"Barley, Barrington J - Grand Wheel, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barley Barrington J)
The background music mingled with the calling of bets and made a meaningless din in his ears. He descended the stairway and wandered among the gaming machines. Idly he stopped at a table with a surface of colored squares. He put Loder's chip on the pale green. The table-top flickered and surged. The chip went down.
"Hello, Cheyne. Anything upstairs worth getting into?"
Scame turned on hearing the voice of Gay Mill-man, an acquaintance. "No, nothing," he said, and walked on.
Centuries ago, he reflected, an establishment like this one would have been filled with simpler mechanical devices, of which the roulette wheel, he supposed, was the archetype.
But that was before the advent of randomatics, the modem science of chance and number, had rendered all such devices obsolete. They were now regarded as primitive, almost prehistoric. Scame could have
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walked into any old-style casino or gambling arcade and, armed with the randomatic equations, would have been guaranteed to win, moderately but consistently, over the space of an hour or two.
Randomatics rested on certain unexpected discoveries that had been made in the essential 'mystery of number. It had been discovered that, below a certain very high number, permutating a set of independent elements did not produce a sequence that was strictly random. Preferred sub-structures appeared in any 'chance' run, and these could be predicted. Only when the number of independent elements entered the billions-the so-called 'billion bracket'-did predictability vanish. This was the realm of 'second-order chance', distinguished from first-order chance in that it was chance in the old sense: pure probability, unadulterated by calculable runs and groupings.
The mythical system once sought by cranks and eccentrics became, therefore, a scientific fact. To meet this challenge the fermat, a new class of machine able to operate beyond the billion bracket, arose. Early versions had been comparatively crude affairs, following, perhaps, the path of a single molecule in a heated gas or counting out exploding atoms. As the randomatic equations, refined and extended, pushed back the billion bracket still further these, too, became obsolete. These days all formats worked on the sub-atomic level, by manipulating the weak nuclear interaction, intercepting neutrinos, processing exotic artificial particles, or even tapping the source of true randomness below the quantum level. The innards of some of them were Wheel secrets.
Making for the exit, Scame paused in the foyer, where there stood a row of a small type of fermat called the mugger. Muggers held a special fascination for Scame, perhaps because of their ubiquity. Wherever one turned there was a mugger. They existed in their billions, all treated by Wheel mathematicians as a single stochastic organism with terminals spread over a hundred star systems. Not bad, Scame thought, for
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something that had evolved from the ancient fruit machine, or one-armed bandit.
He fumbled in his pocket for a coin and pressed it into the mugger. He touched the go bar: a cloud of colored dots twinkled silently on the gridded screen. It was like watching a structureless proto-galaxy, speeded up. Number, he thought. Number was what it was all about. What everything was all about. Number, plucked out of some unfathomable sub-universal source.
The sparks settled. Scame scanned the grid slots.
Gold. Gold. Gold. And gold all along the line.
Stupefied, he stared at the golden points. As he did so, a soft conspiratorial voice issued from the base of the mugger.
"Jackpot. You have won the jackpot."
Scame glanced around him. The Legitimacy government had long outlawed Wheel jackpots, though rumors persisted that they were still operated illegally -rumors which, given the nature of the odds, were hard to confirm. Some said the jackpot was an enormous sum of money. Others that it granted a secret wish.
The soft voice spoke again, directing him. "Take hold of the silver handles below the pay-off groove. The jackpot will then be delivered."
Scame broke out in a sweat as he looked for the handles, which to the uninitiated were merely part of the mugger's florid decoration. Nervously he closed his fingers round them, his head reeling to think of the odds against this happening. One jackpot, perhaps, per billions, trillions of throws? It seemed impossible. Impossible? No, he reminded himself, nothing was impossible in a world of random numbers. Only improbable.
And then the jackpot hit him and it was nothing he could have guessed at or expected. The Wheel house dwindled from his consciousness. He was standing on the edge of a precipice. Below him was a raucous,
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roaring, boiling sea. Then the ground vanished from under his feet. He was falling. Down, down, down.
He was sinking, drifting, swimming through a vast shifting foam-like sea out of which abstract entities formed and dissolved without rhyme or order. He came to understand that he had dropped out of the realm of solid reality. He was in the awful other reality, the one he had been contemplating, dimly and theoretically, instants earlier. The gulf of pure randomness that underlay all of existence. The Great Profundity:
The universe was made of number. The ancient Greeks had been the first to guess at that fact. Modem science, aided and abetted by randomatics, had confirmed it. And here it was: the source from which number flowed in an endless, utterly irrational stream. Before there was the atom, before there was the elementary particle, before there was h, the quantum of action, there was number.
Scame understood the randomatic equations now in a way he never had before. But even those equations were dissolving, breaking up. Everything dissolved in this foam sea. It was a universal solvent beyond the wildest alchemical dreams, breaking down substance, idea, being itself. Even Scame's own consciousness was dissolving, in ecstacy and terror, into the endless flux....
Then it all vanished and substance returned. The silver handles were cool in Scame's sweating hands. The formats glittered and flashed, ranked silver and red. Vastoess.
His experience had fouled up his sense of orientation. The impression of vastness, in particular, lingered, attaching itself to everyday objects. The blue wall to his left was, at a guess, the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The fermat before him was a ti-
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tanic construction soaring thousands of miles into the air. Above, the roof ... he glanced up, and quickly looked away again, seeing a titanic moving assemblage of folds and color alongside one of the fermats. It was a woman in a tan robe, thumbing in a coin, touching the go bar, thumbing in a coin, touching the go bar, on and on.
The vast perspective was not all. Everything around him seemed to have been translated from the concrete to the abstract, as though every vestige of meaning had been sucked out of the world. His consciousness had become over-sensitized. Sounds were hard to recognize, floating in the air around him without any identifiable source. Even the formerly pleasant music coming from the softspeakers had lost its tune-fulness; it skirled on, atonal, surrealist, arbitrary.
A voice boomed to him across great cavities.
"YOU ALL RIIIGHT, CHEYNEEEE?"
He made an effort at recognition. It was Gay Mill-man, his face so huge as to make his expression unreadable.
"YOU LOOK PAAAALE ..."
Scame spoke. "YES I'M ALL RIIIIGHT . . ." Each vibration of his voice was like the beat of a drum. He turned away from Millman and headed for the street, forcing himself to overcome his fear that he would fall over and topple thousands of miles to the floor.
Walking to the exit was like crossing space to another planet. Each step was a stride that crossed a continent. But eventually he stood outside, where he tried to normalize his sense of size and distance. It had been raining and the street was wet. He tried to tone down the sound of the traffic in his mind, and looked up at the black sky of lo. The towers of the town were outlined sharply against the big soft globe of Jupiter. It was too much. He closed his eyes painfully.
"A moment if you please, friend."
Scame opened his eyes again. A thousand-mile-across face ballooned into view. Thin nose, pale skin,
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jaunty eyebrows all smeared from horizon to horizon.
Like a telescope suddenly refocusing, his vision became normal. The face was human size. "Skode Loder," Scame muttered. "You want me?"
"His twin, as a matter of fact. Skode is still upstairs." The other flicked his fingers and conjured a card into his hand, giving it to Scame. It was an introduction card, of the type used to make formal contact. A spoked gold wheel revolved slowly, given perpetual motion by electrolytic molecular printing. "Will you be at home at ten tomorrow?" "I suppose so."
"Be there." The tone of his voice, the ritualized summons from the Grand Wheel, all implied a certainty that Scame would be on call. Loder turned abruptly and mounted the steps into the gaming house.
Scarne set off down the street, still too bewildered to form any definite feelings. The illusion of giantism might have disappeared-if it could be called an illusion, size being relative-but the jackpot, the vision of ultimate probabilities, was still vivid in his mind. He was trenchantly aware that behind the glistening street, behind the moving cars and the glittering signs fronting the buildings, lay the almost mystic gulf of non-causation, invisible to the senses, invisible to the unaided mind, on which the world floated without apparent support. Pacing the sidewalk like a stricken man, he came to a comer where there was a news-vendor stand. A flash-sign glowed above the delivery slot: BIG DEFEAT IN HOPULA CLUSTER. LEGITIMACY FORCES REEL BEFORE HA-DRANIC HAMMER-BLOWS. But even this horrifying war news failed to catch his attention, and he passed by, walking through a ghost world.
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Chapter Two
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