'If you win you get the hour,' said Adams. 'If I win you take my orders.'
'I'll throw with you,' said Sutton. 'On terms like that, I'm willing to gamble.'
And he was thinking:
I lifted the battered ship on Gygni VII and maneuvered it through space. I was the engine and the pilot, the tubes and navigator. Energy garnered by my body took the ship and lifted it and drove it through space…eleven years through space. I brought the ship tonight down through atmosphere with the engines dead so it could not be spotted and I landed in the river. I could pick a book out of that case and carry it to the table without laying hands on it and I could turn the pages without the use of fingertips.
But dice.
Dice are different.
They roll so fast and topple so.
'Win or lose,' said Adams, 'you can use the visor.'
'If I lose,' said Sutton, 'I won't need it.'
Jonathon came back and laid the dice upon a tabletop. He hesitated for a moment and when he saw that the two humans were waiting for him to go, he went.
Sutton nodded at the dice carelessly.
'You first,' he said.
Adams picked them up, held them in his fist and shook them, and their clicking was like the porcelain chatter of badly frightened teeth.
His fist came down above the table and his fingers opened and the little white cubes spun and whirled on the polished top. They came to rest and one was a five and the other one a six.
Adams raised his eyes to Sutton and there was nothing in them. No triumph. Absolutely nothing.
'Your turn,' said Adams.
Perfect, thought Sutton. Nothing less than perfect. Two sixes. It has to be two sixes.
He stretched out his hand and picked up the dice, shook them in his fist, felt the shape and size of them rolling in his palm.
Now take them in your mind, he told himself…take them in your mind as well as in your fist. Hold them in your mind, make them a part of you, as you made the two ships you drove through space, as you could make a book or chair or a flower you wished to pick.
He changed for a moment and his heart faltered to a stop and the blood slowed to a trickle in his arteries and veins and he was not breathing. He felt the energy system take over, the other body that drew raw energy from anything that might have energy.
His mind reached out and took the dice and shook them inside the prison of his fist and he brought his hand down with a swooping gesture and let his fingers loose and the dice came dancing out.
They were dancing in his brain, too, as well as on the tabletop and he saw them, or sensed them, or was aware of them, as if they were a part of him. Aware of the sides that had the six black dots and the sides with one and all the other sides.
But they were slippery to handle, hard to make go the way he wanted them to go and for a fearful, agonizing second it seemed almost as if the spinning cubes had minds and personalities that were their very own.
One of them was a six and the other still was rolling. The six was coming up and it toppled for a moment, threatening to fall back.
A push, thought Sutton. Just a little push. But with brain power instead of finger power.
The six came up and the two dice lay there, both of them showing sixes.
Sutton drew in a sobbing breath and his heart beat once again and the blood pumped through the veins.
They stood in silence for a moment, staring at one another across the tabletop.
Adams spoke and his voice was quiet and one could not have guessed from any tone he used what he might have felt.
'The visor is over there,' he said.
Sutton bowed, ever so slightly, and he felt foolish doing it, like a character out of some incredibly old and bad piece of romantic fiction.
'Destiny,' he said, 'still is working for me. When it comes to the pinch, destiny is there.'
'Your hour will start,' said Adams, 'as soon as you finish talking.'
He turned smartly and walked back to the patio, very stiff and straight.
Now that he had won, Sutton suddenly was weak, and he walked to the visor on legs that seemed to have turned to rubber.
He sat down before the visor and took out the directory that he needed.
INFormation. And the subheading.
Geography, historic, North America.
He found the number and dialed it and the glass lit up.
The robot said: 'Can I be of service, sir?'
'Yes,' said Sutton, 'I would like to know where Wisconsin was.'
'Where are you now, sir?'
'I am at the residence of Mr. Christopher Adams.'
'The Mr. Adams who is with the Department of Galactic Investigation?'
'The same,' said Sutton.
'Then,' the robot said, 'you are in Wisconsin.'
'Bridgeport?' asked Sutton.
'It was on the Wisconsin River, on the north bank, a matter of seven miles above the junction with the Mississippi.'
'But those rivers? I've never heard of them.'
'You are near them now, sir. The Wisconsin flows into the Mississippi just below the point where you are now.'
Sutton rose shakily and crossed the room, went out on the patio.
Adams was lighting up his pipe.
'You got what you wanted?' he asked.
Sutton nodded.
'Get going, then,' said Adams. 'Your hour's already started.'
Sutton hesitated.
'What is it, Ash?'
'I wonder,' said Sutton, 'I wonder if you would shake my hand.'
'Why, sure,' said Adams.
He rose ponderously to his feet and held out his hand.
'I don't know which,' said Adams, 'but you are either the greatest man or the biggest damn fool that I have ever known.'
XXXIII
Bridgeport dreamed in its rock-hemmed niche alongside the swiftly flowing river. The summer sun beat down into the pocket between the tree-mantled cliffs with a fierceness that seemed to squeeze the last hope of life and energy out of everything…out of the weather-beaten houses, out of the dust that lay along the street, out of the leaf-wilted shrub and bush and beaten rows of flowers.
The railroad tracks curved around a bluff and entered the town, then curved around another bluff and were gone again, and for the short span of this arc out of somewhere into nowhere they shone in the sun with the burnished sharpness of a whetted knife. Between the tracks and river the railroad station drowsed, a foursquare building that had the look of having hunched its shoulders against summer sun and winter cold for so many years that it stood despondent and cringing, waiting for the next whiplash of weather or of fate.
Sutton stood on the station platform and listened to the river, the suck and swish of tiny whirlpools that ran
