So Stile had won after all! Yet he wished he could have done it by solving the riddle. The west pole—where could it be? He might never know, and that was an aggravation. Stile had been late in the Round Three roster, and now was early in the Round Four roster, as the Game Computer shifted things about to ensure fairness. Hence he had less than a day to wait. He spent much of that time sleeping, recovering from his excursion with the tanks and resting for possibly grueling forthcoming Games. He had been lucky so far; he could readily have lost the Football Game and the Riddle Game, and there was always the spectre of CHANCE to wash him out randomly. Most duffer players were fascinated by CHANCE; it was the great equalizer. So he hoped he would encounter a reasonably experienced player, one who preferred to fight it out honestly. One who figured he had a chance to win by skill or a fortuitous event in a skill contest, like the referee’s miscall in the Football Game. But a true skill contest could be arduous, exhausting both participants so that the winner was at a disadvantage for the next Game.
If Stile’s employer discovered anything in the course of her investigation into the matter of the forged message-address, she did not confide it to him. That was the way of Citizens. They often treated serfs with superficial courtesy, but no followthrough. The Citizen he had encountered in Round One, the Rifleman, was an example; there had been no further communication from him. There was no such thing, in Proton law and custom, as a binding commitment by Citizen to serf. Everything went the other way. Stile remained troubled by the continuing campaign against him by his anonymous enemy. At first he had thought this person had sent Sheen and then lasered his knees as a warning to get out of horseracing. But he had gotten out—and the threat continued. There had been a Citizen who was after him, but that had been effectively neutralized, and Sheen’s self-willed robot friends had verified that he was not the present offender. They had not been able to trace the source of the substituted address, because it had not been handled through any-computer circuits; it had been a “mechanical” act. But they had watched that particular Citizen, and knew that he was relatively innocent.
Someone wanted Stile dead—in Proton and in Phaze. Perhaps it was the same person—a frame-traveler. There were a number of people who crossed the curtain regularly, as Stile himself did. Maybe that same one had killed Stile’s other self, the Blue Adept, and tried for Stile with less success. Probably another Adept; no lesser person could have done it. But who? The maker of golems—or the maker of amulets? Stile was becoming most eager to know. If he beat the long odds and won the Tourney, he would have at his disposal the resources of a Citizen. Then he would be in a position to find out—and to take remedial action. That was the real imperative of his present drive. He could not wash out of the Tourney and simply return to Phaze to court the Lady Blue—not when a curtain-crossing Adept was laying constant deathtraps for him. He had life-and-death riddles to solve first!
His Round Four opponent was a woman his own age: Hella, first Rung on the Age 35 ladder. Stile had qualified for the Tourney by being fifth on the male 35 ladder, but he was actually the top player of his age. Many top players remained deliberately low on their Game ladders, so as to avoid the annual Tourney draft of the top five. Hella, however, really was the top female player, whose tenure ended this year; she had been eager to enter the Tourney. Nevertheless, she was not in Stile’s class. He could out-perform her in most of the physical Games and match her in the mental ones. If he got the numbers he would have no gallantry at all. He would choose PHYSICAL. If he had the letters he would have to go for TOOL, to put it into the boardgames block, where he retained the advantage over her.
Hella was a fit, statuesque woman, taller and heavier than Stile. She had half-length dark-blonde hair, slightly curly, and lips a little too thin. She looked like what she was: a healthy, cynical, hard-driving woman, nevertheless possessed of a not inconsiderable sex appeal. Larger men found her quite attractive, and she was said to be proficient at private games, the kind that men and women played off record. Stile had played her often, in random Games, but had never socialized with her. Most women did not get romantic about men who were smaller than themselves, and she was no exception. Stile himself had always been diffident about women, and remained so. Sheen was special, and not really a woman. The Lady Blue was special too—and Stile really found himself unable to forward his suit with her. She was his other self’s widow...
“I would rather not have come up against you,” Hella told him in the waiting room. “I’m already half out; a duffer caught me in CHANCE.”
