My stomach was acting up again but I was very hopeful.

I gave Snelz the money and the dice and left him practicing. Heller would shortly be headed for Earth!

Jettero Heller sat in my room, idly watching Homeview. Each day there had been three sagging hours between the time he came back from training and the moment the Countess was smuggled up for supper and the night.

Apparently the Countess had to put in some time late in the day to teach her assistants to train and, femalelike, there was some nonsense about bathing and getting dressed before her nightly date.

Heller had glanced over the four-foot pile of old Blito-P3 surveys, more to identify them than get any data out of them. He had smiled to see the lists of revolts and pretenders in that one province of Manco but he had also laid it aside. He was doing just one thing – waiting for the Countess. He glanced at his watch: nearly all of the three hours had yet to run. He sighed, bored.

I sat in a chair over by the wall, pretending to study some entries in my notebooks – actually I was looking at blank pages. Tonight would be different!

A knock on the door. Snelz entered. He took off his cap to indicate it was social. He said to me, "Officer Gris is it all right with you if I talk to Officer Heller for a bit?" It was all rehearsed. "Go ahead, go ahead," I said.

Heller looked up languidly. He pointed to a chair.

Snelz said, sitting down, "Jettero, I need some help. As you know, we play a lot of dice down at Camp Endurance and there are some very sharp fellows there. I once heard in the Fleet, before they cashiered me, that you were really an expert at dice. As a personal favor, could you teach me something about it?" Heller looked at him a bit oddly, I thought. I held my breath. Was this going to work?

But Heller laughed. "I shouldn't think there could be much about dice that a Fleet marine officer didn't know."

"Oh, come along," pleaded Snelz in a very convincing protest. "There's lots to know about it. I've just come into a bit of money and I don't want to be smarted out of it. What I don't understand is probabilities and second bets." In the most popular version of dice then in vogue, there was always a second side bet between the players. The original bet was made and then there was a throw and then a second bet was made based on odds for or against the other player winning. The one who threw would then chant something like, "Ten credits to one you can't beat that." Then the other would throw and if he had beaten the first player's throw, he won both bets.

"Oh?" said Heller. For a bit it looked like he wasn't going to help. Then he shrugged and took a sheet of paper from his kit. He rapidly wrote, from left to right, across the bottom of the page, the numbers 6 to 72. "With six dice, each one with 12 points, the total you can shoot will add up to anything from 6 to 72."

"Yes, yes," said Snelz, pretending great interest.

Heller wrote a series of numbers up the left side of the sheet vertically. "These are the number of combinations of dice that produce the total score. As you can see, it is a high number."

"Interesting," said Snelz, gazing intently, just as if he weren't a past master at it, which he was.

"Now," said Heller, "when we draw a curve, using these two factors, we get a bell curve." And he drew it: it did look like a bell, bulged very high in the middle.

"Fascinating," said Snelz, who must have worked out the same curve a hundred times.

Patiently, Heller drew a vertical line roughly up from the 28 and the 50 at the bottom so they crossed the bell shape. "Now the odds against your making anything below 28 or above 50 are very high. The odds in favor of shooting anything between28 and 50 are pretty good. So on the second bet, you keep that in mind. There's more to this but that's a starter. You sure you don't know all this?"

"Oh, I really appreciate it," said Snelz who probably learned it at the age of five. He turned to me. "Officer Gris, would you mind terribly if Jettero and I had a little game?" He turned to Heller. "I surely would like to try this out. Just for modest stakes, of course."

"You sure?" said Heller. "I don't want to be accused of taking advantage of a beginner."

"No, no, no," said Snelz. "This is all fair and square. Anything you win, you win. Anything I lose, I lose. All right? I just happen to have a set of dice on me." They sat down on either side of the table and Heller took the dice Snelz held out.

"I always like to do something," said Heller. "I don't want to be accused of switching dice during play. So we'll just mark these." He reached for his little tool kit, took out a tiny ink bottle and in the upper corner of the 1 on each die, made a microscopically small dot. "That ink fades after a few hours. It just makes sure we're playing with the same dice all the time. No offense. Just a precaution." I mentally rubbed my hands together. If they played with those same dice the whole game, I was going to wind up a much richer officer. I began to calculate how much I would give Snelz: a hundred credits? Fifty? Even forty-five would be a fortune for an Apparatus officer.

They began with a modest half-credit bet. Snelz threw 20. Heller declined to make a second bet that he could beat it. He threw 51. He won. Ah, well. Good strategy. Heller was to win for a while.

"Let's bet one credit," said Snelz. "I feel lucky." Heller took the dice. Now dice players have a routine all their own, all unnecessary. They take the six dice in their cupped palms; they shake them on the right side of their head; they shake them on the left side of their head; then they tap one set of knuckles or the other on the table and send the dice bouncing onto the board with a sort of shovel motion. And they sing to the dice as they do it. Heller did all this. But he had two wrinkles of his own. He blew onto the palmed dice first and then shook them and he shook them longer and harder than I have seen dice shaken before. His hands sort of blurred in the shake – very, very fast!

Heller threw a 62. Against his own advice, he said, "One credit to a hundred says you can't beat that. I frankly advise you to decline."

"No, I'll take it," said Snelz. He placed the dice carefully in his palm. When he shook them, he didn't permit them to roll about. He banged his knuckles on the table.

I thought, hey, this is early to start winning. The bang on the table, of course, settled the lead pellets into the goo in the hollow. The dice rolled out a 10!

Oh, I thought. Clever boy. He's carrying out the strategy.

"Ouch," said Snelz. "Looks like I better up my stakes to recover my loss. Two hundred credits all right with you for this next bet?" Of course it was really Heller's turn, as he didn't have the first throw, to set the stake for the first bet. But he shrugged, overlooking the irregularity, looking as tolerant as you would look at an amateur who didn't quite know the rules.

Snelz threw. It was a 50. Any dice player can add up the points at a glance if he is expert and I thought Snelz made an error by calling "Fifty!" instantly in a loud voice. I guessed Snelz was too excited to mask his expertise. "Fifty credits to fifty credits says you can't top it." Heller was in the swing of it now. He blew upon the dice. He shook to the right and shook to the left and as he did it, he sang: Money for my honey, Booze for my cruise, Fly them over fifty And don't let this spacer lose.

He threw and cried, "Fifty-five!" after the dice stopped rolling. He picked up the money with an easy sweep.

Snelz said, "You certainly are lucky. I know I am just a beginner at this, but I am afraid I will have to double my bet again. Four hundred credits all right with you?

"Actually," said Heller, "doubling is a Devil's game. I advise against it."