Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Well, if you apply a certain equation to as many of the points on the plane as you can, apply it over and over again—you gotta have a powerful computer—some of them go flying off to infinity and some stay finite. And if you color the ones that stay finite black, they form the silhouette of a warty fat man. And if you color-code the other points by how quickly they want to go infinite, you find that the fat man is surrounded by all kinds of shapes, boiling off of him, that look like squid tentacles and seahorse-tails and ferns and rib-cages and stuff."

Crane seemed to be about to speak, but Mavranos went on.

"And you don't always need Mandelbrot's equation. The fat man shows up in a lot of other functions on the complex plane, as if the shape of him is a—a role that's just waiting for something to come along and assume it. He's a constant figure, along with other lobed and geometrical shapes that look like … well, case in point tonight, like Hearts and Clubs and Diamonds and Spades, often as not."

Crane squinted at him for several seconds. "And something about … the Wizard of Oz, you said. How'd you learn about all this?"

"It's become a—a hobby of mine, studying weird math."

"And this fat man's name is … Mandelbrot?"

"No, no more than Frankenstein's monster was named Frankenstein. The equation was developed by a guy named Mandelbrot, Benoit Mandelbrot. A Frenchman. He belonged to a group, a club in Paris, called Bourbaki, but he split from them because he began to understand randomness, and it didn't sit well with them. They were real prove-it-by-the-rules boys, and he was finding new rules."

"Bourbaki," said Scott drunkenly. "Ecole Polytechnique and the Bourbaki Club."

Mavranos forced himself to breathe slowly. Mandelbrot had gone to the Ecole Polytechnique. Crane did know something about this, or about something that had to do with this.

"You seem to take it pretty lightly, somebody shooting out your windows," Mavranos said carefully.

" 'When there are gray skies,' " Scott sang, " 'I don't mind the gray skies—you make them blue, Sonny Boy.' "

Mavranos blinked. "Do you have a son?"

"No, but I'm somebody's son."

Mavranos sensed that this was important, so he spoke casually. "Well, yeah, I suppose so. Whose son are you?"

"My foster father said I was a bad King's son."

As indifferently as he could, Mavranos asked, "Is that why you play Poker?"

Scott took a deep breath and then put on a grin in a way Mavranos could imagine someone putting on armor. "I don't play Poker anymore. Actually I went out for a job tonight. I think I'm going to be a rep for … Yoyodyne. They manufacture … stuff, locally. Maybe you've heard of them."

"Yeah," said Mavranos, backing down, "I think I have."

"I'd better be heading for bed," Scott said, elbowing himself up out of the chair. "I've got to meet with them again tomorrow."

"Sure. Susan's been wondering where you've been."

Oddly, this seemed to shake Scott. "I bet," he said finally. "See you mañana."

"Okay, Pogo."

After Scott had gone inside, Mavranos sipped his Coors thoughtfully. He's it, all right, he thought. Scott Crane is definitely my connection to the place where math and statistics and randomness border on magic.

And magic is what I need, he thought, fingering the lump under his ear.

Again Scott Crane dreamed of the game on the lake.

And as always, the dream-game progressed just as the real game had happened in 1969 … until he won the cut, and was raking in the pile of money.

"You're taking the money for the hand," said Ricky Leroy softly. Already tension was filling the big room, like a subsonic tone that Scott could feel in his teeth and his belly.

"Uh … yes."

"You're selling it."

"Scott looked around. Something profound was moving or changing somewhere, but the green table and the other players and the paneled walls looked the same. "I guess you could put it that way."

"And I've bought it. I've assumed it." Leroy held out his right hand.

Scott released a handful of bills and reached across and shook hands. "It's all yours."

And then Scott was outside his own body, floating above the table in the whirling smoke; perhaps he had become the smoke. The scale of everything was changing: the table below him was an enormous green plain, and the other players were giants, expressionless, all trace of humanity left behind in the tininess of comprehensible distances. The walls were gone, Lake Mead was as vast as the night sky, and three of the dam's intake towers were gone; the remaining tower in the water soared away above and seemed to threaten the moon, which in the dream was full and bright.