ going to buy half of that bank. Thanks, chief, for helping me make up my mind. Good night, you two lovely people; I’m going to bed. I’m just about bushed.” Vesta, tail high and with a completely new dignity in her bearing, strode away.

“Me, too, Storm; on both counts,” Joan thought at Cloud. “You ought to hit the hammock, too, instead of working half the night yet.”

“Maybe so, but I want to know how things came out, and besides they may want some quick figuring done. Good night, little chum.” His parting thought, while commonplace enough in phraseology, was in fact sheer caress; and Joan’s mind, warmly intimate, accepted it as such and returned it in kind.

Cloud left the ship and rode a scooter across the field to a very ordinary-looking freighter. In that vessel’s control room, however, there were three Lensmen and five Rigellians, all clustered around a tank-chart of a considerable fraction of the First Galaxy.

“Hi, Cloud!” Nordquist greeted him with a Lensed thought and introduced him to the others. “All our thanks for a really beautiful job of work. We’ll thank Miss Janowick tomorrow, when she’ll have a better perspective. Want to look?”

“I certainly do. Thanks.” Cloud joined the group at the chart and Nordquist poured knowledge into his mind.

Thlasoval, the boss of Chickladoria, had been under full mental surveillance every minute of every day. The scheme had worked perfectly. As the club closed, Thlasoval had sent the expected message; not by ordinary communications channels, of course, but via long-distance beamer. It was beamed three ways; to Tominga, Vegia, and Palmer III. That proved that Fairchild wasn’t on Chickladoria; if he had been, Thlasoval would have used a broadcaster, not a beamer.

Shows had been staged simultaneously on all four of Fairchild’s planets, and only on Vegia had the planetary manager’s message been broadcast. Fairchild was on Vegia, and he wouldn’t leave it: a screen had been thrown around the planet that a microbe couldn’t squirm through and it wouldn’t be relaxed until Fairchild was caught.

“_Simultaneous shows?_” Cloud interrupted the flow of information. “On four planets? He won’t connect the _Vortex Blaster_ with it, at all, then.”

“We think he will,” the Lensman thought, narrowing down. “We’re dealing with a _very_ shrewd operator. We hope he does, anyway, because a snooper put on you or any one of your key people would be manna from heaven for us.”

“But how _could_ he suspect us?” Cloud demanded. “We couldn’t have been on four planets at once.”

“You will have been on three of them, though; and I can tell you now that routing was not exactly coincidence.”

“Oh . . . and I wasn’t informed?”

“No. Top Brass didn’t want to disturb you too much, especially since we hoped to catch him before things got this far along. But you’re in it now, clear to the neck. You and your people will be under surveillance every second, from here on in, and you’ll be covered as no chief of state was ever covered in all history.”

[3] A few months later, Joan did send him the full game, which white of course won. Thlasoval studied it in secret for over five years; and then, deciding correctly that he never would be able to understand its terrifically complex strategy, he destroyed the tape. It is perhaps superfluous to all that this game was never published. E.E.S.

_Chapter 15_ ▂▂▂▂▂▂JOAN AND HER BRAINS

THE TRIP FROM Chickladoria to Vegia, while fairly long, was uneventful.

Joan spent her working hours, of course, at her regular job of rebuilding the giant computer. Cloud spent his at the galactic chart or in the control room staring into a tank; classifying, analyzing, building up and knocking down hypotheses and theories, wringing every possible drop of knowledge from all the data he could collect.

In their “spare” time, of which each had quite a great deal, they worked together at their telepathy; to such good purpose that, when so working, verbal communication between them became rarer and rarer. And, alone or in a crowd, within sight of each other or not, in any place or at any time, asleep or awake, each had only to think at the other and they were instantly in full mental rapport.

And oftener and oftener there came those instantaneously-fleeting touches of something infinitely more than mere telepathy; that fusion of minds which was so ultimately intimate that neither of the two could have said whether he longed for or dreaded its full coming the more. In fact, for several days before reaching Vegia, each knew that they could bring about that full fusion any time they chose to do so; but both shied away from its consummation, each as violently as the other.

Thus the trip did not seem nearly as long as it actually was.

The first order of business on Vegia, of course, was the extinguishment of its five loose atomic vortices—for which reason this was to be pretty much a planetary holiday, although that is of little concern here.

As the _Vortex Blaster II_ began settling into position, the two scientists took their places. Cloud was apparently his usual self-controlled self, but Joan was white and strained—almost shaking. He sent her a steadying thought, but her block was up, solid.

“Don’t take it so hard, Joanie,” he said, soberly. “Margie’ll take ’em, I hope—but even if she doesn’t, there’s a dozen things not tried yet.”

“That’s just the trouble—there _aren’t_! We put just about everything we had into Lulu; Margie is only a few milliseconds better. _Perhaps_ there are a dozen things not tried yet, but I haven’t the faintest, foggiest smidgeon of an idea of what any of them could be. Margie is the last word, Storm—the best analogue computer it is possible to build with today’s knowledge.”

“And I haven’t been a lick of help. I wish I could be, Joan.”

“I don’t see how you can be. . . . Oh, excuse me, Storm, I didn’t mean that half the way it sounds. Do you want to check the circuitry? I’ll send for the prints.”

“No, I couldn’t even carry your water-bottle on that part of the job. I’ve got just a sort of a dim, half-baked idea that there’s a possibility that maybe I haven’t been giving you and your brains a square deal. By studying the graphs of the next three or four tests maybe I can find out whether. . . .”

“Lieutenant-Commander Janowick, we are in position,” a crisp voice came from the speaker. “You may take over when ready, madam.”

“Thank you, sir.” Joan flipped a switch and Margie took control of the ship and its armament—subject only to Cloud’s overriding right to fire at will.

“Just a minute, Storm,” Joan said then. “Unfinished business. Whether what?”

“Whether there’s anything I can do—or fail to do—that might help; but I’ve got to have a lot more data.”

Cloud turned to his chart, Joan to hers; and nothing happened until Cloud blew out the vortex himself.

The same lack of something happened in the case of the next vortex, and also the next. Then, as the instruments began working in earnest on the fourth, Cloud reviewed in his mind the figures of the three previous trials. On the first vortex, a big toughie, Margie had been two hundred fifty milliseconds short. On the second, a fairly small one, she had come up to seventy-five. On Number Three, middle-sized, the lag had been one twenty-five. That made sense. Lag was proportional to activity and it was just too bad for Margie. And just too _damn_ bad for Joanie—the poor kid was just about to blow her stack. . . .

But wait a minute! What’s this? This number four’s a little bit of a new one, about as small as they ever come. Margie ought to be taking it, if she’s ever going to take anything . . . but she isn’t! She’s running damn near three hundred mils behind! Why? Oh—amplitudes—frequencies extreme instability. . . . Lag isn’t proportional _only_ to activity, then, but jointly to activity and to instability.

That gives us a chance—but what in all nine of Palain’s purple _hells_ is that machine _doing_ with that data?

He started to climb out of his bucket seat to go around to talk to Joan right then, but changed his mind at his first move. Even if Margie _could_ handle this little one it wouldn’t be a real test, and it’d be a crying shame to give Joan a success here and then kick her in the teeth with a flat failure next time. No, the next one, the only one left and Vegia’s worst, would be the one. If Margie could handle _that_, she could snuff anything the galaxy had to offer.

Hence Cloud extinguished this one, too, himself. The _Vortex Blaster II_ darted to its last Vegian objective and lined itself up for business. Joan put Margie to work as usual; but Storm, for the first time, did not take his own place. Instead, he came around and stood behind Joan’s chair.

“How’re we doing, little chum?” he asked.

“Rotten!” Joan’s block was still up; her voice was choked with tears. “She’s come so close half a dozen times today—why—_why_ can’t I get that last fraction of a second?”

“Maybe you can.” As though it were the most natural thing in the world—which in fact it was—Cloud put his left arm around her shoulders and exerted a gentle pressure. “Bars down, chum—we can think a lot clearer than we can talk.”

“That’s better,” as her guard went down. “Your differential ’scope looks like it’s set at about one centimeter to the second. Can you give it enough vertical gain to make it about five?”

“Yes. Ten if you like, but the trace would keep jumping the screen on the down-swings.”

“I wouldn’t care about that—closest approach is all I want. Give it full gain.”

“QX, but why?” Joan demanded, as she made the requested adjustment. “Did you find out something I can’t dig deep enough in your mind to pry loose?”

“Don’t know yet whether I did or not—I can tell you in a couple of minutes,” and Cloud concentrated his full attention upon the chart and its adjacent oscilloscope screen.

One pen of the chart was drawing a thin, wildly-wavering red line. A few seconds behind it a second pen was tracing the red line in black; tracing it so exactly that not the tiniest touch of red was to be seen anywhere along the black. And on the screen of the differential oscilloscope the fine green saw-tooth wave-form of the electronic trace, which gave continuously the instantaneous value of the brain’s shortage in time, flickered insanely and apparently reasonlessly up and down; occasionally falling clear off the bottom of the screen. If that needle-pointed trace should touch the zero line, however briefly, Margie the Brain would act; but it was not coming within one full centimeter of touching.

“The feeling that these failures have been partly, or even mostly, my fault is growing on me,” Cloud thought, tightening his arm a little: and Joan, if anything, yielded to the pressure instead of fighting away from it. “Maybe I haven’t been waiting long enough to give your brains the leeway they need. To check: I’ve been assuming all along that they work in pretty much the same way I do; that they handle all the data, out to the limit of validity of the equations, but aren’t fast enough to work out a three-point-six-second prediction.

“But if I’m reading those curves right Margie simply isn’t working that way. She doesn’t seem to be extrapolating _anything_ more than three and a half seconds ahead—’way short of the reliability limit—and sometimes a lot less than that. She isn’t _accepting_ data far enough ahead. She acts as though she can gulp down just so much information without choking on it—so much and no more.”

“Exactly. An over-simplification, of course, since it isn’t the kind of choking that giving her a bigger throat would cure, but very well put.” Joan’s right hand crept across her body, rested on Cloud’s wrist, and helped his squeeze, while her face turned more directly toward the face so close to hers. “That’s inherent in the design of all really fast machines . . . and we simply don’t know any way of getting away from it. . . . Why? What has that to do with the case?”

“A lot—I hope. When I was working in a flitter I had to wait up to half an hour sometimes, for the sigma curve to stabilize enough so that the equations would hold valid will give a longer valid prediction.”

“Stabilize? How? I’ve never seen a sigma curve flatten out. Or does ‘stabilize’ have a special meaning for you vortex experts?”

“Could be. It’s what happens when a sigma becomes a little more regular than usual, so that a simpler equation will give a longer valid prediction.”

“I see; and a difference in wave-form that would be imperceptible to me might mean a lot to you.”

“Right. It just occurred to me that a similar line of reasoning may hold for this seemingly entirely different set of conditions. The less unstable the curve, the less complicated the equations and the smaller the volume of actual data. . . .”

“Oh!” Joan’s thought soared high. “So Margie may work _yet_, if we wait a while?”

“Check. Browning can’t take the ship away from you, can he?”

“No. Nobody can do anything until the job is done or I punch that red ‘stop’ button there. D’you suppose she _can_ do it? Storm? How long can we wait?”

“Half an hour, I’d say. No, to settle the point definitely, let’s wait until I can get a full ten-second prediction and see what Margie’s doing about the situation then.”

“Wonderful! But in that case, it might be a good idea for you to be looking at the chart, don’t you think?” she asked, pointedly. His eyes, at the moment, were looking directly into hers, from a distance of approximately twelve inches.

“I’ll look at it later, but right now I’m. . . .”

The ship quivered under the terrific, the unmistakable trip-hammer blow of propellant heptadetonite. Unobserved by either of the two scientists most concerned, the sigma curve had, momentarily, become a trifle less irregular. The point of the saw-tooth wave had touched the zero line. Margie had acted. The visiplate, from which the heavily-filtered glare of the vortex had blazed so long, went suddenly black.

“_She did it_, Storm!” Joan’s thought was a mental shriek of pure joy. “_She really worked!_”