That moment never came. In midair Stile fired. A red splash appeared in the center of Tome’s chest, marking the heart. Contrary to popular fancy, the human heart was centered in the chest, not set in the left side.
Tome spread his hands. He had waited too long, and never gotten off his shot. He was officially dead.
Tome washed off the red stain while Stile registered the win with the Game computer outlet. They shook hands and returned to the Game-annex. Their names had already exchanged rungs. Stile punched Rung Eight, his next challenge. He wanted to capture as many rungs as he could before the alarm spread—and before news of his present weakened condition also got about. If his opponents thought it through, they would force him into the more grueling physical Games, where he would be weakest.
The challengee appeared. He was a squat, athletic man named Beef. “Tome, you challenging me?” he demanded incredulously.
“Not I,” Tome said, gesturing to the ladder.
Beef looked. “Stile! What move are you making?”
“A challenge move,” Stile said.
Beef shrugged. “I can’t decline.”
They went to a booth and played the grid. Beef was unpredictable; often he picked unlikely columns, just for the hell of it. Stile selected B. TOOL, hoping the other would not pick 3. CHANCE.
His hope was vain. Beef was more curious about Stile’s motive than about the outcome of the Game, and they intersected at 3B. The home of roulette, dice, —all manner of gambling devices. Precious little skill. Stile could take Beef in most games of skill—but chance made it even.
Yet already he was maneuvering to upgrade his chances, playing the subgrid, finessing the choices in the way he had. Suddenly it came up CARDS. Cards were technically instruments of chance—but there were quite a number of games, like bridge and poker, where skill of one sort or another counted. All he had to do was pack the final grid with this type.
Beef, however, was alert to this, and selected games like blackjack and high-card-draw. He wanted to make Stile sweat, and was succeeding. It was very bad to have an opponent who cared less about the outcome than Stile did; there was little strategic leverage. Beef made his placements on the grid so that Stile could not establish a full column of his own choices. Three of one player’s preferences in a row meant that player could select that row and have a commanding advantage. The chances of establishing a game utilizing reasonable skill remained 50-50, and Stile was hurting. He had to have better odds!
But Stile knew a skill variant of a chance game that Beef evidently did not. He slipped it in, played for it, and got it: War, Strategy.
The ordinary card game of War consisted of dealing the pack randomly into two piles, with each player turning up cards on one-to-one matches. The higher card captured the lower, and both went into the winner’s victory pile. When the first piles were through, the piles of winnings would be shuffled and played in the same fashion, until finally one player had won the en- tire deck. It was pure chance, and could take many hours to finish. The strategy variant, however, permitted each player to hold his cards in his hand, selecting each card to play. When both were laid face down on the table, they would be turned over, and the higher card won. This play was not truly random; each player could keep track of his assets and those of his opponent, and play it accordingly. He could psych the other player out, tricking him into wasting a high card on a low one, or into losing a trick he should normally have won by playing a card too low. Games were normally much shorter than those of the pure-chance variation, with the superior strategist winning. The element of pure chance could not be reintroduced; a strategist could beat a hand played by chance. Thus Stile had his opportunity to exert his skill, judging his opponent’s intent and playing no higher than needed to win.
They played, and soon Stile’s expertise told. He took queens with kings, while yielding deuces to aces. Steadily his hands grew, providing him with more options, while those of his opponent shrank. Luck? The luck had been in the grid.
In due course Stile was able to play seven aces and kings in succession, wiping out Beef’s queen-high remaining hand of seven with no luck allowed at all. He had won, and Rung Eight was his.
Beef shook his head ruefully. “I will remember that variant,” he said. He didn’t mind losing, but he hated to be outsmarted so neatly.
They returned to the Game-annex. But Stile’s two wins had attracted notice. A knot of serfs stood before the 35M ladder. “Hey, Stile,” a woman called. “Are you making your move this year?”
He should have known privacy would be impossible. He was too well known in these circles, and what he was doing was too remarkable. “Yes,” he said shortly, and made his way to the ladder. He punched the challenge for Rung Seven.
The holder of that Rung was already present. He was Snack, an average-heighted man who specialized in board games and light physical exercises. He was more formidable than the two Stile had just taken, but still not really in Stile’s class.
“I will respond to your challenge in one day,” Snack said, and left.
This was exactly the sort of thing Stile had feared. A rung-holder had to meet a challenge from the rung below, but could delay it one day. Stile had to rise rung by rung; he could not challenge out of order. He had no choice but to wait—and that would interfere with his return to Phaze.
Sheen took his arm. “There’ll be an audience tomorrow,” she said. “When a player of your caliber makes his move for a tenure-abridging Tourney this close to the deadline, that’s news.”
“I wanted to qualify quickly, so I could return to Phaze before the Tourney,” Stile said. “Neysa is waiting and worrying.”
Even as he said it, he knew he should not have. Somehow the words got out before his mental intercept signal cut them off. “Cancel that,” he said belatedly.
She looked straight ahead. “Why? I’m only a machine.”
Here we go again. “I meant I promised to return to meet her at the palace of the Oracle. It was her question to the Oracle that freed me. The only one she can ask in her lifetime—she used it up just to help me. I must return.”
“Of course.”
“I made a commitment!” he said.
She relented. “She did send you back to me; I should return the favor. Will you promise to return, to meet me again?”
“And to qualify for the Tourney. Yes. Because you have also sacrificed yourself for me.”
“Then we shall send you on your way right now.”
“But I have to compete for Rung Seven in one day!” “So you will have to work fast, over there.” She drew him into a privacy compartment. “I’ll send you across to her—right after I have had what I want from you.” And she kissed him most thoroughly, proceeding from there.
She was a robot, he reminded himself—but she was getting more like a living woman than any he had known since Tune. And—he was not unwilling, and she did turn him on. It would be so easy to forget her nature . . . but then he would be entering another kind of fantasy world, and not a healthy one.
Yet how could he continue with a robot in one frame and a unicorn in the other? Even if he entered the Tourney and won, against all the odds, and located his other self in Phaze and assumed his prerogatives there—impossible dreams, probably—how would he alleviate the developing conflict between females?
Sheen finished with him, cleaned him up, brushed his hair, and took him to the dome geographically nearest the Oracular palace in the other frame, according to his understanding of the geography. They scouted for the curtain. They were also wary of the anonymous killer, but apparently the break in Stile’s routine had lost that enemy for the nonce. It was hard to keep track of a fast-moving serf on Proton!