settled it. They must have heard the bell and hadn’t bothered to answer. Obviously it was very secret, what They did. So it stood to reason that it was worth finding out about. It also stood to reason that this park, or garden, where I was, was Their private one, and They must come out and walk in it from time to time. Which meant there had to be a door round on the other wall of the triangular fort, the wall I hadn’t seen.
I went round there, through the bushes. And, sure enough, there was a door, in the middle of that side. A much more easy and approachable-looking door than that front door. It was made of flat glass, with a handle in the glass. I looked carefully, but it seemed dark behind the glass. All I could see were the reflections of the park in it and the reflection of the canal too. Its arches were right above me on that side. But what I didn’t see was my own reflection in that door as I dashed across the gravel. I should have thought about that. But I didn’t. It was probably too late by then anyway.
The door opened on to a sort of humming vagueness. I was inside before I knew it. They both turned round to look at me. Of course I saw what a fool I’d been then. The building was triangular. There was no room for the door to open anywhere except into the room with the machines. I had assumed that it didn’t, because I hadn’t been able to see it through the glass door. There were the machines in front of me now, a triangular patch of them, winking and blinking, and I ought to have been able to see them just as clearly through that door.
An awful lot in that place was vague, including Them. The shadow of the canal was in here too, and the only things I could see clearly were those that happened to come in the slabs of dark shadow where the arches were. In between, it was white sky, with everything confused in it. They were in the sky. You never see Them clearly. All I did see was a huge table standing down at the wide end of the triangular room. There was a sort of flickering going on over it and some huge regular shapes hanging in the air above it. I blinked at those shapes. They were like enormous dice.
So there is a game going on! I thought.
But it was the queerest feeling. It was like having got into a reflection in a shop window. And, at the same time, I had a notion I was really standing outside in the open air, under the canal arches somewhere. I thought at first that it was this feeling that kept me standing there. I thought I was plain confused. It only came to me gradually that I was sort of hanging there, and that I couldn’t move at all.
The one of Them nearest me walked round behind me and shut the door. “Another random factor,” he said. He sounded annoyed. It was the way my mother would say, “Bother! We’ve got mice again.”
And the other one said, “We’d better deal with that before we go on then.” He said it the way my father would answer, “You’d better set traps again, my dear.”
“How?” asked the first one, coming back round me to the machines. “Can we afford a corpse at this stage? I do wish we could do without these randoms.”
“Oh but we can’t,” said the other. “We need them. Besides, the risk adds to the fun. I think we’d better discard this one to the Bounder circuits – but let’s get a read-out first on the effect of a corpse on play.”
“Right you are,” said the first one.
They both leant over the machines. I could see Them through the white sheets of reflected sky, looking at me carefully and then looking down to press another button. It was the way my mother kept looking at the colour of our curtains when she was choosing new wallpaper. After that, They turned their attention to another part of the machine and gazed at it, rather dubiously. Then They went down the room to look at that huge flickering table.
“Hm,” said the first one. “Play is quite delicately poised at the moment, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the second. “If it was on your side, it would help bring your revolution closer, but I can’t afford any urban unrest for a couple of decades or more. I claim unfair hazard. Let’s discard. Agreed?”
The first one came back and stood looking into the machine in the intent way They did. “It would make good sense,” he said, “if we could go back over the family of this discard and scrub all memory of it.”
“Oh no,” said the other, moving up too. “It’s against the rules for a discard. The anchor, you know. The anchor.”
“But we can scrub with a corpse. Why don’t we?”
“Because I’ve already claimed unfair hazard. Come on. Make it a discard.”
“Yes, why not?” said the first one. “It’s not that important. What’s the rule? These days we have to check with the rest in case the Bounder circuits are overloaded, don’t we?”
As I sit here, it’s true! They said all that, talking about me just as if I was a wooden counter or a piece of card in a game. And I floated there and couldn’t do a thing about it. Next thing I knew, They were punching more buttons, round the end of the machines.
And the place opened up.
You know if you go to a barber’s shop with a lot of mirrors, how you can sit looking into one mirror and see through it into the mirror behind you, over and over again, until it goes all blurred with distance? Well, what happened was like that. Over and over again, and all blurred, there were suddenly triangular rooms all round. They were slotted in on both sides, and beyond and behind that, and underneath, down and down. They were piled up on top of us too. I looked, but it made me feel ill, seeing two of Them walking about up there, and others of Them above and beside that, all strolling over where They could see me. They all wore those cloaks, but They weren’t just reflections of the first two. They were all different from one another. That was about all I could tell. It was all so blurry and flickery, and the reflection of the canal arches went striding through the lot, as if that was the only real thing there.
“Your attention for a moment,” said one of Them who was with me. “We are about to make a discard. Can you confirm that there is still room on the Bounds?”
A distant voice said, “Computing.”
A nearer, hollower voice asked, “What’s the reason for the discard?”
The second one of my Them said, “We’ve had an intrusion by a random factor, entailing the usual danger of feedback into the native world here. I’ve claimed unfair hazard against reinsertion as a corpse.”
“That seems adequate,” said the hollow voice.
Almost at once, the distant voice said, “The Bounds have space for four more discards. Repeat, four more only. Is the reason good enough?”
There was a little murmuring. For a moment, I thought I was going to end up as a corpse. I still didn’t know what I was in for, you see. Then the murmur grew – with an air of surprise to it, as if They were wondering what They were being asked for. “Reason sufficient. Sufficient reason,” came rumbling from all round, above and underneath.
“Then I must caution you,” said the hollow voice. “Rule seventy-two thousand now comes into play. The final three discards
