Spaceland Read online

  “We’ll start out with a proof of concept,” continued Jena, her cheeks growing pink again. “Then do some surveys to figure out the best way to productize. And meanwhile we’re getting a buzz going. If we do this right, the venture capitalists will call us instead of us calling them. Maybe a stunt of some kind to whet the public’s interest. Free media exposure. How about a contest to raise the profile? We’ll have Web of course, Web from the start, but if we wanna hook the front porch folks, we’ll need to get direct mail and telemarketing campaigns in place, all ready to go as soon as we can pull the trigger. You’re talking about a serious budget, Momo. Millions. I could work it up.”

  “The prophets and holy men we used in the past had no business models,” said Momo thoughtfully.

  “Joe, a prophet?” said Jena, laughing again.

  “Can I get some respect?” I said. “You’re right, Momo, business is the way to go. And we’re the ones to do it for you. And as for funding, if you don’t make a scene in the casino, Jena and I can win mucho dinero in Tahoe. Nothing like what we’ll need, but at least enough to start. Once we’ve got some seed money, we’ll think of a way to make it grow. Blackjack’s just for openers.”

  “You only have six hundred dollars in your wallet,” said Momo. “That’s a rather small stake for gambling.”

  “It’s enough. If I keep winning it’ll build.”

  “I’ll obtain some additional cash,” said Momo. A proper amount to start with. I see some nearby. Wait.” She disappeared.

  “It’s gotta be Vegas,” said Spazz.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said. I was still mad at Spazz for laughing at me.

  “Vegas is where the high-roller games are. You win more than a hundred grand at Tahoe or Reno, they’ll throw you out and maybe stomp your butt in the parking lot. If we’re talking about winning a million off quality people, it’s gotta be Vegas.” Spazz gave a brisk cough for emphasis.

  “What’s this ‘we,’ Spazz?” I said coldly.

  “Didn’t you say you needed an assistant, man? Hell with that, I’ll be your Chief Technology Officer. Or how about your —apostle. I heard that stuff about prophets. Momo’s tried this before, right?”

  “I don’t know if it was Momo herself. It might have been one of her ancestors. She said her trick for giving me my third eye was a family secret.” I lowered my voice and took Jena aside, hoping Momo wasn’t watching us from somewhere vout there.

  “You’re smart to build up the budget estimate,” I murmured to Jena. “If Momo’s machine works, great—and if it doesn’t, we’ve still helped ourselves to a big chunk of the cash flow. We work this thing, and we get rich either way. You think I should really cut Spazz in?” Jena nodded enthusiastically. I was going to have to keep an eye on those two.

  “Where did Momo go just now?” asked Jena loudly. “Where would she get money?”

  Right about then the stacks of bills started dropping out of the air. Seventeen thousand bucks in all. Momo swelled up into the room and stood there smiling at us.

  “I obtained these from the building across the street,” she said. Meaning Wells Fargo. “They were inside the great metal safe.”

  “Oh my god,” said Jena. “Did anyone see you?”

  “By no means. The building was empty and the vault was locked. I went over it and reached vinn to pull the money out. Nothing more than my fingertips was visible. These flat pieces of paper are very important to you, are they not?” She fixed me with her all-seeing eye. “I can read your lips, Joe Cube. I know of your ignoble wish to amass great wealth.” I started to mumble an apology, but Momo held out a calming hand. “I recognize your qualities, both good and bad. I accept you as you are. But let there be no thought of shirking the Great Work.”

  “And the Great Work would be something relating to the fourth dimension?” said Spazz. “Are you talking about an educational product ? Not much money in that.”

  “I don’t bring the fourth dimension as a theory,” said Momo. “I bring it as a fact. No one who beholds me can doubt.”

  “The point of all this being what?” asked Spazz.

  “That’s right,” put in Jena. “We need a clear mission statement for the business plan.”

  “It is well that you have so practical a turn of mind,” said Momo. “My mission is that you make use of some very remarkable technology.”

  “To do what?” pressed Spazz.

  “The situation is this,” said Momo. “My family can produce a certain class of simple devices that we’d like to see you Spacelanders make use of. Rest assured that the technology is quite out of your normal ken. I’d rather not say more until I’ve decided upon the best application.”

  “We’ll definitely need a sharper message,” said Jena. “Before we go out and pitch.”

  “I’ll tell you soon,” said Momo. “I’m researching a variety of things.”

  “About Vegas,” I put in. “Why should I bother going off to cheat at blackjack, when you can fetch us as much money as we want? Did you think of looking in the safe-deposit boxes?”

  “I will countenance no shirking,” said Momo.

  “I’m not shirking,” I whined. “It just seems inefficient to gamble when you can steal.” That didn’t sound good, so I amended it. “Not that I’m for stealing.”

  “It’ll be fun at the casino,” said Jena. “Like a team-building exercise.”

  “Vegas kicks butt,” added Spazz.

  “It will be interesting to observe how you three comport yourselves,” said Momo. “And it’s not certain that I can keep visiting you. The Empress’s troops—well, never mind about that for now. It is well that you learn how to provide for yourself without me. Give a man a fish, and you feed him once. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” She grew larger again, a body flowing out of her head like hot wax. “Shall I transport you to Las Vegas?”

  We three looked uneasily at each other.

  “I think we’d rather take an airplane,” I said.

  “Let’s do it,” said Spazz. “We’ll drive up to the airport and get the next flight. We’re not gonna need reservations. Nobody’s gonna be booked on any flights today.”

  “Should we bring Tulip, too?” I suggested. I liked Tulip a lot better than I liked Spazz. I kept thinking about how she’d felt when we’d danced together. Her spicy smell, her heavy gold earrings, her oily, kissable skin.

  “Can’t,” said Spazz. “She’s gone to spend a couple of days with her sister in Fremont. Took off this morning. We had a little falling-out over breakfast, sad to say.”

  “What happened?” asked Jena.

  “I told her I’m head over heels in love with you, Jena,” said Spazz in his softest, hoarsest voice. I could hardly believe my ears. And then Spazz was letting loose one of his grating laughs, right in my face. “Just joshin’, dude.”

  The three of us got in my Explorer and swung by our house to get some stuff for the trip. While we were at it, we switched cars ; we drove to the airport in Jena’s shiny new frost green VW Beetle. Jena said it would be easier to park. and she was right. We got a great compact-sized space right by the elevator to the gates.

  4

  Las Vegas

  Jena had brought her deck of cards along, so we played practice hands on the whole flight down, with Jena dealing and Spazz acting like another player. While we were playing, Spazz wrote a little Java simulation on his laptop to figure out precisely how much my subtle vision was going to improve my odds. The tattooed snake on his right forearm writhed as his fingers typed. A few hundred thousand hands scrolled by in cyberspace, Spazz quietly clearing his throat as he watched.

  “In standard play, you win against the dealer forty-six percent of the time,” rasped Spazz. “With subtle vision, you never have to bust, and your win rate goes up to almost sixty percent.” Three-fifths of the hands, just as I’d thought.

  “That’s puny,” said Jena.

  “Well, Joe could look way down in the
deck and save his big bets for the hands he’s sure to win. Do you want to try that, Joe?”

  I doubted it. I’m a businessman, not an engineer. “Sixty percent is fine,” I said dismissively. “It’ll pile up.”

  “Unless a run of bad luck cleans you out early,” said Spazz, touching his ear stud.

  “Are you sure you’ll win, Joe?” asked Jena.

  “Trust me,” I said. “The main thing is that we’re very cool in the casino. I’m scared of those casino guys. Don’t you two be hanging on me.”

  “You need us!” said Jena. “We’re your good luck!” She and Spazz leaned their heads together and laughed. They were getting along really well. This seemed like it could turn out to be fun—Jena knew how to handle a wolf like Spazz.

  The conversation turned to where we should stay. Spazz and me had been in Vegas for COMDEX in November; we’d been booked into the three-thousand-room Vegas Hilton right next to the convention center. I suggested we just go there.

  “Too plastic,” said Jena. “Anyway, this is on our own tab. I know this great funky place called the Hog Heaven. They call it the Hog for short. It’s an old casino on the Strip with the world’s largest motel right behind it.”

  “When were you in Vegas, Jena?” asked Spazz.

  “I was here in ’95,” she said. “I was doing research for a project on Indian Gaming.” I happened to know that she’d done that trip with Buck Sawyer; it had come a week or two after Jena and I had first met, back when we were working together at a CompUSA in Denver. “I’m half Yavapi, you know,” Jena told Spazz.

  “Bitchin’,” he said. “I like Native American stuff. A woman at Acoma sold me a little round pot with a hole in it, and with a tiny figure of someone crawling out of the hole. But she didn’t explain it to me. Did you ever hear any legends about anything like that growing up, Jena?”

  “Jena grew up Norwegian,” I said. “She doesn’t know much about being Native American.”

  “Shut up, Joe, you sound like my stepfather,” said Jena. “And, yes, Spazz, I know exactly what you’re talking about. A lot of the Pueblo tribes believe people came from under the ground. They think the Earth’s hollow.”

  “Seeing in the fourth dimension is kind of like seeing inside of things,” I said, tapping the plane window. I didn’t like the way I kept losing control of the conversation. “When I look down, I can see under the Earth,” I continued. “News flash, guys, it’s not hollow.” But now Jena was watching Spazz draw a picture of the pot he claimed he’d bought.

  It was early evening by the time we got onto the Strip. I rented a Lincoln Navigator SUV, just to compare it with my Explorer. The Navigator was another Ford Motors product, but higher end. It turned out to be a hell of a nice vehicle, if a bit mushy on the turns.

  Jena directed me to the Hog Heaven, up at the north end of the Strip. Once we were inside, it took about fifteen seconds to pay a clerk for a couple of rooms next to each other. Outside the casino’s back door was a maze of asphalt lanes, all lined with pre-fab beige rooms, stacked two high all along the endlessly branching avenues and side alleys of the Hog Heaven motel complex. There might have been a thousand rooms. The clerk gave us detailed instructions on how to drive to our assigned cubicles, but even so it took a couple of tries. Every row of rooms looked alike. Once we’d parked the Navigator and used our bathrooms, we took off on foot for Nero’s Empire.

  What a place. Nero’s was like a city inside, complete with malls and restaurants, even bigger than Caesar’s. It was designed kind of like a fish trap. Once you’d walked in twenty feet past the entrance, you couldn’t see how to find your way back out. The slots were whooping and blinking and there were lights on the ceiling to steer you to the gaming tables. I stopped and watched one of the slots for a minute; I could see its insides. If I’d had more of a mechanical bent of mind, maybe I could have figured out how to tell when it was about to pay off. But blackjack was the sure thing. According to Jena, the casino didn’t have to tell the IRS about winnings at the gaming tables. Jena said no matter how many chips you won, the casino would redeem them for cash and send you on your way.

  I stepped up to the cashier’s cage and bought seventeen of Nero’s one-thousand-dollar chips with the cash that Momo had given us. They were impressive-looking things, shiny and gold, unlike the lowlier denominations, which were plain colors.

  At Jena’s advice, I took a seat at a shoe-dealt blackjack table with a minimum bet of a hundred dollars. At the shoe-dealt tables you didn’t touch your cards at all, so there was less chance of my doing something wrong.

  With the exception of the dealer’s hole card, all cards were dealt face up from the fat wooden shoe, which held something like ten decks. The dealer was a sharp faced, heavily made up woman with a stiff red wig and a starched white shirt. In her forties. One of those hard-bitten Wild West types; Mom had had co-workers like her back in Matthewsboro. With my subtle vision, I noticed a tear gas aerosol in little holster inside her blouse.

  “Howdy do!” she said, eyeing my stack of thousand-dollar chips. “Bettin’ the farm.” She gave me an encouraging smile. “I admire that.”

  “Today’s gonna be my lucky dray,” I said.

  “Don’t forget to take care of the dealer when you win.”

  On my first hand, the dealer had an eight showing. Using my subtle vision, I could see that her turned-down hole card was a ten. To beat her, I had to get a total between nineteen and twenty-one. I got a six and a jack, both dealt face up from the shoe—no hole card for the players. Sixteen points. The face cards count ten in blackjack, and an ace can count either one or eleven, whatever the player likes. The best hand is a face card and an ace: blackjack.

  The dealer looked at me. Did I want another card? With my subtle vision I could see the seven of clubs face down on the top of the shoe’s fat deck. If I stood pat, my sixteen would lose to the dealer’s eighteen. If I drew, I’d have twenty-three: too high, busted. Lose-lose. I drew a card; I figured it might look suspicious if never ever busted.

  “Joe!” said Jena sharply. She was watching over my shoulder. “You’re not supposed to go over twenty-one! Maybe your sixteen would have won!” Had she already forgotten everything we’d discussed on the plane? Like about being cool in the casino? AIl I had was an edge, with no certainty of winning any given hand.

  “Easy, Jena,” said Spazz, who was watching over my other shoulder and making a little throat-clearing noise at each card I got.

  The dealer glanced over at us, then finished giving the other players their extra cards. The woman next to me stood pat with nineteen. She’d bet two hundred dollars.

  The dealer flipped over her hole card, showing her eighteen. If you’re not used to casino blackjack, you might think the dealer would want to draw another card to try and beat the player’s nineteen, but the rules are that the dealer has to act mechanically. Fairer all around, with less chance for collusion or rancor or massive dealer error. With one exception, the dealer always draws to a total of sixteen or less, and stands pat with a total of seventeen or more. The one exception to the rule comes if a dealer’s seventeen includes an ace counted as eleven; in this case the dealer must take a hit as well, changing the ace to a one if necessary.

  But right now the dealer had eighteen, so there was no question of taking a hit. The woman with nineteen points won two hundred dollars—blackjack pays the same as your bet—and I lost my first thousand.

  As the dealer took my chip. I stared at the shoe of cards, trying to see ahead to the next hand. If I was going to win the next one, then why not bet five thousand? But just now, counting that far into the deck took more concentration than I had. The situation was too stressful. And having Jena hover over me and be doubtful wasn’t helping things a bit. To make looking ahead even less practical, players kept coming and going, affecting which card I would get. Keep it simple, stupid. I bet another thousand.

  This time the dealer had a three in the hole and a seven showing. I wasn’t going
to be able to predict what she’d end up with, because she’d be drawing after all the players got done, so this time I’d just draw as many cards as I could without going over twenty-one. I got a ten and a seven for starters. When I got my chance to ask for a hit, I saw that the facedown card on the top of the deck was a queen, which would have busted me. So I stood pat. When all the players had taken their cards, the dealer flipped over her hole card and drew a ten. She had twenty to my seventeen. Another thousand gone.

  “You’re not doing this right, Joe!” said Jena.

  I really didn’t like it when Jena doubted me. I lost my temper. “Shut up, you bitch,” I hissed. “Leave me the hell alone.”

  “Hey, let’s chill,” said Spazz. “Joe knows the rules, Jena. Don’t stress him out. And watch your mouth, Joe. That’s your wife you’re talking to. The woman you love.”

  “Go away,” I repeated. “Both of you. You’re bad luck.”

  Jena glared at me, hooked her arm into Spazz’s, and stamped off.

  I started winning then. As soon as I was up two thousand dollars, a cocktail waitress appeared, wanting to give me a drink. I asked for ginger ale. When she got back I was four thousand up.

  “Here’s your drink, honey,” said the waitress.

  I took a sip. It had rum in it—a lot.

  “I wanted plain ginger ale,” I said, setting the drink back down onto her tray.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, giving me a lingering pat on the back. Maybe feeling me down for a weapon or a computer.

  I had a streak of good hands and then I was twenty thousand ahead. A skinny talkative guy with nicotine breath and a New York Jets T-shirt sat down on my left. “I been watching you,” he said. “I’m gonna do just like you do.” He had a pile of thousand chips as big as mine. Even though he kept losing, it didn’t seem to bother him. And he was talking to me all the time. His name was Gus. A low-class loudmouth.