"I'll be damned," Sid said in awe. "Suppose you don't want a coat, or anything else, for the time being?"

  "Then you simply let it accumulate until something comes up that you do wish. Very simple, my boy. No laws broke, nobody hurt. And avid gamblers, such as we admittedly are, enjoy themselves."

  Sid Cusack looked about the room some more. He said, "How do you pay the, wha'd'ya call 'em, croupiers?"

  Holly Owyler was a compulsive chuckler, hardly being able to get out a sentence without one. He chuckled and said, "We don't. Remember, this is a club. We take turns at the stick on either the crap table or roulette table. At the blackjack table the players switch around handling the bank. Evens out the odds. If a player gets a blackjack, it's his turn to take the bank. Some of the boys get a kick out of acting as croupier. Ned Haines over there on the roulette wheel. He'd rather be on that side of the table than playing, so, hell, we let him do it. And Jake, over on the crap table. "What's your weakness, Sid?"

  "Well, poker, I guess. Stud poker. I played quite a bit in the army. We had to play for matches, or candy, stuff like that, but we played. Had to kill time somehow."

  "Okay, Sid, come on over here and I'll fix you up with Marty Cantine."

  The younger man hesitated. Then, "Uh, well, sure."

  Marty Cantine, seated behind a desk, was a small, wizened type with a mouth full of overly large and crooked teeth, an anachronism in this day. Sid Cusack decided the man must be afraid of Dental Surgeons. Before him was the screen of a private mini-computer. He looked up at their approach.

  Owyler was saying, "In a club this size you find all types. Marty is a frustrated banker. Inherited too much money to ever have to really work, so he takes it out being club treasurer."

  They stood before the desk and Owyler said, "Marty, meet Sid. Sidney Cusack, Martin Cantine. Sid and I met last night and hit it off right from the beginning, Marty. He's a boy that likes the action, so I thought I'd invite him to join up."

  Cantine stuck out a thin hand to be shaken. "Why not? The more the merrier. How much should I put you down for, Sid?"

  Sid Cusack looked blank. "Well, what's the usual?"

  "It's up to you. Why don't you start with five hundred? You can always get more."

  "Five hundred!"

  "If that's not enough…" the club's banker said.

  "Oh. No, well that's enough to start with, surely." Cusack gave a nervous laugh.

  Holly Owyler chuckled.

  Cantine said, "Now if you'll just let me have your credit card. Formality, to prove you're currently solvent. That's a laugh, eh?"

  Sid Cusack flushed, then patted his pocket. "I swear to God, I must have forgot to put it in my pocket when I changed suits this morning."

  Holly Owyler said, "Nothing, nothing. Forget about it, Sid. I vouch for him, Marty." He said to Sid Cusack, "You oughten to be that vague, boy. It's against the law not to have your pocket phone on you. Suppose Uncle Sam wanted to get in touch with you?"

  Marty Cantine shrugged and said something into the mini-computer screen. He said to Sid, "How many chips do you want from your balance now?"

  Sid looked at Holly Owyler.

  The jovial worthy chuckled and said, "If you're going to be playing stud, you'd better take the whole five hundred."

  Sid cleared his throat. "Well, okay."

  The banker counted out the chips from a rack to his left. "These are twenties, these are tens, these fives." It didn't seem to amount to many chips in the Cusack eyes.

  Holly Owyler took him by the arm. "Over here. I'll introduce you to some of the boys."

  The boys at the stud table all out-aged Sid Cusack by at least ten years. They were stolid in their unsmiling game. Nobody bothered to shake hands. The extent of acknowledgement of the introduction was a curt nod of the head. There were six of them and one empty chair. Sid Cusack put his chips down before it and sat himself. He looked up at Holly Owyler who was beaming.

  "I'll have to amble around and check things out," Owyler said. "This is my day to host the games. Ned Haines has it tomorrow. Apartment 106, in Tower-Two. I'll see you get cleared through with Security, if you want to show up."

  Sid said hesitantly, "Does every member have to take his turn entertaining?"

  Holly Owyler patted him on the shoulder, "No, no. We got it split up among six of us Who're especially keen, got lots of time on our hands, and with the escape sanctums big enough to hold us all." He winked hugely. *This is a private club and we don't feel like we're treading on anybody's toes but it's still a good idea to hold the meetings in escape sanctums. We don't want anybody prying into our private affairs."

  The player with the deck said, "Let's play cards."

  "See you later, Sid," Owyler said, strolling off.

  The ante was five dollars. The first deal, Sid Cusack got eights, back to back. Two of the others folded. A queen high bet a ten dollar chip.

  When it got around to Sid, he raised it ten, clearing his throat and saying, "My first hand. I feel lucky."

  Nobody answered that. Their faces remained in the traditional lack of expression of the poker player. Two more dropped out. They might look as though between them they owned all the pseudo-dollars in the world but they didn't throw any of them away, evidently. At least, not at poker.

  Nobody picked up anything with the following card. The queen was still high. He passed it to Sid who bet another ten chips. The queen stayed, the third player dropped out.

  Sid Cusack caught another eight. With a pair showing, he was now high. He bet a twenty. Queen folded.

  Sid raked in the pot. Without making it obvious, he hoped, he very nonchalantly counted his take. He drew in a short breath. He had netted exactly a hundred dollars.

  When Carol Ann returned to the apartment that late afternoon, it was to find Sid bent over the library booster of the TV phone, which was in itself mildly surprising. Sid Cusack was ordinarily more apt to be watching a historical war show on the Tri-Di. He had a predilection for vicarious violence.

  She tossed her bag to the couch and went over to the auto-bar and dialed herself the one long pseudo-whiskey highball which she liked to take for relaxation immediately upon return from the office.

  Sid looked up, almost as though impatient at being interrupted and said, "Hi, doll. You're kind of late, aren't you?"

  She picked up the drink as soon as it was delivered and went over to the comfort chair and sank into it "Everything and its cousin came up today, beginning about noon. I didn't even have time for lunch. We got a petition signed by over two thousand residents demanding a reduction in the maintenance fee. Barry Ten Eyck's been arguing with their committee all day. I had to sit in, of course."

  "Hey, that's good. It'd apply to us too. How much would we save?"

  "Fifty pseudo-dollars a month if it went through. The trouble is, dear, that we're skating too near the edge of the breakeven point for this deme as it is. A reduction of an average of fifty dollars per apartment for all five thousand apartments would come to a quarter of a million a month, or three million a year. I doubt if Barry could do it and still make a profit for Vanderfel-ler and Moore."

  "Well, that's no worry of yours, doll. And laughing boy has some nerve keeping you overtime almost every day. What does he think you are, a slave?"

  The sheen was there in his eyes again. He had probably taken a trank pill since noon, she realized.

  She took another pull at her drink and said, "That's the trouble with being top management, darling. In theory, the Demecrat and his two assistants work an eight-hour day. In actuality, it's something like being a ship's captain. You're on duty all the time."

  "Well, that's their job, and they get paid for it but plenty. But your salary isn't enough to put up with that treatment."

  Carol Ann sighed. "A Demecrat's secretary is his right arm, darling. If he works sixteen hours, so do I. It couldn't be any other way. And always remember, a Demecrat's secretary is very handy for promotion when there's a vacancy."

  He said sourly, "Like you said, you don't have a degree in deme management."

  "Which brings us to something I wanted to tell you about. I'm going to start studying for one, Sid. Right here in the apartment on the TV booster screen, of course."

  "What! I swear to God, doll, we hardly have any time for ourselves as it is. We haven't been out to a nightspot since Friday."

  "It's Meritocracy, darling. If you drop behind in upgrading yourself, you look around one day and find that you're dropping out, period." She finished her drink.

  He got up in disgust and headed for the bathroom. "I think I'll get myself a trank."

  She stood too, preparatory to taking her glass to the disposal chute. She said softly, "I think you've already had a trank, dear."

  "So what? I'm a big boy, I can stand two in a row." He turned and went into the bathroom, half slamming the door behind him.

  On her way past the chair in which he had been seated, she idly looked down into the library booster screen, wondering what he was reading. The book was, The World's Greatest Gambling Systems, by Leo Guild and the chapter was devoted to poker and entitled "The Odds System."

  Frowning puzzlement, she dropped her glass into the disposal chute and returned to her chair.

  When he came back, his eyes sparkling now, his humor restored, she said, "How did you make out with Mr. Owyler?"

  He grinned happily. "Can't tell you, doll, but I've come up with something at last that's going to make us both rich. I've just got to figure it real carefully, get all the angles down pat. What'd you think if I told you I ran up over three hundred pseudo-dollars today?"

  "I'd say, haw?"

  He grinned slyly and touched the end of his nose with his forefinger. "Can't tell you yet, but one of these days you're going to be in for a big fat surprise, doll. A big fat surprise."

  She sighed. "Another one of your deals?"

  "You won't be so upstage about my deals, honey, when it starts raining pseudo-dollars."

  "I'm afraid you're overdoing that trank, darling."

  "Have you ever tried it?"

  "Well, no."

  "Then you oughten to knock it. What's the old wheeze about all censors being illiterates?"

  She tried to suppress her impatience. "It's a long history, man's search for a happiness drug. If and when he ever finds it, I suspect it will be the end of man—at least as we know him."

  He didn't know what she was talking about. Sid Cusack said definitely, "It's already been found, Carol. It's trank. LSD, mescaline, marijuana, all the rest of them, were just the preliminaries. Trank gives you everything, takes away nothing. It's even legal. Why? Because there's no bad effects. It isn't habit forming, no hangover, even kids and old folks can take it, you never have to increase the dosage and it's dirt cheap."

  "In fact, I'm beginning to think the government subsidizes it," Carol Ann muttered.

  "If they don't, they ought to. It keeps everybody happy, which isn't the easiest thing in the world if you're living on NIT. I still say you ought to give it a trial, doll."

  "No thanks," she said. "I'll achieve my happiness, such as it is, through my own efforts, not through a pill."

  Three days later, when Carol Ann returned to the apartment, it was to find Sid not at home. She decided that he was probably having a swim in one of the pools down in the lower levels and shrugged out of her jacket. She went to the small closet in the bedroom to hang it up. It was a favorite jacket, an import from Common Europe, and one of the few articles of clothing that she had cleaned when required rather than disposing of it.

  She was taken aback to note three men's suits hanging there, suits she had never seen before. She made space for the jacket and returned to the living room for her highball and to await Sid.

  Three suits at once, and a fourth that Sid was wearing?

  Theirs was somewhat larger than a mini-apartment but still small by the standards of yesteryear. When the building boom had begun, the all-out effort to supply decent housing for everyone in the country, the first demes to go up stressed efficiency in size, for the sake of packing in as many residents as possible. But now that the boom was falling off, the housing shortage a thing of the past, the new demes being built were beginning to feature more space. It had become a status symbol to have several rooms in your apartment. It was one of the headaches with which her boss, Barry Ten Eyck, had to contend. Residents of Shyler-deme would move for the sake of a larger apartment.

  However, even these new places didn't waste space in the manner of fifty years before. One no longer accumulated large stocks of clothing; one used it and disposed of it; automation of production and the new synthetic textiles made clothing so inexpensive that it didn't make sense to launder or clean. Nor, with the advent of the National Library Banks, hooked up to your TV screen, did it make sense to accumulate books, records or tapes of music. Every bit of music, from folk to opera, was in the banks. So were all the movies and TV shows ever cut, for that matter.

  Sid, beaming happily, came in just as her drink was being delivered.

  She started to ask him about the suits, but he spoke first, holding up a small box in his hand.

  "Doll," he said. "Remember when we had to sell your engagement ring, over in the Swap Shop in the Common, back before you got this job and we were always so broke?"

  She said, "Of course, darling, but you needn't worry about that. Everybody has their emergencies. You'll buy me another some day when you get on your feet."

  He grinned at her. "Here it is." He flicked open the box. A ring gleamed there.

  She stared at it. "But that's not the same ring. Where…"

  "Of course not," he crowed. "The Swap Shop has long since sold your first one. But this is better."

  She took it, completely dumbfounded. "But, dear, where could you have possibly gotten it? And, Sid, those suits in the closet. Three of them, and they're of the best quality."

  He was obviously delighted with himself. "I told you it'd be raining pseudo-dollars for us, doll. And it's just the beginning."

  "But… but how…?"

  "Ask me no questions, Til tell you no lies," he grinned. "Actually, I, uh, did a favor for a friend and he insisted on my buying six hundred dollars worth of things on his credit account. Anything I wanted to select. Maybe I put too much of it into the clothes, but the kind of people I'm associating with these days, doll, I have to keep up my front."

  "What kind of people?"

  He touched the end of his nose confidentially. "Rich people, doll, people so rich the pseudo-dollars drip off them unnoticed."

  Carol Ann Cusack dropped into the Security office the following day, just before lunch.

  Bat Hardin looked up at her and smiled, "Hi, Mrs. Cusack. What spins, as Barry would say?"

  She was frowning. She hesitated, as though wondering how to put it, or even if she wanted to put it at all. Finally, she said, "Mr. Hardin, how much gambling goes on here in Shyler-deme?"

  "Gambling?" He leaned back. "Not a great deal. Not here or anywhere else in the United States. It's not very practical without a currency. It's one crime, if you can call it a crime, that took a nosedive when the National Bank took over with the Universal Credit Card. Anybody so hot for gambling that they've got to have it can always go over to the Bahamas, of course. The so-called government there has legalized gambling and controls it itself. You can play with your International Credit Card. Every gambling device has a payment slot. You make your bet and are either debited or credited with the amount you lose or win."

  "I don't mean in the Bahamas or Malta or any of the other wide-open places around the world. I mean right here in Shyler-deme."

  He said, "Real gambling, like I said, isn't very practical. I understand there's a card club of some sort or other up in the higher floors. But I imagine they play for fun, or perhaps prizes, or some such. I wouldn't know."

  He flicked a switch on one of his phone screens and said something into it which she didn't catch. He looked down into the screen for a moment, then up at her as though he had just validated something.

  "It's not one of our regular organized clubs, that is, organized and controlled by the deme. Very private and restricted. Probably a chance for some of the boys to get together periodically and get a bit boozed up, away from their wives. Fellow named Holly Owyler seems to be president, or whatever they call him."

  "Owyler!"

  "Yeah, that's right. Why?" He frowned at her. "Listen, is something up?"

  She looked confused. "No, no I guess not. I was simply curious. Forget about it, Mr. Hardin. Thanks." She turned to leave.

  He looked after her thoughtfully for a long moment. After awhile he began to gnaw his under lip. Finally, and hesitantly, he flicked a switch and said, "Give me the I.D. Number of Holly Owyler and his apartment number as well.'*

  Sid Cusack was sitting in his comfort chair, staring unseeingiy and unhappily at the far wall of the room when the identity screen on the door hummed. He jerked and his eyes went to it.

  The face there was the toothy one of Marty Cantine.

  Sid Cusack hesitated for a long agonized moment. He could simply ignore it. The visitor had no way of knowing that Sid was at home. He could ignore it and Cantine could only go away.

  But it wasn't that. He couldn't avoid the other indefinitely. He activated the door and came to his feet, forcing a smile to his face. He didn't realize it but the smile was on the sickly side.

  Cantine came in, followed by another gambling club member. The name vaguely came back to Sid Cusack. Ned Haines, the one whose big weakness was roulette and who liked the game so well that he usually took the stick as a volunteer. He was evidently one of the club's most avid members since he was always present at the meetings. Sid hadn't run into him much since Sid Cusack was strictly a stud poker man.

  Sid said, "Come on in, gentlemen. Could I dial you a drink?'*

  They shook hands. Both sets of eyes went around the apartment. The eyebrows of Ned Haines went up slightly. Cusack got the impression that the other had never seen an apartment this austere.

  "Too early, Sid," Marty Cantine said. "We'll make it brief. Came down for a quick spot of business. Sorry to intrude on you."

 

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