His glance fell upon a little gray man, opposite: a dried-up wisp of humanity, whose pale anxious eyes, through heavy-lensed glasses, were peering at endless rows of notations in a small black book.
His thin nervous fingers were tapping at the keys of a compact, noiseless computing machine.
Only three blue chips remained before him on the board.
Giles Habibula called to him,
“Brother, do you want to win?”
The little stranger blinked up at him, hi near-sighted bewilderment.
“Sir,” came a shrill piping voice, “I do. More than anything else in the world.
I have been laboring many years—I have made twenty million calculations—endeavoring to perfect my system of play.
I have three chips left.”
“Forget your mortal system,” wheezed Giles Habibula. “And play your three chips on one hundred and one.”
The little man scratched his gray head uncertainly, peering vaguely back at his book and his calculating machine.
“But my system, sir, based on the permutations of numbers and the gravitational influence of the planets—my system—”
“Fool!” hissed a mousetrap-faced female beside him.
“Play!
Old blubber-guts has got something!
He just cleaned up a couple of billions!”
She set a stack of her own chips on one-hundred-one.
Giles blinked, and the croupier spun his ball.
The little gray man looked at his machine, and put one chip on forty-nine.
The fat yellow hands of Giles Habibula, handling the green certificates as if they had been incandescent metal, laid the stack of his winnings on the double-zero.
“Two billions and a few odd millions,” he told the chalk-faced croupier.
And his voice dropped to a rasp of deadly menace.
“And don’t you move until that ball stops.
Don’t take a mortal breath! I’ll handle the relays.”
He looked back at the little gray man.
“On second thought, brother,” he wheezed, “your forty-nine will win.
Due to gravitational influences!”
He thrust the green handle of his cane abruptly into the croupier’s pasty face.
“You stand still!”
The cane lifted, with a slow, deliberate sweep, and the ball clicked into the slot.
“Forty-nine is the winner!”
Sobbing with pale faced relief, the croupier snatched up the sheaf of bills from zero-zero.
With a trembling wand, he raked in the other bets.
He pushed a stack of a hundred chips to the small gray man.
The bleak faced woman made some sound, very much under her breath, and abruptly departed.
“My system!” piped the frail little man, excitedly.
“At last—it wins!”
His thin fingers recorded the play in his little black book.
They tapped the silent keys of his machine.
He peered at the dial, and then pushed the stack of his chips back upon the number forty-nine.
The colorless eyes of Giles Habibula glittered at the croupier.
“Forty-nine,” he predicted, “will win again.”
The croupier licked his dry lips.
His glazing eyes shot a despairing glance at Caspar Hannas.
He hoarsely called for bets, and spun the ball, and watched its clicking circle with a kind of white horror on his face.
And forty-nine won!
“My system!”
The gray man clutched with shaking hands at chips pushed toward him.
“For twenty years,” he whispered,
“Dr. Abel Davian has been thought a visionary fool.