Stopping suddenly, he realized that his mind had been made up for some time. Win or lose-live or die-how could he say no to the chance to gamble with money like that! He turned suddenly and jabbed his finger at the big man in the chair.

“I’ll do it-you probably knew I would from the time you came in here. There are some terms of my own, though. I want to know who you are, and who they are you keep talking about. And where did the money come from-is it stolen?”

Kerk drained his own glass and pushed it away from him.

“Stolen money? No, quite the opposite. Two years’ work mining and refining ore to get it. It was mined on Pyrrus and sold here on Cassylia. You can check on that very easily. I sold it. I’m the Pyrric ambassador to this planet.” He smiled at the thought.

“Not that that means much, I’m ambassador to at least six other planets as well. Comes in handy when you want to do business.”

Jason looked at the muscular man with his grey hair and worn, military-cut clothes, and decided not to laugh. You heard of strange things out in the frontier planets and every word could be true. He had never heard of Pyrrus either, though that didn’t mean anything. There were over thirty thousand known planets in the inhabited universe.

“I’ll check on what you have told me,” Jason said. “If it’s true we can do business. Call me tomorrow…

“No,” Kerk said. “The money has to be won tonight. I’ve already issued a check for this twenty-seven million; it will bounce as high as the Pleiades unless we deposit the money in the morning, so that’s our time limit.”

With each moment, the whole affair became more fantastic-and more intriguing for Jason. He looked at his watch. There was still enough time to find out if Kerk was lying or not.

“All right, we’ll do it tonight,” he said. “Only I’ll have to have one of those bills to verify.”

Kerk stood up to go. “Take them all, I won’t be seeing you again until after you’ve won. I’ll be at the Casino, of course, but don’t recognize me. It would be much better if they didn’t know where your money was coming from or how much you had.”

Then he was gone, after a bone-crushing handclasp that closed on Jason’s hand like vise jaws. Jason was alone with the money. Fanning the bills out like a hand of cards, he stared at their sepia-and-gold faces, trying to get the reality through his head.

Twenty-seven million credits. What was to stop him from just walking out the door with them and vanishing. Nothing really, except his own sense of honor.