No Phule Like An Old Phule (15 page)

“Yes, Sergeant,” said Thumper, one last time, and he scuttled out the door. It was a real job to keep from grinning as he came into view of his fellow recruits, but somehow he managed it.

“If that goddamn dog wasn’t an interplanetary mascot for a clean green ‘vironment, knowed and beloved throughout the galaxy, I’d’ve shot his raggedy ass four, maybe five times, right then and there,” said Double-X. He was sitting in the Desert Lounge, Zenobia Base’s bar for legionnaires, with a group of his buddies, sharing a cold beer and the story of his encounters in the wilds outside the camp that day.

“Su-u-ure, I can just see the story on the tri-vee news, Space Legionnaire Kills Beloved Environmental Mascot,” said Street, scoffing. “With your picture-nah, they wouldn’t put somethin‘ that ugly on. They’d put on Barky, the Environmental Dog instead. Even shot full of holes, he be a little bit cute.”

“Cute?” Double-X slapped his hand against his forehead. “He gets his choppers in your leg, you tell me about cute then. That’s the bitin’est dog you ever seen-you or anybody else.”

“Well, I thought I’d seen everything in the Legion,” said Slayer. “But when I drove up and saw Spartacus halfway up a tree, I about busted open laughing. If the captain hadn’t been. there, I bet I would have. I didn’t know Sythians could climb trees.”

“More like, he flew up there on his glide-board,” said Street. “You’re right, though-if I’d seen that, I’d have bust open laughing, too.”

“I don’t think is funny,” said Tusk-anini. “Barky try to hurt legionnaires. Captain must stop Barky.”

“You Voltons must not have any pets,” said Super-Gnat, sitting on a bench next to her huge partner. She grinned, then went on, “The thing is, Barky is kind of cute. I mean, kids all over the Galaxy have his holo in their rooms, and they send money to save the trees because of Barky. When I was a kid, I used to think it was really blurgin‘ how he could sniff out pollutants…”

“When you was a kid?” said Do-Wop. “Man, that’s one long-lived dog… OW!” he yelled, as Super-Gnat punched him.

“Barky’s genetically engineered,” said Sushi, laughing at his partner. “They didn’t want to have to replace him every few years, so while they were giving him the genes to let him sniff out methane and fluorocarbons and so on, they made him long-lived, too. If I remember right, he’d be going on eighty years old even if he’d never started space-traveling.”

“Eighty or eight, don’t give him no right to bite folks,” said Double-X, slapping a fist into his open hand.

“I was the captain, I’d be tellin‘ those AEIOU suckers to lift their ship before the sun sets on ’em.”

“I bet he would like to do that,” said Sushi, swirling the ice cubes in his rum and Neocoke. “Problem is, the captain can’t just order another government agency off the planet except under martial law, which doesn’t apply here. If he could get the Zenobians to ask them to leave, that’d be another story. But so far, the Zenobians don’t seem interested in them one way or another.”

“Hey, maybe I can get Barky to chase Leftenant Qual up a tree,” suggested Do-Wop, pointing toward the ceiling to illustrate the idea.

“That’d get ‘em interested, all right.”

“You ever get a good look at Qual’s teeth?” asked Super-Gnat. “He’s got about twice as many as any dog you ever saw, and mostly twice as big-plus, he runs even faster than a Gambolt. If Barky has enough sense to find the meat in a hamburger-and at least, his bio says he does-he’ll steer clear of that fight for all he’s worth.”

“Bio? The farkin‘ dog’s got a bio?” said Double-X.

“Hey, watch your mouth,” said Super-Gnat. “Barky, the Environmental Dog, was my favorite icon when I was a kid. I cried for a week when we moved to a new town and my mom forgot to bring along my Barky doll. You talk bad about Barky, I’ll whap you.” She flexed her right arm to show him she meant business.

“All right, all right,” said Double-X trying to smooth things over. He probably outweighed Super-Gnat by fifty kilos, but everybody in the company knew that what the little legionnaire started, she finished—with Tusk-anini ready to step in if he thought she wasn’t getting a fair shake.

He rubbed his chin, and mused, “I guess all those big media stars got bios; so why not Bark?”

“Barky’s bio says he’s the most intelligent dog ever, too,” said Super-Gnat, somewhat ‘placated. “I read the whole thing when I was a kid. And watched his show every week. It was really triff, watching him chase the polluters.”

“Yeah, except now he seems to think that we’re polluters,” said Sushi. “I don’t know how he got that idea-the camp’s about as green as you can get-I think we recycle everything we can, certainly anything likely to be useful if we ever had to fight somebody. Of course, the AEIOU probably doesn’t take that point into consideration.”

“War not healthy for ecologies,” said Tusk-anini. “Best reason to prevent war, I thinking.”

“Maybe that dog do be smarter than he looks.” said Street, nodding. “Course, I knowed he was right smart all along when he went bitin‘ on Double-X.” That set off another round of good-natured insults and arguments that went on until closing time. The legionnaires went to bed without figuring out what to do about Barky, or how to deal with the AEIOU mission to Zenobia, although they talked enough about those problems to solve them half a dozen times.

It probably would not have made them any happier to know that their superior officers were having no better luck.

Victor Phule popped a token into the slot of the machine facing him and pulled the lever. There was something gratifying about the activity; just enough mechanical resistance, a sound of gears engaging and wheels spinning-even though he’d been told that the sounds were actually synthesized effects, and the gears and wheels were simulations that had nothing to do with the choice of which symbols the machine would display. Instead, an elaborately sealed Heisenberg circuit determined the winning (or more often, losing) combination. Whoever had designed the machines had done her job well, Phule grudgingly admitted. It felt as if you could actually use the handle to control which symbols appeared, even when your brain knew the facts to ‘be otherwise.

The “wheels” spun to a halt, and Victor Phule inspected the three symbols in front of him: a bell, a cherry, and a lemon. No payout this time. Phule picked up his Slate-omat and entered the result. On the whole, he was fortyseven thousand dollars in the red at this point. Considering that the bank of machines he was playing took nothing less than five-thousand-dollar tokens, that was a pittance. One decent payout, and he’d be ahead of the game. One significant jackpot, and he’d rake in more for one play than any but the top casino executives made in a year. And if he hit the big one… He chuckled. It was only a matter of time.

He was mildly surprised that nobody else seemed interested in these particular machines. Yes, the price of a play was high, but the payouts were proportionateIy richer than anything else in the Fat Chance Casino. Even thirty-five to one, the odds for playing a single number at the roulette table, was a paltry reward compared to the million-to-one superjackpot the casino had posted for these machines.

Well, if no one else played, no one else had a chance to win, did they? Determinedly, Victor Phule fished in his pocket and took out another token.

He was about to feed it into the machine when someone close behind him said, “Having any luck today?”

He turned to see a woman’s face-youngish, darkhaired, and rather pretty, though not on the vidstar level. Almost inevitably, she knew who he was and how much money he had; Victor Phule was not without ego, but he had no reason to believe he was the type of man who would appeal to many women if his wealth were suddenly to disappear. On the other hand, he had an excellent notion of just how attractive that wealth was to almost everyone else he met. After all, the galaxy has room for only a limited number of multibillionaires—which meant that the vast majority of those around him at any given time had far less money than he, and had at least some interest in altering what they perceived as. an unnatural imbalance. From Victor Phule’s point of view, of course, that imbalance was very much the natural state of affairs, and he saw no reason to give anyone a chance to change it to his disadvantage.

So his first response to the question was to verify, out of the comer of his eye, that his bodyguard was nearby, paying due attention to the situation. Sure enough, Eddie Grossman was only a step or two away, pretending to play the slots while looking in his direction. The guard lifted a forefinger to his left ear, signaling that he had already scanned the woman for weapons and found nothing to set off his alarms. Good-that eliminated one source of worry, although there were of course plenty of ways to damage or kill someone without carrying a detectable weapon.

That verified, Victor Phule decided to indulge himself with a few moments’ conversation. “Luck doesn’t enter into it,” he said. “Beating these machines is easy, if you have a good system and stick to it.”

“You must have a lot of faith in your system,” said the woman, eyeing the machine that Phule had just been playing. “Could you teach me how you play?” Victor Phule looked at her again, sizing her up..

“You don’t look as if you have enough money to play on these machines,” he said. “They’re five thousand dollars minimum…”

“Yes, that’s what convinced me you must have a good system,” said the woman. She paused, then said, “My name’s Lola, by the way.”

Phule ignored her attempt to get his name. “You need to get a set of five machines and protect them from anyone else playing them until you’ve won your quota. So if you were thinking about putting a token in one of these, forget about it./” Lola smiled.

“I’m afraid that even if I had your confidence, I don’t have your bankroll. If I like your system enough to try it, it’ll be on the five-dollar machines. But go ahead, Mr… ?

“Next thing is, you have to set yourself an amount you’re going to win, and once you win it, you stop for the day. Slot machines are calibrated to take a certain percentage of the bets made on them, so you have to resist the belief that you can hit the jackpot twice in a row.”

“I see,” said Lola. “So you’re feeding your own bank of machines until they payoff, then quitting while you’re ahead.”

“Yes, essentially that’s it,” said Victor Phule. “I’m betting that most of the players are too undisciplined to follow a system like mine. So their losses build the jackpot even bigger for me, you see.”

“I guess so,” said Lola, nodding dubiously. “But what happens if…” But by then Victor Phule had decided that the young woman was interesting, but not enough so to distract him from his mission of breaking the bank at the Fat Chance Casino. He rubbed his palms together, a signal to the bodyguard, and said, “Well, Miss, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. But I really have to get back to work here.”

And no sooner were the words out of his mouth than Eddie Grossman was there, gently taking the woman by the elbow and steering her toward the exit, talking quietly to her. Eddie was good at what he did-most likely, the young woman would never be aware that she’d been given the brush-off. If he wanted to renew the conversation, it would be as if nothing had ever broken it off.

He put a token in the slot and pulled the lever. . .

Lola walked out of the High Rollers’ Lounge in the Fat Chance Casino burning with curiosity. Her first encounter with Victor Phule had been, much stranger than shed had expected. About the only thing that fit any predictable pattern was the bodyguard’s moving in gently to encourage her to end the conversation with his client Phule must have flashed him some signal she’d missed. But that was all right-she’d actually gotten to talk to him much longer than she’d hoped to. Unfortunately, she hadn’t learned very much of use. Victor Phule’s explanations of why he was playing the casino’s quantum slots didn’t make any sense-and that set off all her alarms. She didn’t see any reason to point out that nobody else but the armaments tycoon was playing the five-thousand-dollar machines. Without the undisciplined players he depended on to build up the losses, his supposed “system” was nonsense.

Besides, everybody but the most unthinking fish knew that the slots gave the worst odds in the whole casino. Obviously, nobody who could build a financial empire like Phule-Proof Industries could be so cavalier about throwing away his money. So there must be something else going on here. What was Victor Phule’s real game? Was his conspicuous high rolling nothing more than shilling, meant to encourage others to play recklessly? Was his so-called system just a way to convince players that the slots might not be the bad investment that every sensible gambler claimed they were? Or was something even deeper going on here? Lola did her best to keep her face cheerful, to keep Victor Phule talking.

Whatever his game was, she intended to find out-and to be there to scam him out of a share of the proceeds, whenever it did payoff. It wasn’t going to be an easy job, Lola told herself. But it had a lot better chance of paying off than Victor Phule’s system for playing the slots. And whether or not he realized it, she had a lot more at stake than he did. She smiled again. Always bet on the hungry fighter, said the old gambler’s cliche. One thing for sure: she was a lot hungrier than Victor Phule. And she was going to get her bite out of him, one way or another.

Back at Zenobia Base, Willard Phule’s wrist intercom buzzed, then Mother’s voice came through the speaker.

“Hate to wake you up, cutie pie, but we’ve detected an incoming ship. You might want to tidy up before they get here.”

Phule, who had been wide-awake {it was midaftenoon, after all) and working at his desk, grinned

“Thanks, Mother,” he said.

“That must be the party of bigwigs we’ve got to entertain for Ambassador Gottesman. Try to hail them, and patch me in when they answer.”

“Will do, sweetums,” puited Mother, and she broke the connection.

“Do you plan to meet these, uh, bigwigs in person?” asked Beeker, looking up from the financial program he’d been running.

“Sure, if it really is them,” said Phule. “I’m not going to go charging out to meet just anybody again. I learned my lesson with those AEIOU inspectors. I all but rolled out the red carpet for them, and they’ve been nothing but trouble ever since.”