Facts Relating to the Arrest of Dr. Kalugin

“Whist, yes, what a grand idea!” he babbled. “Haven’t played in ages! Be a bit of a change, won’t it? Shall we, ah … shall we wager?” He must have seen foolish-looking Courier as his chance to repair his losses.

“I’m not certain my friend has much money—” I began, but Courier smiled and reached into his coat.

“I’ve got lots of cash! See?” He emptied his purse on the table. Out jingled a collection of Coins of the World; gold pieces from Chile, American dollars, French francs, British half-crowns, Russian rubles and a mongrel mass of small change.

“Looks fine to me.” The junior manager shuffled the deck with slightly shaky hands. “Stiva, will you partner me?” His assistant clerk pulled up another chair and Courier sat down too, and the junior manager dealt the cards.

I transmitted the rules of Whist to Courier, who nodded with a shrewd expression and sorted quickly through his hand. We lost the first hand; thereafter he watched the cards keenly, and within a few more hands we began to win, and then win every time.

I looked up in horror as I realized what he was doing. You’ve never used your cyborg abilities to win at cards, and neither would I, of course: but it didn’t seem to have occurred to Courier that he’d draw attention to himself by memorizing the positions of the cards, and using his knowledge to win. The chalked figures on the table grew higher and higher as we won more sums in scrip from the junior manager, who sat in a veritable pool of sweat. The room grew unpleasantly silent; Iakov Babin, who had been leaning by the fire regaling a small crowd with bloodcurdling tales of an Indian massacre, left off talking and stared across the room at us with an ironical grin. I met his eyes and he nodded as if to say, What did I tell you? Dybbuk !

Courier, for God’s sake, what are you doing? Let the mortals win some of the time!

He looked up at me in puzzlement. But I thought the object of the game was to win.

Now, it will undoubtedly have dawned on you by this time that there was something wrong with Courier. It had even dawned on me. We aren’t made stupid, and yet he was behaving like a perfect ass! And then I had what I thought was a moment of blinding revelation: he was a courier because that was the only job he was fit for, running from one place to another with a bag of papers! I looked across at his innocent face and all the old horror stories of early experiments came into my mind, before the Company perfected us, before they had managed to give us immortal minds to compare with our immortal bodies. Was he one such Golem? Yes, you shiver: imagine how I felt, sitting across the table from him!

“Babin, I declare you’ve got the Evil Eye!” I tittered. “You’ve broken our winning streak.” And I put down just the wrong card. There was a gasp of relief from the junior manager. Courier started and stared. “But—” he protested.

Enough! There’ll be trouble here if you win any more!

Oh. Okay.

“I’m done.” I yawned prodigiously. “Gracious, the air’s blue in here! Time I went to bed. You’d better turn in too, young man; you’ll have a long journey ahead of you once we’ve got those papers signed.”

“Here, now, that’s hardly fair,” the assistant clerk complained. “We sat out our run of bad luck; you should do the same!”

“He played damned well for somebody who didn’t know much about cards,” muttered the junior manager. As I sought for the right words to defuse the situation, Courier was scooping up his little bag of coins unconcernedly.

“I’ll just take these,” he said. “You can have the scrip stuff back; I can’t use it anyway.” Everyone looked at him, dumfounded.

“Yes, capital idea, all debts canceled!” I cried in false heartiness. “Let’s end our evening on a friendly note, shall we?”

The junior manager stared as that sank in and then smiled desperately. “All right! All debts canceled, fellows, what do you say?” And as I exited the room, hastily pushing Courier ahead of me, I could hear Babin’s roar of denial over the timid chorus of agreement.

“What on Earth possessed you to do that?” I exploded, when we were a safe distance down the corridor. “It’s all very well for you to be careless of your own cover, but you’re endangering mine! I’m obliged to live with those men for the next few years, and what will they think of me?”

His face was so stupidly blank I felt guilty at once. If he were indeed some indestructible simpleton, anger was wasted on him; and I was already thinking poor fellow, it’s not his fault after all when he opened his mouth to speak.

“Say, have you got my orders yet?”