“No,” said Davidson, “that’s not what I mean at all. Although, that stuff you can get, too, and I’m thinking that maybe some of the syndicate boys would like to know. But no, I’m talking about the real inside dope, Itchy. Like, would you want to know every winner of the Kentucky Derby for the next fifty years?”

Everyone stopped still. A few stopped breathing.

Slim Jim held out his hand for the pad. He shut down the Bogart vid and brought up a Web page he’d downloaded from Fleetnet himself. He’d never been so proud as the moment he successfully called up that site. It had taken every one of his sneaky, underhanded tricks to get unsupervised access to a workstation. And then it had required real intelligence to work the search interface to find something like this. Originally, he’d been looking for scores of football games, but had found nothing. Betting there had to be at least one fan of the track among ten or twelve thousand sailors and marines, he went looking for the Derby instead. And bingo! Here he was with the inside running.

“The thing is, Itchy, we gotta move quickly. Some other smart guy’s gonna figure this out real quick, probably in the next couple of days. I grabbed as many results as I could and stored them in here. You’ll find them in the folder called WINNERS. I can’t get to a bookie, but I figure you can. We got to get as much dough down as quick as we can. Because pretty soon the future’s gonna start changing.”

Big Itchy nodded slowly. “Right. Who’s gonna run a race where everyone knows the result?”

“The mob,” said Slim Jim. “But of course, they don’t mean everyone, everyone.”

“You want to take down the mob?” said Big Itchy. “I’m incredulous, Jimmy. Flabbergasted even. I never took you for no suicide case. As soon as they found out what you’d done, they’d come back for their money, and take your nuts as interest.”

“They would, they really would,” Davidson admitted. “And there’s no cutting them in, because they’re not going to believe you. Not yet. So no, I was just joking about the mob. But if you can lay off twenty, thirty big bets around the whole country, we can clean up. Get a nice float for some other things I got in mind.”

“Like what?” asked Big Itchy, sounding more interested with every passing minute.