“Hold it!” I snatched the paper from his grasp and dropped it into a waste bin. “There isn’t going to be any selection today.”
“But I thought we were going to rob the bookies to help the poor.”
“We are, Trev, we are – but not every day! We’ve got to allow time for the poor to collect on the first bet so that they’ll have money for the next one.” Looking at Trev’s perplexed expression I thought of a way to explain the dwindling scale of our charity work. “Besides, what we did yesterday cost me a lot of hard cash – I’ll have to concentrate on some ordinary work for a while, then see how many more needy people we can help. The list probably won’t be as big next time.”
“Sorry, Des,” he said, looking contrite. I didn’t realize the way it was.”
“It’s all right.” I patted him on the shoulder and eased him out of the office. “Just you leave the boring old practical details to me. All you’ve got to do is come up with the winners when we need them. Okay?”
“You can count on me.” He lumbered away amid a creaking of floorboards, leaving me staring thoughtfully into the coffee percolator. One thing I had not anticipated was my cousin actually taking an interest in what was going on in the shop – even when running off leaflets for his own Orion Society he was wrapped up in daydreams so much that he would let any kind of mistake go by. On one lovely occasion he had issued a news sheet, typed up by a semi-literate temp, which had referred all the way through to the Kingdom of O’Ryan. To me it had looked better that way, more appropriate somehow, but apparently a few of the faithful were pretty annoyed about the blunder and had threatened to depose Trev.
Later in the day, when Ralph Wynter called in with a draft of the second message from inside information inc., I told him I was thinking of cutting Trev out of the operation and simply stripping in his signature on future letters. Surprisingly, he was against the idea.
“What we’re doing isn’t actually against the law,” he said, staring meaningfully through his steel rims, ‘but there are large sums of money involved. Some people might get angry and there might be some embarrassing investigations and publicity. It might be advisable for us to take a long vacation.”
“And leave Trev to face the music? I don’t know if I could do that.”
“Nobody’s going to touch him. From what you told me, he’s got the best defence in the world – his innocence. How could anybody even think of leaning on a simpleton who genuinely believed he was a holy crusader?”
I nodded, impressed by the slippery quality of Wynter’s mind, and we went on to talk about more important things. Trev’s behaviour continued to worry me though. Something about the project, as he understood it, seemed to have caught his imagination and his interest was still as high as ever when Monday – the day of the selected race – came round.
On several occasions when I went into his office I found him sitting in his thought box running his UFO detector up and down racing sheets, pausing only to munch a Coco-blob. Right up to the start of the race I was fretting about what I was going to say to him if, as was likely to happen, the ‘wrong’ horse came in first, and so it was with some trepidation that I called up the afternoon’s sports pages on the Cathodata set in my office. I needn’t have worried, however – Realrock Isle had walked it by ten lengths. A combination of relief and unexpected excitement sent me sprinting in to give Trev the news.
“Naturally Realrock Isle won,” he said in a mild voice, arching his eyebrows at me. “What did you expect?”
Only then did I remember the rules of our game. “Of course, I knew it had to win if that’s what the thought voices told you,” I mumbled apologetically, doing my best to cover the slip. “It’s just that when you’re not used to this sort of thing it seems sort of … miraculous.”
“You’ve so much to learn,” he sighed, passing me a handful of racing sheets upon which one horse in every event had been underlined in red crayon. “Take your pick from that lot.”
“Thanks, Trev.” I flicked through the sheets and was pleased to see that he had covered the race Wynter and I had selected for our next mailing – a five-horse affair the following Thursday at Argent Heights. This time the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse, speaking through the medium of a defunct thermionic valve shoved in the end of a Woolworth telescope, had decreed that a nag called Wheatgerm would be first past the post. I got Trev to sign the second letter and, leaving him to his meditations, went out to the shop and started to work.
This time I only had to deal with the 100,000 people from the original list who had been given the winner, and it was a comparatively easy job to split them into five lots of 20,000 and tip a separate horse to each lot. Just to be on the safe side in case Trev came out to do a little work, I put spare letters tipping Wheatgerm on top of each pile – making it look as though the entire mailing said the same thing – and only removed them as the piles were going into the Mailomat. The precaution proved unnecessary, because it was almost quitting time before Trev roused himself and by then all 100,000 letters had been loaded into the pneumotube and were well on their various ways.
I began to feel easier in my mind about how the operation was shaping up, and celebrated by going out on the town that night with an exotic young lovely who was a snake dancer at Lord Jake’s Revue Bar. She ate enough to choke one of her pet pythons, but I had no qualms about the expense – I could feel it in my bones that all my troubles, financial and otherwise, would soon be a thing of the past.
The first faint intimation that my skeleton is a lousy fortune teller came on Thursday afternoon when Wheatgerm romped home so far ahead of the rest of the field that he was nearly placed in the previous race.
Judging by the odds he came in at the bookmakers were as surprised as I was, so I did a slightly peculiar and uncharacteristic thing. I knew that Trev had no cosmic forces working for him, and that it isn’t really remarkable for somebody to pick two winners in a row, and yet I was unable to resist digging out the handful of racing sheets he had marked and comparing them with the Cathodata results. The way it worked out, he had chosen some thirty horses and out of that number precisely three, including Wheatgerm, had been winners.
To me that figure seemed about average for somebody making blind stabs with a pin, or even with an old radio tube, so I damped down the sparks of the crazy idea that had begun to glimmer at the back of my mind and began to think about the next phase of the project. We were down to 20,000 people who had been given two winners and now the mechanical side of the operation was becoming child’s play. Trev made things easier by spending more and more time in his thought projector while he pored over racing sheets, and once again I didn’t even have to ask him to pick a horse in our next four-horse race. He had chosen an animal called Prismatic and as it was the odds-on favourite I wasn’t too surprised when it won fairly comfortably. Trev received the news with a calm shrug and handed me another bunch of marked-up sheets, including one on which he had underlined a horse called Foreign Exchange in our next four-horse race.
Pleased with the way we had settled into an undemanding routine, I split the remaining list of 5,000 clients into four equal lots, tipped each lot a different horse and had the whole mailing completed in less than half an hour. Past experience had taught me to be extra careful when everything in the garden seems lovely, but I was so bemused by the nearness of the first pay-off that I let myself be lulled into that famous false sense of security, and was totally unprepared for trouble when it came.
I had spent an entire evening at my apartment with Ralph Wynter, splitting a bottle of Tucker’s Choice and perfecting the text of the letter we were going to send to our reduced roll of 1,250 lucky people who – when the fourth race was run – would have received advice of four straight winners. Even though I say so myself it was a masterpiece of psychological manipulation, one which played on their quasi-religious hopes so accurately that they were bound to fall over themselves in their rush to mail us their money. With the serious business completed, Ralph had called up a couple of well-endowed working girls he was friendly with, and we had spent a few hours sampling what a more poetic person might have called the garden of earthly delights.