The stuff he buys them with turns out to be two-inch-square bits of something like cellophane except that it’s opaque and has printing on it. The printing is a long way from being in English so you can’t read the denominations but you take his word for it—his spoken word.
You hit a losing streak. You lose all your chips and have to use the currency you got from Borl to buy more from Camelon, who has most of the chips by now. But you play cautiously for awhile to learn their style—they’ve developed styles already. They’re taking to poker like cats to catnip.
Borl is a bluffer—he always bets more, if he bets at all, when he has nothing than when he has a good hand. Camelon plunges either way about every fourth or fifth hand—the last two times he had them and that’s why he’s got the chips now. David is cautious.
So are you for awhile. Then cards begin to run your way and you bet them. You begin to pile up chips, then cellophane units. Dari—the one who had their spaceship—comes back. There’s a momentary intermission while barriers are lowered—and you carefully think about nothing except the excitement of the game as poker is explained to Dari. Telepathically, because it’s faster and the boys are in a hurry to get back to the game. Dari buys in.
He wins his first pot and he’s an addict. Nobody cares what time it is or whether school keeps.
Pots run to a thousand units at a time now— as many chips in one pot as you got for all your books and equipment. But that doesn’t matter because you’ve got forty or fifty thousand units in front of you. Dari goes broke first, then Borl —after he’s borrowed as much as Camelon will lend him. Camelon’s tough and David manages to pike along and stay in.
But finally you do it. You’ve got all the money and you own one Tharn spaceship, to boot. And the game is over. You’ve won.
Or have you? Camelon gets up and you look at him and remember—for the first time in many hours—that he is an Alien.
“We thank you, Bobthayer,” he thinks at you; the barriers are down now. “We regret that we must kill you for you have introduced us to a most wonderful game.”
“In what are you going to leave?” you think at him. “The spaceship is mine.”
“Until you are dead, yes. Ifear we shall inherit it from you then.”
You forget not to talk. “I thought you were gamblers,” you tell him, all of them, aloud. “I thought you played for keeps. I thought you were honorable when it came to gambling if nothing else.”
“We are but…”
Borl forgets and talks aloud too. “He’s right, Camelon. We cannot take the spaceship. He won it fairly. We cannot—”
Camelon said, “We must. The life of an individual is meaningless compared to the advancement of the Tharn. We will dishonor ourselves but we must return. We must report these planets. Then we shall kill ourselves as dishonored Tharn.”
You look at him in wonder and he looks back and suddenly he lowers deliberately a barrier of his mind. You see that he means what he said. They are gamblers and they’ve gambled and lost and they’ll take the consequences. They’ll really kill themselves as dishonored—after they’ve reported in.
A lot of good that’s going to do you. You’ll be twenty years dead by the time they get home. And you won’t have a chance to tell Earth what Earth’s got to know—what to get ready for in forty years. It’s a stalemate but that doesn’t help you or Earth.
YOU THINK desperately, looking for an out. You’ve won and they’ve lost. But you’ve lost too—Earth has lost. You don’t care whether they’re reading your mind or not. You look desperately for an answer, even one that leaves you a possibility. Maybe you can make a deal.
“No,” Camelon thinks at you. “It is true that if you offered us back our ship, our money, the books and equipment in exchange for your own life—which was already forfeit—we could return honorably to our people. But you would warn Earth. As you were thinking some hours ago a defense might be developed by your scientists. So we would be traitors to our own race if we made such a deal with you even to save our own individual honors.”
You look at them one at a time, at them physically and into a part of their minds, and you see that they mean it, all of them. They agree with their leader and they mean it.
Dari thinks, “Camelon, we must leave. We go to our deaths, but we must leave. Kill him quickly and let us complete our dishonor.”
Camelon turns to you.
“Wait,” you say desperately aloud. “I thought you were gamblers. If you were gamblers you’d give me a chance, no matter how slim a chance! You’d leave me here with one chance out of ten to survive. And in exchange for that chance I’ll give you your own possessions back voluntarily and mine too. That way you wouldn’t be stealing them back—you wouldn’t be dishonored. You wouldn’t have to kill yourselves after you reported.”
It’s a new idea. They look at you.
Then, one by one, they think negatives.
“One chance in a hundred,” you say. There’s no change. “One chance in a thousand! I thought you were gamblers.”
Camelon thinks, “You tempt us except for one thing. If we leave you here alive you can leave a message for those who are due in thirty-nine days to pick you up, even though you yourself do not survive to meet them.”
You’d been hoping for that but they’d read your-mind. Damn beings who can read minds! Still, any chance at all is better than nothing. You say, “Take away all writing materials.”
Borl thinks at Camelon, “We can do better than that. Put a psychic block on his ability to write. A chance in a thousand is little, Camelon, to save our honor. As he says we are gamblers. Can’t we gamble that far?”
Camelon looks at David, at Dari. He turns to you and raises his hand. You lose consciousness.
You awaken suddenly and completely. The lights are dim. The inside of the dome looks different. You look around and realize that it has been stripped of most of the things that were there. And there is only one Tharn in the room with you—Camelon. You find you are lying on the cot and you sit up and look at him.
He thinks at you, “We are giving you one chance in a thousand, Bobthayer. We have calculated it carefully, everything is arranged. I will explain the circumstances and the odds.”
“Go ahead,” you say.
“We have left you enough food, enough water—barely enough to survive, it is true, but you will not die of’ hunger or thirst if you ration them carefully. We have studied your metabolism with great care. We know your exact limits of tolerance. We have, as Borl suggested, also blocked your ability to write so that you can leave no message. That, of course, has nothing to do with i your one chance out of a thousand of survival.”
“Where’s the catch? What’s the chance, then, if. you leave me enough food and enough water. Oxygen?”
“That’s right. We have taken out your oxygen system and are leaving one of our own type. It is much simpler. See those thirteen plastic containers on the table? Each one contains enough liquid oxygen to supply you—by very careful calculation—with enough oxygen to last you three days if you are extremely careful and take no exercise whatever.
“The oxygen is in a binder fluid that keeps it liquid and lets it evaporate at a constant and exact rate. The binder fluid also absorbs waste products. You need open one jar every three days—or whenever you find yourself in need of more oxygen than you are getting, which will be within a matter of minutes of three days.”