Insight Editions · No. 197
Solar Lottery
Philip K. Dick
In a 2203 interplanetary federation, a dismissed biochemist becomes entangled in a lottery-based transfer of power, political assassination, and a mission to a distant planet.
A study guide to Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
Solar Lottery was Philip K. Dick's first published novel, an Ace Double of May 1955 (details and the British variant in the Ch1 box). In 2203 nine planets are ruled from Batavia by a Quizmaster, chosen when the bottle, a machine driven by subatomic randomness, twitches to one of six billion power cards. Any new Quizmaster may be killed by an assassin picked at a public Challenge Convention. Everyone else plays Minimax, sworn by fealty oaths to the five industrial Hills or to a person, or sinks among the unks, the unclassified.
- The oath (Ch1-4). Ted Benteley, a sacked biochemist, swears a personal oath to Quizmaster Reese Verrick just as Verrick quacks and the bottle raises Leon Cartwright, old repairman and president of the crackpot Preston Society, who sends a freighter of misfits toward the legendary Flame Disc.
- The assassin (Ch4-8). Verrick posts a million gold dollars and backs Keith Pellig, a synthetic body run by 24 minds switched at random so the telepathic teep Corps cannot read its next move. Benteley wakes up inside it.
- The hunt (Ch9-13). A Voice claiming to be John Preston guides the freighter; Pellig breaks the teep rings at Batavia; on the Moon Wakeman proves the switch is rigged by Herb Moore and dies. Benteley finds the bomb, kills Moore's body and flees to Cartwright.
- The law (Ch14-16). Benteley swears a positional oath to Cartwright; Judge Waring rules that Verrick broke the oath first. Verrick kills Eleanor Stevens, swaps power cards for the office and is shot dead by Cartwright.
- The reveal (Ch17). Cartwright had biased the bottle for years and sold Benteley the next winning card; Moore blows himself up; the emigrants land and find Preston as a taped image in a buoy.
Dick alternates Benteley, a moralist who wants an ideal to serve, with Cartwright, a tired man who has quietly built a better game, and cuts away to the freighter for the Preston plot. The prose is fast pulp with odd flashes: ads "like bright shiny sewer-bugs," a man reading his own face from inside an assassin, a telepath writing in lunar dust. Two machines claim to be random or prophetic, the bottle and Pellig's switch, and both turn out to have an owner's hand on them.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Verrick Quacked | Benteley swears to Verrick as he falls |
| 2 | The Preston Society | Cartwright launches the ship; is told he is One |
| 3 | A Million Gold Dollars | Corps odds, Moore's file, the bounty |
| 4 | Dinner at Farben Hill | The Davises, the Convention, Pellig named |
| 5 | The Party at Farben | Minimax debate; Benteley put on Pellig |
| 6 | Who Am I? | Benteley wakes in Pellig's body |
| 7 | Heisenberg's Particle | Twenty-four minds, random switching |
| 8 | Loyalty to Flesh | Eleanor's need; Benteley's crumbling oath |
| 9 | The Voice Beyond Pluto | White fire; Preston's voice-print |
| 10 | Bait but No Quarry | Pellig on the liner; Cartwright to Luna |
| 11 | Three Stations Down | Crypt raided; teep rings burn out |
| 12 | Not Random | Moore flies Pellig to the Moon |
| 13 | Letters in the Dust | Wakeman dies; Moore's body killed |
| 14 | A Positional Oath | Rotten oaths; a two-dollar p-card |
| 15 | Coffee with the Enemy | Verrick at the resort; a judge called |
| 16 | The Swap | Ruling, Eleanor killed, Verrick shot |
| 17 | To Keep Moving On | Bottle rigged; Preston a recording |
6 billion power cards in the lottery (Ch1).
59 and 11 Quizmasters the Corps has guarded and saved; two weeks the average reign (Ch3).
$1,000,000 in gold, Verrick's bounty (Ch3).
24 minds behind Pellig (Ch7).
Nine twitches Cartwright stacked; $5 paid and $2 charged for Benteley's card (Ch14, Ch17).
Verrick Quacked
About this text. Solar Lottery was Dick's first published novel: Ace Double D-103, May 1955, 35 cents, bound back to back with Leigh Brackett's The Big Jump [ISFDB]. Dick's own title was Quizmaster Take All; Ace's publisher A. A. Wyn chose the new one from a list Donald Wollheim gave him [philipdick.com]. The British edition, World of Chance (Rich & Cowan, 1956), was set from an earlier draft and differs considerably [ISFDB; PKDS Newsletter 21, 1989]. The omnibus prints 17 numbered, untitled chapters; titles here are editorial.
There had been harbingers. Early in May 2203 the newsmachines report a flight of white crows over Sweden, fires that wreck half the Oiseau-Lyre Hill, small round stones falling near the work camps on Mars, and at Batavia, capital of the nine-planet Federation, a two-headed Jersey calf. Directorate fortune tellers are booked weeks ahead. "But one man's harbinger is another man's event." Oiseau-Lyre answers its fires by dissolving the oaths of fifty percent of its classified staff.
The power card
Ted Benteley spots his dismissal notice, tears it to pieces and is glad: for thirteen years he has tried "every legal stratagem" to break his fealty oath.
- The card. At noon the Hill hands back his power card, coded at birth: "his one chance out of six billion in the great lottery" of being twitched by the bottle to the number One position. He is thirty-three.
- The dash. By 2:30 he has dissolved his minor fealties, by 4:00 sold his assets at "a high percentage loss," and by nightfall he is flying first class to the Indonesian Empire.
- The cram. In a cheap room overlooking the Directorate he scans library tapes on biochemistry, since applications for positional-fealty oaths to the Quizmaster "were processed only once."
Five days of cigarettes end with a call to a bed girl agency, and the blonde Lori carries him through one more day. Verrick hires on Minimax: oaths seem to go out "on a random basis," and Benteley can find no pattern. He buys a second good luck charm, drops a dime in a phenolbarb dispenser and takes a robot taxi past ramp hawkers selling "methods" to beat the game. Nobody buys: "anybody with a genuine system of prediction would be using it, not selling it." Lori catches him in the lounge and hangs a third charm on him, unworried by the teep Corps of telepaths: "A bed girl has nothing to conceal."
| Term | What it means in 2203 |
|---|---|
| The bottle | The "socialized instrument of chance" that picks the Quizmaster |
| Twitch, quack | A random power shift; to be "bottled to One" is to win, to "quack" is to fall |
| Power card | Everyone's lottery ticket, coded at birth |
| Fealty oath | Positional (to the post) or personal (to the man); serf and protector |
| Classification | Skill rank won by Quiz, such as 8-8 biochemist; "unks" have none |
| Hills | The industrial combines: Oiseau-Lyre, Farben, Soong and others |
| Teeps | The Directorate's telepathic Corps |
| Minimax | The "M-Game": risk nothing, outlast the other players |
Wakeman and Eleanor
Benteley wants a class 8-8 post, not another Hill: "The Hills are corrupt. The whole system's decaying. It's up for sale to the highest bidder." His work there went "Down the rat hole!" and the Hill slogan, SERVICE IS GOOD AND BETTER SERVICE IS BEST, is "a laugh."
- Wakeman's warning. Verrick carries no charms; twitched to One when already class 6-3, "Luck leaks out of his pores." But luck "comes in streaks," and "the high and mighty always fall." Swear to Verrick and "You'll be stuck to him, as one of his permanent serfs."
- The catch. The oath is to Verrick in person, not to the post. Eleanor, who has touched him for luck "many times," swears Benteley on over a flesh-colored plastic bust of Reese Verrick.
- The aside. Wakeman has a warning about Leon Cartwright of "a crackpot splinter organization"; Eleanor, his niece, calls her uncle Peter "up for sale, like his Hills" and vows "I'll never leave Verrick."
Halfway through the oath Reese Verrick walks in with his personal staff: huge, a "gray, weathered face," iron-streaked hair. Eleanor takes Benteley's p-card ("There it went, once again"). Verrick crushes his hand, "The last crumbs, for awhile. The rest goes to Cartwright, the Prestonite," and leads the party to the Farben Hill, where his lock "was to me personally." Outside the newsmachines shriek: "Verrick quacked! ... Prestonite bottled to One!" at nine-thirty Batavia time. "And Benteley had sworn an oath to him."
An oath at the worst moment. Benteley leaves a corrupt Hill to serve the idea of the Directorate and becomes the personal serf of the man the dice just threw down. In a world run by chance his careful plan fails, and the one thing he chose freely, his oath, is what binds him.
The Preston Society
Leon Cartwright, "perhaps sixty," tall, mild-eyed, drives an '82 Chevrolet full of mailing-tapes, a loaded Hopper popper under the seat, through streets that are "relics of the last century, like himself and his car." "The unks, the unclassified, remained."
How the world got here
Dick stops for a history lesson. Once production was solved, consumption became the problem; by 1980 troops burned the surplus every Saturday, "the cars and toasters and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes that nobody could buy." The Quizzes let people win what they could not buy, and the prizes turned from goods into power and prestige.
The collapse went so deep that "people lost faith in natural law itself"; "the very concept of cause and effect died out." Its creed is Minimax, "a kind of Stoic withdrawal": the player "risked nothing, gained nothing... and wasn't overwhelmed," outlasting the others. Dick credits von Neumann and Morgenstern and has it used in the Second World War, Korea "and in the Final War." "That was why Leon Cartwright, electronics repairman and human being with a conscience, had become a Prestonite."
The ship
At the Preston Society, a narrow wooden building beside a laundry, the mail brings bills and a five dollar bill in an old woman's shaky hand; the take is thirty dollars. With his niece Rita O'Neill he slips through a false slot under John Preston's fly-specked photograph into a hidden room crowded with emigrants.
- Who goes. Bill Konklin and Mary Uzich, a young couple; Jereti; the pilot, Captain Groves, a "stern-faced" Black spacer; labourers, a jet stoker, optical workers, a bed girl, a nurse, a cook, a carpenter.
- Why. "These were people with skill in their hands... not their heads." The system ranks them failures.
- The send-off. Preston "knew there'd be a ship heading out past the colony planets"; men "would seek new frontiers... and freedom." "Keep tight hold of your charms and let Groves do the steering."
To Rita he is bleak: "Assassins have killed every unk the bottle ever twitched," and "I broke the rules by just wanting to play."
Major Shaeffer
Jets land on the roof; green-uniformed guards fan out behind Major Shaeffer of the teep Corps. Cartwright lays out his papers and bares the identity marks seared into his forearm. There was "a power shift this morning, a little after nine." Shaeffer assumes a penniless unk sold his power card on the black market, as classifieds always manage to buy them up. Cartwright puts his card on the table. "You knew this was coming." "That two-headed calf." The Corps came to him before telling Verrick only because Peter Wakeman "made a big thing of it," and it has caught thoughts of "a ship." Cartwright: "Some creditors, perhaps."
Outside, by Preston's crypt, his "dark, ill-formed body" lies in a "yellowed fly-specked plasti-cube" that nobody visits. Half a mile off, the believers climb into a battered GM ore freighter, bound for the Flame Disc, Preston's "mythical tenth planet."
Dick's Minimax. Von Neumann proved the minimax theorem alone in 1928; the book with Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, came in 1944 [Springer; Wikipedia]. He became an AEC commissioner on 15 March 1955 [DOE AEC history]. The theorem does not counsel withdrawal: in a two-player zero-sum game the safest play is often a mixed, randomised strategy, so the bottle is truer to the theory than Dick's "Stoic" gloss. The burnings also have a past: in 1933 the AAA had 10 million acres of cotton ploughed under and bought 6.2 million pigs [USDA ERS].
Minimax as a design rule. It is the logic of adversarial search in game-playing AI and of worst-case planning such as bank stress tests. Dick shows the failure mode: a system that only minimises its worst loss stops aiming at anything.
The unk who knew. The new ruler kept his power card unsold, knew the twitch was coming, and has his real plan already on the launcher.
A Million Gold Dollars
On the intercon rocket over house-boat cities strung "from Hawaii to Ceylon," the tv runs Verrick's ten years and a sketch of John Preston: "the tiny frail man creeping from the Information Libraries to the observatories," losing his classification, dying in obscurity, leaving "half-crazed, half-prophetic books." Cartwright now commands the Corps, army, warfleet and police and the whole apparatus of "classification, Quizzes, lotteries, and training schools." Against him stand "the five Hills," the industrial frame of the system.
- Verrick's plan. "By August he would have eliminated the random twitch and the whole M-Game structure." He has gone to Farben, "where he's strongest."
- The Challenge. One sanctioned assassin at a time. An amateur with a grudge loses his own p-card, is barred from office, and the bottle must be "stepped ahead one twitch."
- The Corps' limits. "We're not spies or secret agents. We merely guard your life."
- The ship. "The ship is going all the way out. We're not setting up another squatters' colony." "Everything we have is there."
160 years the Corps' age; 59 Quizmasters guarded, 11 saved from the Challenge.
Two weeks the average reign. Ten years Verrick; thirteen old McRae, from '78, with 300+ Challengers stopped.
24 hours to convene the first Challenge; a million gold dollars Verrick's bounty.
The rexeroid room
Eleanor's desk is empty. She came to the Corps at seventeen, served only Verrick, switched her positional oath to a personal one, and followed him out, so by law she "loses her supralobe": the operation on her temples in Chapter 1. She is the mistress of Herb Moore. Verrick gutted the old office, "a sort of Arabian erotic house," sent the bed girls to the Martian work-camps, and built a chamber walled in twenty feet of rexeroid, bomb-proof with its own air and food, an arsenal in the closet. The builders went "off to the camps, like Pharaoh and his tombs." A hidden passage behind the desk: "Ostensibly, it leads out. Realistically, it leads in." Shaeffer will seed it with gas capsules.
Peter Wakeman, dapper, thin-haired, shot glass in hand, the man who swung the Corps from Verrick, waves off thanks: "it had nothing to do with you." He knows Preston as "the odd-ball astronomer" whose planet the telescopes never found and who "died in his ship." The teeps scan Cartwright: "You're oddly phased for this society. The M-game places a great emphasis on the Aristotelian Golden Mean." Everything rides on the ship: "Outhouse or palace."
Herb Moore
Herb Moore, handsome, blond, early thirties, runs the Farben research labs. Wakeman reads his strategy: make Cartwright feel "a sort of janitor sitting in the boss' chair." Moore praises Verrick ("fully rational") and recites the file on the man before him.
| Moore's file | What it leaves out | |
|---|---|---|
| Origins | Born 5 October 2140 outside the Imperial Hill; charity schooling | Hands, not symbols: welding, electronics, printing |
| Patents | Circuit improvements rejected as "trivial" | They were "incorporated in the bottle itself, a year later" |
| Classification | Failed 5,000+ times; gave up at 49 | He services the bottle at Geneva |
| Society | Joined at 50; "your mania" | Six years at meetings first |
| Plans | Shrines, tracts, "endless armadas" | One old ore-carrier, already gone |
Moore's precedent is Robin Pitt, Quizmaster number thirty-four, nineteen, homosexual and "a psychotic," killed after one week gathering wild flowers and writing sonnets ("Poetry," Cartwright corrects; he was thirteen then). The Challenge, Moore says, protects from "fools and madmen": "Nobody can plan to be a dictator: it comes and goes according to subatomic random particles." Then the blow: "Verrick has put up a million gold dollars to the one who gets you." The Convention will meet at the Westinghouse Hill, "plenty of rooms at low rates." Cartwright breaks: "He's right; I have no place here." Wakeman: "That's why it's such a good strategy. We have a good strategy, too."
Two slips. Cartwright thinks "I'm sixty-three," but born in October 2140 he is 62 in May 2203. Shaeffer's Pharaoh is legend: the Valley of the Kings tomb builders lived for generations in a paid village at Deir el-Medina and in Year 29 of Ramesses III went on strike over late rations [Museo Egizio, Turin Strike Papyrus].
The repairman inside the machine. Moore's sneer hides the clue: Cartwright's rejected circuits run inside the bottle, and he has serviced it for years. The system calls him a failure because it measures symbols, not hands.
Dinner at Farben Hill
The Davis house is bright and warm: Al, shoes off, watches the ads; Laura cooks. They never eat protine, a mutant algae from Middle East culture tanks that now grows over the Great Lakes and in Laura's wash basin: "Protine is for the unks." Tonight it is real beef, spring potatoes, green peas, white rolls and real coffee, because Al jumped a whole class by beating the Government Quiz, studying with Laura every night. Sam Oster, "that rabble-rouser" with a big following among the unks, made a whole programme of it.
- The screen. "Ads were the highest art-form"; the s-Channel turns news into swirling colour and sound for pleasure, the literal 1-Channel is what "all the unks watch."
- The view. Through a transparent wall the cars of Berlin pour into the Farben cone "like incandescent moths into the chimney of a cosmic lamp."
- The past. Benteley's partner Julie is a work-camp official on Jupiter, apart six months; he and Laura lived together for less than a month, years ago.
Serfs
Al has been in fealty to Verrick three or four years: "Who wouldn't be satisfied?" Benteley: "Verrick tricked me!" He fled the Hills only to land "where it's dirtiest." Al answers with a creed: "There's a natural selection and evolution. Those who can't survive fall by the way." Benteley's reply drops a fact: "Verrick fired our research labs." The "harbinger" fires at Oiseau-Lyre were arson by the man who was buying up the Hills.
The news runs on under dinner:
- Purge. Cartwright has dismissed two hundred Directorate staff as "b.s.r.", "Bad security risk."
- Convention. Already "hundreds of thousands of applications" at Westinghouse; Verrick "has agreed to handle the multiplying technical details."
- Judge Waring. About a hundred, long white beard, still on the Board, ruling the Convention "like Jehovah in the old Christian myths." Laura remembers a stuttering Quizmaster quacked and "that black-haired assassin who made such a wonderful Quizmaster": the killer can inherit the post.
- Odds. Seventy-thirty on the first assassin, sixty-forty on the second; "speed rather than form will count high."
Laura urges Benteley to apply and recalls girlhood: "I hated being a girl because then I couldn't be an assassin when I grew up." Unks are spoiling the pink and green housing; "why don't they sign up for work-camps?" Al eats a date, a fruit so natural it puzzles him: "The infinite diversity of God's creations." Laura, shocked: "They might think you were a Christian."
"Reese Verrick will be back in the number One spot inside a week. His money picks the assassin. The assassin is under fealty to him."
Al Davis
Benteley will move his things himself: "The hell with Verrick." He snaps the set off ("I'm tired of hearing that goddamn racket"), stands at the glass, then tells Al what he came for: "Something beyond people grabbing for power, struggling to get to the top of the heap over each other's dead bodies." The ads are "like bright shiny sewer-bugs." Laura wants the Convention back; he switches it on and leaves. Behind him the set screams "By popular acclamation... by the wishes of a planet! The assassin is... Keith Pellig!"
The 1950s under the paint. Protine echoes the algae-food hopes of Dick's day: the Carnegie Institution's Algal Culture from Laboratory to Pilot Plant (1953, ed. J. S. Burlew) reported a 1951 Arthur D. Little pilot plant that grew nearly 100 pounds of dry Chlorella [Carnegie Publication 600]. The Quizzes and prize shows echo radio and tv give-away programmes such as Stop the Music; the FCC tried to bar them as lotteries and lost in the Supreme Court on 5 April 1954 [FCC v. ABC, 347 U.S. 284].
Comfort is the trap. Al and Laura are decent, well fed and untroubled by murder as sport. Benteley's walkout is his first refusal inside Verrick's world, and so far it costs him only a dinner.
The Party at Farben
Eleanor's car lifts over Farben Hill in the chill night. "Verrick sent for you an hour ago." Inside, Reese Verrick fumbles angrily with something until Herb Moore fixes it: "You have no manual dexterity." The chamber is half church, half "medieval bawdy house": wood panels, stone fireplace, Medieval Saxon cups. Verrick is slightly drunk and still the mind that misses nothing. This is a celebration of the first Convention that chose an assassin Verrick "has had him on tap"; he plans "one assassin" only: "There's no point in sending out an endless stream."
Near two a.m. a MacMillan robot serves methane gale, a Callisto berry liquor from Verrick's special work-camp. Then Keith Pellig appears: straw-yellow hair, gray-green suit, blank face, "colorless, silent." Eleanor: "He's cute" and, gripping Benteley's arm, "He gives me the creeps." She lifts her crimson hair to show the two dead circles above her ears: her teep ability is gone by law. Born in San Francisco nineteen years ago, she is of the line of Earl and Verna Phillips, the only telepath ancestors after a Soviet missile hit Livermore in the Final War; the whole Corps is related and she was trained for it as destiny.
A music robot throws random harmonics. The men argue.
| Verrick | Moore | |
|---|---|---|
| Origin of the M-game | Invented by WWII mathematicians; the system is artificial | Discovered: society is a strategy game like poker |
| Chance vs strategy | The bottle elevates "an ass, a crackpot" at random | Minimax cracks strategy into chance so statistics work |
| Teeps | Charms and harbingers are superstition; he plays skill | Teeps fulfill Minimax's pessimistic expectation |
| Pellig | Keep him secret; do not announce on tv | "Pellig is unbeatable"; essence of Minimax; tell everyone |
Moore: if you act randomly, "even you don't know what you're going to do." Verrick shows his bare chest, no charms, and his thumb: "I go by rule of thumb." When Moore says he would announce Pellig on tv, Verrick shuts him up. Benteley butts in as an 8-8; Moore blanches: "You're someone Oiseau-Lyre tossed out." Verrick forces him onto the project: "Benteley's working with you from now on." Hosts leave. Eleanor, bitter: "Quite a party, wasn't it?"
Keith Pellig (first sight). Straw-yellow hair, nondescript features, silent; the Convention's chosen assassin, already circulating so "everybody" can see him.
Eleanor Stevens. Nineteen, ex-teep, dead circles above the ears; left the Corps rather than use her gift against Verrick.
Origin myth, not history. No Soviet missile hit the Livermore lab in any Final War: the lab opened in 1952 as a U.S. weapons site [LLNL history]. Earl and Verna Phillips and a telepath bloodline from radiation are Dick's invention. Keep the fiction; do not "correct" it in the plot.
One assassin, already owned. The Convention's "choice" is a man Verrick had ready; Moore wants the secret public, Verrick wants silence, and Benteley is shoved onto the project that builds it.
Who Am I?
Benteley's head aches in the disheveled chamber. He wants to leave; Herb Moore blocks the exit with Pellig, calling him "the greatest discovery since the wheel." Pellig is bleached, odorless, "an empty cipher"; the handshake is cool and moist, without strength. Drunk on methane gale, Benteley thrusts a glass at him: eat, drink, and be merry; tomorrow someone else dies. He taunts Pellig as a professional killer of a "harmless crackpot" who never did anything to him. Moore bristles. Verrick ends the party: "You'll be contacted when you're needed."
Benteley calls after him: why not murder Cartwright yourself and cut out the middle-man? Verrick laughs and goes to bed. Eleanor pulls Benteley aside: "Everything's going to pieces." Moore shows Pellig off; Verrick still thinks he has teeps. She invites Benteley to bed or home; he has no home. In the corridor he hears voices, crashes into something, and hits Moore, who calls him a "third-rate derelict." Locked room: Eleanor undresses; they have sex.
Later, cold dawn. Figures sprawled in an orgy's aftermath: Eleanor, Al and Laura Davis, others. Then he sees his own face. He flees the corridors. A full-length mirror shows an "insect-thing": waxen hair, vapid mouth, colorless eyes. He screams; the image vanishes. Lighter than his own body, he flies "like a ghost" through walls until he hits a fireplace and flutters down. In a lit room Verrick works over tapes. Benteley's thin insect-voice: "Who am I?" Verrick, irritated: "You're Keith Pellig"; ready "in less than two hours."
"You're Keith Pellig"
Reese Verrick
"You're the assassin picked by the Convention. You have to be ready to go to work in less than two hours."
Reese Verrick
The mirror. Benteley's own face on a sleeping body, then Pellig's shell in the glass: the book's first hard break of identity. The empty medium has swallowed the man who swore the oath.
The serf wakes as the weapon. Benteley came to learn the strategy; by dawn he is the strategy, and does not yet know what that means.
Heisenberg's Particle
Eleanor: this is not Pellig; Moore is paying Benteley back for the fight. A lab doctor blacks him out. Overheard: Reese "doesn't really understand what Pellig is"; Moore took MacMillan's robot papers and needs Verrick's money. Evening, 8:30: Benteley wakes clear. Eleanor: next time, "You, and twenty-three other bright young men." He tries to leave. Moore: he discovered what Pellig is; Verrick will not free him.
Benteley's guess: synthetic vehicle, slam minds in, incinerate after. Moore: three at once made chaos; empty Pellig is "vegetable," twilight sleep; the party operator was a lab bureaucrat. Months of crew training; most crack from claustrophobia; "a couple dozen" can stand it; Al Davis is one (placid); ranks bought on the black market; minds run successive. Legal: one assassin, Convention-chosen; "there won't be more than one of him." Eleanor tried once: too shocking for women. Flying: lighter body, or a drug cocktail.
At dinner Pellig eats veal, another tech inside. Verrick worries: Cartwright kept his p-card, bought "at least half a dozen" last month, held a Preston Society meeting the day of the twitch: maybe a dope-sheet on the bottle.
Teeps lock an assassin in multiple rings; plimp boards still lose (eighty vs one). DeFafla once won via Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at random. Pellig: twenty-four minds in Farben cubes, switched at random, each with a full strategy. Moore: "Pellig is Heisenberg's random particle." Path known; velocity unknown.
Randomised operators against perfect observers. Twenty-four minds switched so telepaths cannot lock a strategy matches rotating operators, multi-agent control, and zero-trust against an adversarial watcher.
Names Dick borrows. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (1927) is a 1950s metaphor here, not physics: path known, velocity unknown. MacMillan robots are Dick's invention. Gibbon's history is real; DeFafla is not.
One body, twenty-four strategies. The Convention's single assassin is a legal shell; the weapon is randomised succession of minds teeps cannot predict.
Loyalty to Flesh
Eleanor's new rooms in the classified quarters of Farben Hill; she is not living with Moore. After the Corps she moved through serial relationships (Moore, a research tech, someone on the planning board). Cut off from family, she fears being alone yet hates the Corps as a "collective organism" where you cannot really love or hate. She asks Benteley to live with her.
He looks out at the Hill. He had wanted the Directorate as something better than the Hills; she calls it an abstraction: "It's people who are real, not institutions." He answers that it stands above any man. She: only flesh is left to grab. He: "And I hate fathers." Then the sick-man rant: games, assassination as entertainment, "Loyalty we swear away to plastic busts."
| Loyalty to people | Loyalty to ideals | |
|---|---|---|
| Eleanor | Protector, mistress, warm body; Verrick as safety | Corps and Directorate are prying collectives |
| Benteley | Serf/protector oath still binds him in practice | Directorate as something larger than any man |
| Moore | None: loyal to theories and to himself | Pellig as chess, not fealty |
| Verrick | Broke the moral code by swearing Benteley knowing he would quack | Beats the M-game with Pellig rather than play square |
Loyalty is crumbling while they stand there. Moore loyal only to theories; that is why she left him. Verrick already broke faith by the oath scene in Chapter 1. Eleanor: the Challenge was set years ago; "It'll work, won't it?" of Pellig. Benteley agrees to go along: he swore on; he will not break his oath, even if the structure is rotten. "I don't want to help it along."
Sex. She clutches her charms for luck, asks if she is enough, if the rooms are all right. He is listless: "You're fine." "Sure. You're swell." Then harsh: as she said, "tomorrow should be a big day."
"I'd like to pull this whole thing down with a big loud crash. But I don't have to; it's collapsing by itself."
Ted Benteley
Julie, then Eleanor. Last lover before this: class 7-9 Julie, small and pretty, months ago. Eleanor is nineteen, charms between her breasts, needing to be enough. His answers are empty; the oath holds him more than desire does.
He stays for the oath he no longer trusts. Benteley will operate Pellig not from belief in Verrick or in Eleanor, but because breaking his word would finish the collapse he already sees.
The Voice Beyond Pluto
Captain Groves calls at breakfast from forty astronomical units, roughly halfway, since the Flame Disc should orbit at twice Pluto's distance, "assuming that it existed." He now steers by Preston's material. About ten emigrants want off before the last buoys; Cartwright lets them go and calls his own post "a kind of nightmare I can't wake up from."
Past the marker
A rusty needle stirs at the final limit of charted space. Bill Konklin recalls that the expedition of '89 found nothing and rages at "a madman's mystic guess": out here come only "visionaries and crackpots." In their scrubbed infirmary cell Mary Uzich asks "Which are we?", finds it "awfully nice" anyway and owns up to a love charm. As he bends to kiss her she winks out. White fire fills the ship and a voice blooms inside him: this is "the middle space," "Fragile Earthmen" should go home, and "Flame Disc is our world." Groves knows the Voices of Preston's book and signals Batavia as the voice weighs "whether to destroy you" or "to lead you to safety on Flame Disc."
Preston's voice
Verrick and Moore watch through their bug on the ship. Verrick, shaking, thinks "We've made contact with another race." Within the hour Geneva matches the voice to Preston's own recording of his Unicorn. Preston died 150 years ago, Verrick protests. Moore: "John Preston is still alive."
Physics and planets. At 40 AU a signal needs about 5.5 hours each way (one AU is 499 light-seconds [NASA JPL]); Dick ignores the lag. Preston echoes Lowell's Planet X, the search that found Pluto on 18 February 1930 [Lowell Observatory]; the Planet Nine proposed by Batygin and Brown in 2016 is still unseen [Astronomical Journal].
The prophecy answers back. Preston was a dusty crypt; now his voice offers to guide the freighter, and the question of who is fooling whom moves out into the void.
Bait but No Quarry
Over the Pacific under a midsummer sun, a straw-haired young man talks to the girl beside him. Margaret Lloyd, not over eighteen, is bound for a job interview at the Soong Hill and has been class 11-76 since last month because she lives with "a very important person," Walter, who will meet her at Batavia. He claims class 56-3 and gives his name as Keith Pellig. He greets the ticket robot as "brother" and talks oddly: "Sometimes I seem a stranger to myself," and, from "an old manuscript," "It's a great life, if you don't weaken." He offers two drinks, "Assuming I still know who you are."
Wakeman's plan
At breakfast Wakeman confirms "It really is Preston," and Rita hears the Voices, Preston "there to guide us." Wakeman cares more that someone else asked for the same analysis minutes earlier; the Library knows who, "But they're not telling." Cartwright waves it off. In a few days he has become "a hunched, aged, and very frightened man": "A man's coming here to kill me, publicly and in broad daylight, with the whole-hearted approval of the system." Wakeman sees he no longer cares about the ship that brought him here.
- The move. Verrick will try the rexeroid chamber first, so the Corps will take Cartwright to Luna, to a retreat "registered as a conventional psycho-health resort," where a man in a Farley suit "literally stands out."
- The lie. Does Verrick know of it? "We're positive," says Wakeman, "a coldblooded lie," because Cartwright "needs certitude." Privately he thinks Verrick knows, and his Hills hold land on three sides of the resort.
- The trap. "In half an hour Batavia will be a cul-de-sac for Pellig. Bait but no quarry." Pellig, Shaeffer infers, boarded a liner at Bremen.
Inside the machine
In the lounge Pellig turns sullen and Margaret wilts. Inside the body Ted Benteley orders bourbon, lost in thought, when the mechanism switches and he is back in a cube at Farben, gripping the metal ring that is "a combination support and focus," watching a miniature lounge on his screen. A red button lights "three rows down and four to the right," and the new operator spills the bourbon. "That's your friend Al Davis," says Herb Moore, who will not say which button is his.
- Warning. Your own light flashes "a split-second" before the switch; look away and you may be "standing under a palm tree facing fully armed teeps."
- Risk. The operator is pulled back before a body dies: "One out of twenty-four, times the forty percent chance of losing the body at all," about 1 in 60.
- The spare. Benteley charges that the lab "is already constructing a second android." Moore: "I'll be hooked in exactly like you."
Alone, Benteley pictures the net: a clerk, a bed girl, a child, an old veteran under a blanket, weapons disguised as "a lipstick, a fluff of candy, a mirror." Pellig is a moving pin on the schematic; no pin marks the teeps.
| Pellig's flight | Cartwright's flight | |
|---|---|---|
| Craft | Ordinary intercon liner from Bremen | Experimental C-plus, robot-operated |
| Cover | Small talk, a false class 56-3 | A fake psycho-health resort on Luna |
| Aboard | Benteley, then Al Davis, by remote | Cartwright, Rita, Wakeman, Corpsmen |
| Weak spot | The teep net at the field | No positive defence; Verrick land on three sides |
The C-plus
Cartwright packs, dreading being "caught out in space." Rita, a lucky cat's foot between her breasts, explodes: "Stop doing what you're doing! It's not like you!" Wakeman feels the old man's urge to lock himself in Verrick's inner office, "to claw a way back into the womb," then a "thin icy column of hate" from Rita. Cartwright explains: she always saw him in charge, "and she blames you for it." Wakeman learns "that he didn't understand people as well as he thought."
At noon the C-plus, "the first off the assembly-line," rises from the roof; Rita half relents. Wakeman knows that on Luna "We're giving up all positive defense," but takes the chance, and the drive blacks them out. In that moment the liner opens and Pellig steps down, "blinking and peering excitedly" at the Directorate "and the waiting network of teeps."
Clock trouble. The liner flies under a midsummer sun, yet the twitch came in early May and the text speaks of "the few days since Cartwright had become Quizmaster." Dick's calendar slips.
Both sides bet on misdirection. The Corps hides the quarry and lies to its own client; Verrick hides the hunter inside a body any of two dozen men may be wearing. The man who planned the ship has stopped planning.
Three Stations Down
At 5:30 a.m. a construction rocket lands "in the center of what had once been London," and guards ring the Preston Society building. Verrick, in greatcoat and boots, watches workmen tear down the monument and lift out the yellowed crypt. They strip the "old barn" of pamphlets, tapes and printing paper and find the false wall, the meeting chamber and an escape passage to a public garage; the Society's other clubs met in flats, "two or three members apiece." Verrick studies the fly-specked photograph: "a tiny withered leaf of a creature," arthritic hand raised, eyes "harsh, blazing," "like an ancient prophet."
The dummy
At Farben Moore cuts the brittle shield himself ("Powder, hell") and yanks an arm. It comes away: the body is a plastic dummy, hollow, on metal ribs, a metal dome under the wig. "The dummy was made first and then photographed." Eleanor suggests Preston used the MacMillan papers as Moore did and built a synthetic of himself. Moore insists the voice was Preston's own, since "No two voices have the same tape-pattern." Pulling off the fingers one by one, he admits "My synthetic... will live a year" and "I can't do it." He hurries off to plug into Pellig.
The net
At the field Al Davis drives the body, glad of the crowd's "ocean of sound" to hide his mind. Margaret waves at Walter, a bored, thin-faced desk man in his forties, and Davis sees the recognition in his face: Walter is a teep and has read the thumb-gun and the whole plan. Davis vaults a railing, crosses streets and traps himself in a clothing store. A silent whoosh slams him back into his ring at Farben, shaking but safe.
On the screen the next operator burns out through the window. The fat clerk freezes, convulses and collapses. Pellig ducks into a dark theater, a bad move since teeps need no light, burns through a lavatory wall, and then the red button twitches again. A calm new operator takes a robot taxi toward the golden Directorate tower. "Incredibly, the teep network had failed to stop it."
In Shaeffer's network it is panic. Walter Remington had "the whole syndrome" and passed the assassin to Allison in the store, where "At the second station he ceased to exist." There was no shield: "The entire personality was cut off instantly." A Corpswoman picks him up at the theater, and her mind screams; the overload smashes mind after mind down the web, "Three in a row." On ipvic to Luna Shaeffer admits "we're beaten." A last teep watches Pellig leave the cab and dissolves into "infantile mutterings": "He's here and he isn't here."
Eleanor explains it to Verrick. A teep holds a mind by its "unique taste," not by sight; if the person you were talking to became "a totally different person," the contact would snap. Verrick tosses a foil list of flights out of Batavia onto his cluttered desk. Pellig, hands in pockets, climbs the marble stairs toward Cartwright's suite.
"Reese, I think you're driving them insane."
Eleanor Stevens
The fat clerk. Dick never says who he is. He collapses the instant the operator changes, while Allison is holding the assassin in that very store, so the clerk looks like the second station, struck down by the break (an inference, not stated).
Surveillance that assumes one self. The Corps tracks a mind, not a body. Pellig breaks it by changing the mind under the face, and the watchers pay: each break burns out the teep who was holding on.
Not Random
Peter Wakeman "had made a mistake." He drinks from the bottle and goes up to the dome, where Corpsmen swim in "spring-scented air," to tell Rita O'Neill: "They can't stop him." Pellig will find Cartwright, "But it's only a question of time." Wakeman will study the scans of Herb Moore, since "Verrick could never work anything out this clever." Rita says he should have let her uncle run things: "You treated him like a child until he gave up and believed it himself." To his vow, "Some way, somehow," she adds "Between drinks, maybe," and leaves.
Storming the Directorate
Alarms ring: "The assassin is in the building!" Panicky guards fire into the crowd, leaving "a blackened, burned-out patch of charred bodies." Green-clad troops land on the roof and MacMillan guns roll down corridors. To Eleanor the non-teeps mean "the Corps has been knocked out."
- The lounge. A new operator slips past a closing MacMillan gun into the reception lounge, where Benteley, at his screen, knows the room he waited in to see Verrick.
- The tank. The thumb-gun splashes off the rexeroid; one of Moore's staff burns round it, a blast opens the concealed passage, and Shaeffer's gas capsules pop uselessly: "The body did not breathe."
- Empty. Verrick bounces like a child, "He's in," then shrieks, "They got the son of a bitch out!" Troops close in on the decoy.
Moore reads the flight list Verrick tossed aside: "He's on Luna," taken "in their C-plus ship." He throws a switch and his own body sags. The body burns through a wall and shoots straight up at the afternoon moon. Benteley now understands his ghostly flight of Chapter 6: the body is a miniature ship from Moore's reactor labs, airless, "capable of interplanetary flight."
The death's-head
Wakeman guesses "a fractured personality artificially segmented," each part with its own strategy, and his Corpsmen cry "A brilliant contribution!" He orders them into suits to "kill him on the spot," takes a last drink of Verrick's Scotch, and walks onto a Moon that is "a death's-head." Pellig lands "like a meteor" three miles from the balloon. Wakeman runs, falls, patches a hissing suit and loses his popper.
Then he teeps the assassin: "That's not Pellig!... That's Herb Moore!" Moore, unaware, has dropped every barrier. On top lies Minimax and randomness, and "It was a lie." Below are jealousy of Benteley, "a ceaseless terror of death" and ambition. "The twitch of the Pellig machinery wasn't random." Moore can switch anyone in or out, himself included.
Pellig burns the Corpsman to ash, and Wakeman feels the dead man's mind scatter "into random particles of free energy." Alone, he heaves a boulder in the weak gravity; Pellig springs clear in a blast of panic, raises the thumb-gun, and Moore is gone. The face melts and reforms, and a new mind calls "Peter Wakeman!" It is familiar, wary and hostile: Ted Benteley.
| Pellig as sold | Pellig as built | |
|---|---|---|
| Switching | Random, no pattern | Moore has "complete control" |
| Operators | Two dozen equal minds | Moore hooks in at will |
| Body | A walking shell | An airless ship |
| Motive | Verrick's comeback | Moore's jealousy, fear, ambition |
A random switch with an owner. Where fairness rests on chance, as in audit sampling or key generation, whoever builds the randomiser should not hold its override. Everyone tested Pellig's output; nobody asked who could set it. That is the case for independent validation.
Dick's dead Moon. In 1955 crater origin was still argued; Ralph Baldwin's The Face of the Moon (1949) made the impact case, which Apollo confirmed [Meteoritics oral history; NASA SP-330]. Dick's lost lunar "life" has no basis: samples held no organisms and quarantine ended after Apollo 14 (1971) [NASA NTRS].
The randomiser had a hand on it. Pellig beat the Corps because nobody could predict the next mind, yet one man could choose it. At the first boulder Moore panics and is gone from the body; the gun passes to Benteley.
Letters in the Dust
Beyond the known system the voice tells Groves, "Don't lose contact with my own ship." "You're John Preston," Groves says. It promises to guide the landing on the Disc, then fades. A military black-out has closed the lines to Batavia, and Groves guesses: "Somehow, the teep Corps must have failed."
Letters in the dust
Wakeman shouts that the switch is rigged, but "Without atmosphere his voice died in his helmet." He can read Benteley's "deep aversion and doubt" and cannot answer. So the telepath scratches letters in the dust "like some primitive," and Benteley replies in thought.
The dust dialogue. "MOORE TRICKED YOU. NOT RANDOM." Then "BOMB." Benteley suspects a trick, knowing Moore and the operators are watching. "PELLIG SET TO DETONATE WHEN CLOSE TO CARTWRIGHT." Does Verrick know? "YES." Eleanor Stevens? "YES." "Prove it!" "EXAMINE YOUR BODY. LOCATE POWER LEADS. TRACE CIRCUIT TO BOMB."
Benteley tears open the synthetic chest and traces the wiring. "The last clinging mist of loyalty to Verrick was rapidly fading." "I'm taking the body back. All the way to Farben." A quarter mile up, Moore twitches the selector; Benteley, back in his chair, watches the body incinerate Wakeman, who stands "oddly calm and dignified."
Farben to Narvik
Benteley shorts the relays on his sealed door, takes a guard's Popper and bursts into the lab, where a second synthetic is being built and Moore lies limp in his ring. "Benteley killed the limp, unprotesting body of Herb Moore." The Pellig body thrashes, "a crazed thing dancing a furious rhythm of death," then shoots off for deep space, Moore stuck inside.
"All nine planets were now Hill-operated death traps," so Benteley risks Luna, where he may be shot "as one of Verrick's agents" or hailed as "Cartwright's savior." Hill guards hold Bremen, so his robot cab heads for the military repair field at Narvik.
A closed book
On Luna Cartwright hears "Peter Wakeman is dead," fondles his old car popper, wants dinner and says a determined killer "sooner or later he shows up." Rita: "I think I liked you better when you were afraid." He sits facing the door. Through it comes Shaeffer with "Ted Benteley... A serf of Reese Verrick's."
Benteley: "He broke his oath to me." He killed Moore? "Not exactly... I killed his body." Shaeffer reads Cartwright: "Moore will undoubtedly find Preston." Verrick tapped the ship's ipvic beam; they can follow the body's visual beam by leaning on Harry Tate. To Rita: "He released me by betraying me." Cartwright: "My first assassin is a closed book."
The wrong sleeping drug. Cartwright's "sodium pentathol" is Pentothal (thiopental), an ultra-short-acting anaesthetic first given in 1934; patients wake within minutes. By 1955 it was famous as a supposed truth serum [Wikipedia; ACS].
The rigger caught in his rig. Moore's switch let him put anyone in or out of the body. Killing the body he left behind makes him the one mind that cannot switch out. Benteley turns on evidence he traced himself.
A Positional Oath
The body came "within less than three miles"; two more and Verrick "would now dominate the known system." Its trigger was a proximity mechanism tuned to Cartwright's brain pattern, its bomb "a regulation H-grenade from the last war," legal as a one-hand weapon. The half-built second synthetic dies with Moore.
Rotten oaths
| Oath to Verrick | Oath to Cartwright | |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Personal: to the man | Positional: to the Quizmaster |
| P-card | Taken, never returned | Given for two dollars, kept |
| Broken by | A bomb: no protector may send a classified serf to death | Not tested |
Cartwright unwraps a dozen power cards, examines one "intently" and passes it over: "everybody ought to have an even chance in the great game." "This feels familiar," says Benteley, and recites the oath himself.
Told he should have killed Verrick too, Benteley walks out: Moore was "a calculating intellect, not a man," but he won't touch Verrick. He wants to be "an Al Davis in some world where I can obey the laws." Shaeffer yells "Benteley, run!", Eleanor stumbles in to warn him, and Reese Verrick arrives.
Thoreau at the table. Shaeffer's line echoes Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government (1849): under a government that imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison [Digital Thoreau; Norton]. The link is editorial.
Coffee with the Enemy
Verrick may simply walk in: "He's not an assassin; he's an ordinary citizen." Verrick looks "haggard, but calm," takes black coffee and reports that Pellig was "already thirty-nine astronomical units out" when he left Farben. Moore "was always a lone wolf"; the project "was all his idea." Moore never worried about oaths, which is "the fashion among the bright young men." Eleanor slips into the shadows.
"I can't very well kill Benteley here at the table. I'll wait until later on." Verrick props a Hopper popper against his water glass and napkin ring, then remembers he can do it "along the way, somewhere." Courtesy and threat in one breath.
Cartwright: Benteley "took a positional oath." Verrick: "He broke his oath to me; that negates his freedom to swear on." Shaeffer: "You betrayed him." "I'm not conscious of any betrayal. I performed the duties and obligations due from my end." Shaeffer: "not even remotely true." He pockets the gun, asks for Judge Waring and settles in: "This looks like just the place."
Morning at the psych resort
Felix Waring is "a grouchy, hunched-over old gnome" with a long white beard, the system's highest jurist. He cackles at Verrick: "That Pellig of yours was a fizzle." Ipvic crews wire the main game room. "No purely intellectual games were permitted"; at a psych resort the games are therapeutic.
Rita bowls at robot ducks and sinks into a low-grav web. Benteley sneers of Cartwright, "He'll probably live to be an old man." She snaps: "You can't really be loyal to anybody, can you?"
"You knew about the bomb." Eleanor sizes up Rita ("She must be thirty, at least") and calls Waring "that stupid old goat." When Verrick passes the door she cries "He knows" and begs Benteley to kill him. He refuses: "I'm finished with that." She admits it: "I knew. But I meant everything I said to you." Then: "Answer me!"
Waring thumps his book on the table, and the session begins.
Everyone keeps the forms. A man who meant to blow up his rival sits down to coffee with him, and both agree to let a judge decide. The quarrel is no longer about the bomb. It is about who broke the oath first.
The Swap
The hearing
Five people sit in the room; the ipvic men and the Hill brass are barred. Verrick's statement is a self-portrait as benefactor: Benteley came as "a derelict classified without a position," and Verrick gave him an apartment, a post and "a woman to sleep with." Then Benteley "was too cowardly to go on, so he broke his oath." The bomb goes unmentioned.
Asked about Benteley's job, Verrick says it was "substantially the same work as the other class 8-8 people." "That's a lie," says Shaeffer. Benteley would have taken the project "to its final stage." Its final stage? Cartwright: "Benteley's death." Verrick nods. Pressed about Moore, he withdraws the material on Moore's death. Cartwright puts the rule: "A protector isn't supposed to send a classified serf to involuntary death." A classified serf must give written agreement.
Waring's one point. If the protector broke his side first, the serf "was legally within his rights to drop his work and leave." If not, the serf "is a felon and liable to the death penalty," and even while breaking his oath he "remains his protector's property." The case turns on order of breach, not on the bomb as such.
Evening in the side-bar
Eleanor sits down, "Just a name. Not really a person, any more," and does Verrick's sums the way Moore used to.
| Move | Gain | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Verrick kills Benteley | +50 | -100: shot in retribution |
| Verrick kills Cartwright | +40 | -50: loses his power card |
| Eleanor's version | +40 | -100 to Cartwright, for being killed |
"Both ways he loses," until Eleanor adds Cartwright's own loss. Then she grinds the aluminium candle into Rita's face and brings a scarf-pin up at her eyes.
"Take me back!" Benteley finds Eleanor pleading with Verrick: "I'm bringing you this, aren't I?" Benteley says she is loyal; Verrick: "She isn't worth anything." He admits the idea works, "But I had already worked it out," and throws her through a supply-sphincter onto the lunar surface, where her body bursts. Shaeffer: "It's legal... She wasn't classified."
Vacuum does not burst a body. NASA's Goddard scientists say a person exposed to vacuum would not explode; consciousness lasts about 10 to 15 seconds and death follows within a couple of minutes [NASA Imagine the Universe; Aerospaceweb].
Now I'm Quizmaster
Verrick returns calm, his face gray, "as if he were recovering his strength" after release. He lays out his popper: "Stalemate on all sides." Killing Cartwright costs him his p-card, "But I have my three Hills." Shaeffer: "this is a bluff on his part. The girl took him the idea." The offer: "Your card for mine." Refuse, Shaeffer reads, and Verrick will kill him.
"You can trade," Waring rules. "People buy and sell them all the time." Cartwright lays down his card. Verrick: "Now I'm Quizmaster." Cartwright's small, antiquated popper shoots him "directly in the heart." Is it legal? "Absolutely," though Cartwright loses "that packet of cards." He tosses them over: "I'm an old man and I'm tired."
IN PRACTICE: count the other side's payoffs. Moore's sums score only Verrick's gains and losses with arbitrary weights, so every move looks like a loss. Eleanor's change is adding the counterparty's cost, which turns a dead end into leverage. APPLY IT: when a model of a negotiation, a workout or an AI agent's objective shows no good move, check whose payoffs were left out and where the weights came from.
The swap was the trap. Verrick wins the office by a legal sale and dies, just as legally, the moment he holds it. Benteley still carries the card Cartwright sold him.
To Keep Moving On
Everything but the power card
In the infirmary Rita's face is a "pale transparent halo of bandage." "Verrick's dead," Benteley says. Cartwright: "I came out with everything but my power card." With no Quizmaster the bottle must be twitched ahead, "a day or so." He ticks a black notebook. Only Moore is left: the ipvic monitor says he has entered Preston's ship.
Benteley wants a crew sent after Moore. The next Quizmaster will agree, says Cartwright, "since you're the next Quizmaster." The card Benteley got in Ch14 cost Cartwright five dollars from its first owner; he sold it at a loss to make it "a legal, binding transaction. Not a loan but a regular sale."
A bias on the bottle
Benteley assumes a system of prediction. "I have no formula." He studied bottle construction, Heisenberg and randomness as a young man, became a repairman, and in his late thirties worked "down in the basic controls" at Geneva: "The Uncertainty Principle is on the level." So he did "the next best thing": "I threw a bias on it."
- The scheme. The cards he could buy are set up to "constitute the next nine twitches." He became Quizmaster on his own card, a flaw "that gives me away, if anybody stops long enough to analyze it." He knew weeks in advance; now the bottle "doesn't operate randomly at all."
- The defence. "Was that ethical?" "We're betting against the house, and the house always wins." When the rules are fixed, "you draw up new rules and play by them." The M-game and the classification system are "stacked against us." He wants not equal pots but equal odds, "a game in which everybody stood a chance of winning," hence the Preston Society. He will retire and print leaflets on electronic maintenance.
Shaeffer knew; "The Corps will respect you." Benteley laughs: "I'm probably the first person who was ever under oath to himself." Cartwright finds a word for it, conscience, and Shaeffer confirms it from "the history tapes." His final report: the synthetic spoke to Preston, examined "the machinery that maintains Preston," then Moore was seen "deliberately opening the synthetic's chest and shorting the bomb-leads." Why is unknown.
Flame Disc
The freighter comes down on a planet of "pale, cold fire." Groves admits a thermonuclear explosion three hours earlier, about ten thousand miles off. They will live aboard until the subsurface domes are built. The ship ploughs into ice-hard rock and the power dies. "The planet was a single plain of green light."
The sphere. Groves cuts into a featureless metal sphere. "I," the old man said, "am John Preston." Deaf, half-blind and paralysed, he talks over every question. Konklin finds no drive jets: "this is a buoy." After testing it with "Mary had a little lamb," he sees it: "Vid and aud tapes synchronized to form a replica. He's been dead a hundred and fifty years." There were probably thousands, laid "To attract ships and lead them to the Disc."
Mary is disappointed. Groves: "It's only the physical part of John Preston that's dead." Then she calls it "sort of a miracle," and they listen.
"...the need to grow and advance... To push aside routine and repetition, to break out of mindless monotony and thrust forward. To keep moving on..."
The Preston replica, last lines of the novel
Loose ends. In Ch13 the voice answered Groves ("I am very old"); the buoy cannot hear at all, and Dick does not reconcile the two. The "ship" Moore destroyed was probably another buoy (editorial inference), and his reason for detonating is never given. The rig itself is told, not shown, in one conversation.
Both oracles were machines. The bottle that ruled the system was rigged by its repairman, and the prophet who led the believers was a taped image in a buoy. Yet the fixed game hands power to a man sworn only to himself, and the dead voice brings the misfits to a real planet.
Main Points
- Every "random" machine has an owner. Moore holds the override on Pellig's switch (Ch12-13); Cartwright has biased the bottle for years and "stacked years ahead" (Ch17). The game is fair only to people who never see the controls.
- Rigging is shown as the honest answer to a rigged game. Cartwright's case: "the house always wins," so draw up rules giving everyone the same odds and live by them (Ch17). Dick lets this pass with only Benteley's mild "Was that ethical?"
- Loyalty is the real subject. Benteley moves from a Hill fealty he hates, to a personal oath to Verrick, to a positional oath to Cartwright, and ends as "protector and serf at the same time" (Ch1, Ch14, Ch17).
- Law decides what violence means. Murder of a Quizmaster is a sanctioned sport; the hearing turns on order of breach, not the bomb (Ch16). Verrick may kill Eleanor because "She wasn't classified," and is killed, just as legally, the moment he holds office.
- Randomness beats surveillance until someone cheats. Pellig's 24 switched minds burn out the teep rings because no telepath can follow a strategy that does not exist yet (Ch7, Ch11). Wakeman's dust letters, NOT RANDOM, end that advantage (Ch13).
- The prophet was a recording, and it still worked. Preston is a taped image in a buoy, one of perhaps thousands, yet it leads the misfits to a real planet; Groves: the physical part "isn't really very important" (Ch17).
- Minimax is a philosophy of retreat. Verrick and Moore argue it as risking nothing and outlasting the others (Ch2, Ch5); Benteley's disgust with the Hills is disgust with a society that only minimises losses.
- Classification is caste. Skill rank won by Quiz decides who eats real beef and who eats protine (Ch4); the unks go to work camps, and Laura Davis dreamed of being an assassin.
- Waste makes the system. Ch2's history runs from burned surpluses to Quizzes that let people win what they could not buy; Benteley sees his work go "Down the rat hole!" (Ch1).
- Bodies are interchangeable vehicles. Benteley wakes in Pellig asking "Who am I?" (Ch6); Moore is caught in the body he built (Ch13); the dummy in Preston's crypt and the image in the buoy repeat the joke.
- Telepathy is the state's eye. The Corps reads minds by their "unique taste"; it can protect a Quizmaster only by watching everyone (Ch1, Ch11), and it collapses when identity stops staying put.
- Women pay the highest price. Eleanor loses her teep gift by law, belongs to no one once Verrick drops her, and dies on the lunar surface; Rita is burned in the face (Ch16). Both are judged by their usefulness to men.
- Charms and omens fill the space chance leaves. Benteley's three charms, Eleanor's array, Rita's cat's foot, the white crows and the two-headed calf; Verrick, who carries none, is the man whose luck "leaks out of his pores" (Ch1).
- Courtesy and murder sit at the same table. Verrick props a popper by his water glass over coffee (Ch15); the hearing is held in a psych resort where only therapeutic games are allowed.
- Arithmetic hides whose loss counts. Moore's sums weigh only Verrick's side; Eleanor wins by adding Cartwright's cost (Ch16).
- Old craft beats new genius. Cartwright's circuits sit inside the bottle (Ch2); his antique popper kills Verrick (Ch16); his retirement plan is leaflets on electronic maintenance (Ch17).
- The open frontier is the way out. The tenth planet answers a closed, rigged system with distance; Preston's last words are "To keep moving on" (Ch17).
| Framework | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| The bottle | Power by subatomic chance; everyone holds a card | Reading the politics (Ch1-3) |
| Minimax / M-game | Risk nothing, outlast the rest | Verrick vs Moore (Ch2, Ch5) |
| Personal vs positional oath | Loyalty to a man or to an office | Benteley's arc (Ch1, Ch14) |
| Order of breach | Whoever broke the oath first loses the claim | The hearing (Ch16) |
| Random switching | No fixed mind, so nothing to read | Pellig vs the teeps (Ch7, Ch11) |
| The owned override | Randomness with a controller is no randomness | Moore's switch, the bottle (Ch12, Ch17) |
| Arbitrary-weight sums | Score moves by assigned values | Eleanor's equations (Ch16) |
| New rules, played early | Live by fairer rules before they exist | Cartwright's defence (Ch17) |
The book as a whole. This is a first novel written fast for Ace, cut from about 63,000 to 60,000 words in December 1954 [philipdick.com]. The plot depends on explanation after the fact: the bottle's rig and the buoys arrive in one last chapter, and the Ch13 voice that answered Groves is never squared with a buoy that cannot hear. Dick ignores signal lag (40 AU is about 5.5 hours one way), dates the action to early May yet gives Ch10 a midsummer sun, and makes Cartwright both 62 and "sixty-three." His Minimax, as withdrawal, is not von Neumann's theorem, which is about mixed, randomised strategies (Ch2). Women exist mostly as secretaries, lovers and casualties. Cartwright's rigging is presented as wisdom, and nobody asks who checks the man who controls the bottle.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Ted Benteley | Biochemist, class 8-8 | Swears twice; becomes Quizmaster |
| Reese Verrick | Quizmaster for ten years | Quacked; backs Pellig; shot |
| Leon Cartwright | Repairman, Prestonite | New Quizmaster; rigged the bottle |
| Eleanor Stevens | Verrick's secretary, ex-teep | Benteley's lover; killed by Verrick |
| Herb Moore | Farben's top biochemist | Builds Pellig; owns the switch |
| Keith Pellig | Synthetic body | The assassin with 24 minds |
| Peter Wakeman | Head of the teep Corps | Exposes the rig; killed on Luna |
| Major Shaeffer | Corps officer | Reads minds at the hearing |
| Rita O'Neill | Cartwright's niece | Hears Preston; burned by Eleanor |
| Felix Waring | Highest jurist | Rules for Benteley; allows the swap |
| Al and Laura Davis | Verrick's serfs in Berlin | The content life Benteley envies |
| Captain Groves | Pilot of the freighter | Hears the Voice; lands on the Disc |
| Bill Konklin | Emigrant | Sees that Preston is a buoy |
| Mary Uzich | Konklin's partner | Finds the end "sort of a miracle" |
| Jereti | Emigrant | Wants to land first |
| John Preston | Dead astronomer | Author of Flame Disc; the Voice |
| Margaret Lloyd | Girl on the liner | Pellig flirts with her; a teep shadows her |
| Walter Remington | Teep | First station of the ring |
About this book
Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick, 1955. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- Every "random" machine has an owner. Moore holds the override on Pellig's switch (Ch12-13); Cartwright has biased the bottle for years and "stacked years ahead" (Ch17). The game is fair only to people who never see the controls.
- Rigging is shown as the honest answer to a rigged game. Cartwright's case: "the house always wins," so draw up rules giving everyone the same odds and live by them (Ch17). Dick lets this pass with only Benteley's mild "Was that ethical?"
- Loyalty is the real subject. Benteley moves from a Hill fealty he hates, to a personal oath to Verrick, to a positional oath to Cartwright, and ends as "protector and serf at the same time" (Ch1, Ch14, Ch17).
- Law decides what violence means. Murder of a Quizmaster is a sanctioned sport; the hearing turns on order of breach, not the bomb (Ch16). Verrick may kill Eleanor because "She wasn't classified," and is killed, just as legally, the moment he holds office.
- Randomness beats surveillance until someone cheats. Pellig's 24 switched minds burn out the teep rings because no telepath can follow a strategy that does not exist yet (Ch7, Ch11). Wakeman's dust letters, NOT RANDOM, end that advantage (Ch13).
- The prophet was a recording, and it still worked. Preston is a taped image in a buoy, one of perhaps thousands, yet it leads the misfits to a real planet; Groves: the physical part "isn't really very important" (Ch17).