A Man Obsessed

by Alan Edward Nourse

Harpo made a disgusted noise. "You mean, the old ESP story again. So maybe they go off on another spook hunt. They'll get over it, same as they did the last time or the time before."

The Nasty Frenchman's voice was tense. "But they're changing things. And changes mean trouble." He glanced at Jeff and his eyebrows went up. "Look, they get on a line of work, they assign men to different parts of a job, they get work lined up months in advance. Then all of a sudden something new comes along. They get excited about something and they toss out a couple dozen workers, add on a couple dozen new ones, change the fees, change the work. And they end up handing the best pay to somebody who's just come in. I don't like it. I've been in this place too long. I've had too many tough, lousy jobs here to just get pushed aside because they don't happen to be interested any more in what they were doing to me before. And they never tell us! We never know for sure. We just have to wait and guess and hope."

The little man's eyes blazed. "But we can pick up some things, a little here, a little there—you learn how, after a while. And I can tell you, something's wrong, something's going to happen. You can even feel it in here."

Jeff's skin crawled. That was it, of course. There was something wrong. But it hadn't happened yet. It was going to happen. He stared at a huddled group around a panmumjon game, watched the bright-colored dice cubes roll across and back, across and back. A newcomer, the Nasty Frenchman had said, someone who had come in and disrupted the smooth work schedule of the Center, someone who had the doctors suddenly excited. Someone whom they were planning to use—on a spook hunt.

What kind of a spook hunt? Why that choice of words? Could Conroe conceivably be the newcomer they had been talking about? It didn't seem possible that it could have happened so suddenly if Conroe were the one—but who? And what did this have to do with the ever-growing sense of impending danger that pervaded the room, right now?

Jeff's eyes wandered to the dice game, and the fear in his mind suddenly grew to a screaming torrent. Go away, Jeff. Don't watch, don't look—He scowled, suddenly angry. Why not look? What was there so dangerous in a dice game? He moved over to the nearby huddle and watched the moving cubes in fascination. No, Jeff, no, don't do it, Jeff—With a curse, he dropped to his knees and reached out for the dice.

"You in?" somebody asked. Jeff nodded, his face like a rock. The voice had stopped screaming in his ear, and now something else grew in his mind: a wild exhilaration that caught his breath and swept through his brain like a whirl-wind. His eyes sparkled and he pulled money from his pocket. He laid the bills on the floor and his hands closed on the dice.

He faced a little, pimple-faced man with beady black eyes and he raised the three brightly colored dice, rolling into the familiar pattern. The dice deadlocked in four throws. He sweated out seven more with new dice. Then Jeff saw a break in the odds, boosted the ante on his next throw and caught his breath as the man facing him matched it.

The dice rolled, fell into deadlock again, and the crowd around them gasped, moved in closer around them. The third set of dice was brought out, for the attempts at dead-lock-breaking. Then a fourth set followed, as the complex structure of the game built up like a house of cards. Then Jeff's dice at last rolled the critical number, and the structure began to break apart—throw after throw falling faster and faster into his hands.

Four or five people moved in at his side with side bets and began to collect along with him, as he moved into another game, built it up. This one he lost cold, but still he played on, his excitement growing.