The player shrugged with an indifference that might have been exaggerated. "It's you against the house," he said. "You have a chance to win ten thousand chips—if you feel lucky."
"What if you lose?" Hendley could feel the excitement building in him. He didn't really care what the penalty was for losing. Here was something different. He had the rest of the night to get through somehow. He couldn't risk leaving the Rec Hall while darkness held and the visitor waited. The game would occupy the time, and bring its own exhilaration.
"You don't think about losing," the player said evasively. "What gambler does? The game ends at dawn, no matter who's ahead. If you last out till then, you win."
Sober, Hendley would have persisted in his questioning. Instead he stared at the big table. What could happen to him if he lost? He was a Freeman. Having everything, he had nothing to lose. Anyway, he did feel lucky. And the prize was huge—enough chips to gamble with for weeks! Longer than that, for you always stood a better chance of winning if you had enough chips to ride out the cold streaks and plunge when you were hot.
With a kind of aggressive, defiant determination he strode through the casino. The robot-dealer at the center table looked up as he approached. His plastic face was expressionless, or rather it was set in a perpetual attitude of slightly curious amiability. He could not care whether Hendley played or did not play, won or lost. That in itself was an advantage, Hendley thought. Desire had something to do with luck.
He slipped onto a stool across the table from the robot. "I want to play," he said.
With the instant response of the machine, the robot placed two identical stacks of large chips between them. They were a half inch more in diameter than the usual casino chips, with smooth white surfaces marked by a red cross. The robot pushed one of the stacks toward Hendley. Depressing a button, he activated two pairs of small viewscreens, one set for each player. Only one of each pair of viewers was visible to the opposing player, the other being the player's own record of his moves.
There was a faint whirring, like an old-fashioned museum clock winding up to strike, and the robot's voice mechanism announced, "We play '100' game."
It was to be a direct, head-on contest. Hendley knew the game, whose rules were simpler than the play actually was in practice. It was an electronic version of the child's trick of guessing how many fingers are pointing when the hands are held out of sight, except that the possible combinations of numbers were infinitely greater, with one hundred as the maximum total. Bets were made for high or low figures, with each player free to draw additional numbers after the first two or to stand with what he had. The odds were, on the face of it, even. But Hendley knew that the robot's precision instrument of a brain was capable of exact, rapid mathematical calculations far beyond his powers. He had to offset that edge by turning his human fallibility into an asset—by doing the unexpected. If he allowed any consistent sequence to develop in his tactics, the robot would instantly detect and take advantage of the fact. Hendley forced himself to play erratically, hoping that he would not unconsciously fall into a pattern of inconsistency.
In the two-player duel the moves went quickly. In the beginning Hendley played and bet conservatively. For a while he seemed to be holding his own. Then, very slowly at first, like a runner inching into the lead in a closely contested race, the robot's stack of chips began to grow, Hendley's to shrink.