Making for the exit, Scarne paused in the foyer, where there stood a row of a small type of fermat called the mugger. Muggers held a special fascination for Scarne, 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, Scarne thought, for something that had evolved from the ancient fruit machines and one-armed bandits.
He fumbled in his pocket for a coin and pressed it into the mugger. He touched the go-bar: a cloud of coloured 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. Scarne 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.’
Scarne glanced around him. The Legitimacy government had long outlawed Wheel jackpots, though rumours persisted that they were still operated illegally – rumours 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.’
Scarne 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, 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: a sea of non-causation, on which the universe of cause-and-effect, of structure, order, space and materiality, floated like scum on turbulent water.
Number.
The universe was made of number. The ancient Greeks had been the first to guess at that fact. Modern 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.
Scarne 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 Scarne’s own consciousness was dissolving, in ecstasy and terror, into the endless flux…
Then it all vanished and substance returned. The silver handles were cool in Scarne’s sweating hands. The fermats glittered and flashed, ranked silver and red.
Vastness.
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 titanic constrction soaring thousands of miles into the air. Above, the roof… the roof… he glanced up, and quickly looked away again, seeing a titanic moving assemblage of folds and colour 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 tunefulness; 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 Millman, his face so huge as to make his expression unreadable.
‘YOU LOOK PAAAALE…’
Scarne 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 Io. 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.’
Scarne opened his eyes again. A thousand-mile-across face ballooned into view. Thin nose, pale skin, jaunty eyebrows all smeared from horizon to horizon.
Then, like a telescope suddenly re-focusing, his vision became normal. The face was human size. ‘Skode Loder,’ Scarne 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 Scarne. 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 Scarne 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 corner where there was a news-vendor stand. A flash-sign glowed above the delivery slot: BIG DEFEAT IN HOPULA CLUSTER. LEGITIMACY FORCES REEL BEFORE HADRANIC HAMMER-BLOWS. But even this horrifying war news failed to catch his attention, and he passed by, walking through a ghost world.