into space and my primary interest was in extra-terrestrial design. I faced a bright future.

But twenty years ago, when I met Dori, the realization of West o' Mars seemed farther away than it had in boyhood. An architect's draftsman is paid well but not lavishly, and you can imagine what sort of wealth was required to build a place like this, forty million miles from Earth.

My trouble was, I was in a hurry. My weakness was, I knew that the turn of a card or the roll of the dice could double my weekly salary. It could but, of course, as often as not it didn't. Consequently, I might be rich for a day, only to go hungry for a week.

It was during one of the hungry periods in 2060 that I attended a meeting of the Astronaut Club for the sake of my stomach. I was living then in Huntsville, the Alabama spaceport city, and it was for business reasons that I belonged to the Astronaut Club.

The food was fair, the speeches dull. I was little interested in the entertainment that was to follow, but I wanted to finish my cigar and coffee. The entertainment, it turned out, was Dori.

Her father came out of the wings first, a consumptive old man with a shock of unkempt gray hair. In the center of the table he laid a small rubber ball, a coin and a pair of dice.

He bounced the rubber ball. It bounced a few times and subsided, after a couple of helpful Astronauts had prevented it from rolling off the edge of the table. He tossed the coin about a dozen times and rolled the dice about a dozen times, to prove that the falls were at random. All the while, he gave out a tired, monotonous spiel about the laws of chance.

Then Dori came out. She was too thin to be pretty, but there was a childish appeal about her. She had big, dark eyes in a sad little face, and almost colorless hair. She impressed me not at all. What held me then was that something obviously was to be done with dice.

The old man bounced the ball again. Dori stood a little way from the table and did nothing but keep her eyes on the bouncing ball. It bounced. It kept bouncing. It did not slow down. At the top of each arc, something invisible seemed to give it an additional downward push, so that it did not stop. When it drifted toward the edge of the table, something invisible seemed to guide it gently but forcefully back to the center.

The old man tossed the coin. Dori watched it silently 

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