Read Online Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick - Free Book Online Page B

you,” Benteley said. “An ability you were born with, a unique gift.”
    “You sound like Wakeman. If I had stayed with the Corps I would have had to use my ability against Reese. So what else could I do but leave?” There was tight agony in her eyes. “You know, it’s really gone. It’s like being blinded. I screamed and cried a long time afterward. I couldn’t face it. I broke down completely.”
    “How are you now?”
    She gestured shakily. “I’ll live. Anyhow, I can’t get it back. So forget it, darling. Drink your drink and relax.” She clinked glasses with him. “It’s called
methane gale.
I suppose Callisto has a methane atmosphere.”
    “Have you ever been to one of the colony planets?” Benteley asked. He sipped at the amber liquid; it was strong stuff. “Have you ever seen one of the work-camps, or one of the squatters’ colonies after a police patrol has finished with it?”
    “No,” Eleanor said simply. “I’ve never been off Earth. I was born in San Francisco nineteen years ago. All telepaths come from there, remember? During the Final War the big research installations at Livermore were hit by a Soviet missile. Those who survived were badly bathed. We’re all descendants of one family, Earl and Verna Phillips. The whole Corps is related. I was trained for it all the time I was growing up: my destiny.”
        A vague blur of music had started up at one end of the chamber. A music robot, creating random combinations of sound, harmonic colors and shades that flitted agilely, too subtle to pin down. Some couples started dancing listlessly. A group of men had gathered together and were arguing in loud, angry tones. Snatches of words carried to Benteley.
    “Out of the lab in June, they say.”
    “Would you make a cat wear trousers? It’s inhuman.”
    “Plow into something at that velocity? Personally, I’ll stick to plain old sub-C.”
    Near the double doors a few people were seeking out their wraps and wandering away, dull-faced, vacant-eyed, mouths slack with fatigue and boredom.
    “It gets like this,” Eleanor said. “The women wander off to the powder room. The men start arguing some point.”
    “What does Verrick do?”
    “You’re hearing it now.”
    Verrick’s deep tones rolled out over everybody else’s; he was dominating the argument. People nearby gradually stopped talking and began filtering over to listen. A tight knot of men formed, grim-faced and serious, as Verrick and Moore waved louder and hotter.
    “Our problems are of our own making,” Verrick asserted. “They’re not real, like problems of supply and labor surplus.”
    “How do you figure?” Moore demanded.
    “This whole system is artificial. This M-game was invented by a couple of mathematicians during the early phase of the Second World War.”
    “You mean discovered. They saw that social situations are analogues of strategy games, like poker. A system that works in a poker game will work in a social situation, like business or war.”
    “What’s the difference between a game of chance and a strategy game?” Laura Davis asked, from where she and Al stood.
    Annoyed, Moore answered, “Everything. In a game of chance no conscious deception is involved; in a poker game every player has a deliberate strategy of bluff, false leads, putting out misleading verbal reports and visual horse-play to confuse the other players as to his real position and intentions. He has a pattern of misrepresentation by which he traps them into acting foolishly.”
    “You mean like saying he has a good hand when he hasn’t?”
    Moore ignored her and turned back to Verrick. “You want to deny society operates like a strategy game? Minimax was a brilliant hypothesis. It gave us a rational scientific method to crack any strategy and transform the strategy game into a chance game, where the regular statistical methods of the exact sciences function.”
    “All the same,” Verrick rumbled, “this damn bottle throws a man