Of Death What Dreams

5

For the first three hours, it was touch and go. They paid off heavily on the twenty-one hours read-out, showed a modest recoup on the twenty-two, cut deeply into their tiny reserve at twenty-three.

“We ain’t hacking it, kid,” Aroon muttered, wiping at his bald forehead with a yard-square handkerchief. “At this rate we go under on the next read.”

“Here’s a revised line,” Bailey said. “One of the intermediate composites is cresting. That’s what threw me off.”

“If we pull out now, we can pay off and call it square.”

“Play along one more hour, Gus.”

“We’ll be in too deep! We can’t cover!”

“Ride it anyway. Maybe we can.”

“I’m nuts,” Gus said. “But OK, one more pass.”

On the midnight reading, the pot showed a profit of three hundred and thirty-one Q’s. Aroon proposed getting out then, but half-heartedly. At one hundred, the stake more than doubled. At two, in spite of a sharp wobble in the GNP curve, they held their own. At three, a spurt sent them over the two thousand mark. By dawn, the firm of Aroon and Bailey had a net worth of forty-one hundred and sixty-one credit units, all in hard tokens.

“I got to hand it to you, Bailey,” Aroon said in wonderment, spreading the bright-colored plastic chips on the table with a large, hairy hand. “A month’s take—in one night!”

This is a drop in the bucket, Gus,” Bailey said. “I just wanted to be sure my formulas worked. Now we really start operating.”

Gus looked wary. “What’s that mean, more trouble?”

“I’ve been keeping my eyes open since I’ve been here in Four Quarters. It’s a pretty strange place, when you stop to think about it: a whole sub-culture, living outside the law, a refuge for criminals and misfits. Why do the Greenies tolerate it? Why don’t they stage a raid, clean out the Prekes once and for all, put an end to the lawbreakers and the rackets? They could do it any day they wanted to.”

Gus looked uncomfortable. “Too much trouble, I guess. We keep to our own. We live off the up graders’ scraps—”

“Uh-uh,” Bailey said. “They live off ours—some of them, even at the top.”

“Crusters and Dooses—live off Prekes?” Gus wagged his head. “Your drive is slipping, Bailey.”

“Who do you think backs the big books? There’s money involved—several million every night. Where do you think it goes?”

“Into the bookers’ pockets, I guess. What about it? I don’t like this kind of talk. It makes me nervous.”

“The big books want you to be nervous,” Bailey said. “They don’t want anyone asking questions, rocking the boat. But let’s ask some anyway. Where does the money go? It goes upstairs, Gus. That’s why they let us alone, let us spend our lives cutting each other’s throats—so they can bleed off the cream. It’s good business.”

“You’re skywriting, Bailey.”

“Sure, I admit it’s guesswork. But I’m betting I’m right. And if I am, we can cut ourselves as big a slice as we’ve got the stomach for.”

“Look, we’re doing OK, we play small enough maybe they don’t pay no attention—”

“They’ll pay attention. Don’t think we’re the first to ever get ideas. Staying small is the one thing we can’t do. It will be a sure tip-off that we’re just a pair of mice in the woodwork. We have to work big, Gus. It’s the only bluff we’ve got.”

“Big—on four M.” Gus stared scornfully at the chips he had been fondling.

“That’s just seed,” Bailey said. “Tonight we move into the big time.”

“How?”

“We borrow.”

Gus stared. “You nuts, Bailey? Who—”

“That’s what I want you to tell me, Gus. Here.” He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Write down the names of every man in the Quarters that might be good for a few hundred. I’ll take it from there.”