“You notice he’s concentrating everything he can bring to bear on my left flank. Fifteen moves from now he’d’ve been focused on my King’s Knight’s Third. Three moves after that he was going to exchange his knight for my queen and then mate in four. But, finding out what he was up to, I’ve just derailed his train of operations and he has to revise his whole campaign.”
“No wonder I didn’t see . . . I’m simply not in your class. But would you mind if I stay and look on?”
“We’ll be glad to have you, but it won’t be fast. We’re playing strict tournament rules and taking the full four minutes for each move.”
“That’s quite all right. I really enjoy watching Grand Masters at work.”
Master though he was, Thlasoval had no idea at all of what a terrific game he watched. For Joan Janowick and Neal Cloud were not playing it; they merely moved the pieces. The game had been played long since. Based upon the greatest games of the greatest masters of old, it had been worked out, move by move, by chess masters working with high-speed computers.
Thus, while Joan and Storm were really concentrating, it was not upon chess.
Chapter 14
▂▂▂▂▂▂VESTA THE GAMBLER
JOAN WAS HANDLING the card games, Cloud the wheels. The suggestion that it would be smart to run honest games had been implanted in the zwilniks’ minds, not because of the cards, but because of the wheels; for a loaded, braked, and magnetized wheel is a very tough device to beat.
Joan, then, would read a deck of cards, and a Lensman or a Rigellian would watch her do it. Then the observing telepath would, all imperceptibly, insert hunches into the mind of a player. And what gambler has ever questioned his hunches, especially when they pay off time after time after time? Thus more and more players began to win with greater or lesser regularity and the gambling fever—the most contagious and infectious disorder known to man—spread throughout the vast room like a conflagration in a box-factory.
And Storm Cloud was handling the wheels.