The Search for the Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart Page A

it this way,’ I said a little more calmly. ‘I like sailing in strong winds. That’s risk-taking. But I like to prepare my boat carefully, have a skilled crew member aboard with me. and carry all the latest safety equipment. But it’s still risk-taking – intelligent risk-taking.’ I frowningly thought of my father. ‘My father, on the other hand, also liked to sail. But he thought nothing of taking some junkheap out on to the ocean without charts or safety equipment or weather projections and with a crew that had never been further out to sea than a bathtub. That’s what I call stupid risk-taking – gambling, if you will. And of course his dice decisions were the stupidest gambling of all.
    ‘I see what you’re driving at,’ said Honoria. ‘But it seems to me that the whole meaning of risk-taking is that you subject yourself to …’ she hesitated to say the word, maybe fearing it would provoke a diatribe, ‘… letting chance into your life.’
    I didn’t explode.
    ‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘I guess my futures speculation is a declaration of war against chance. But as you said, if chance were actually beaten, then the game and the risk and the fun would be over. Yeah, I see that, but my father somehow wants to turn that fact into some sort ofworship of chance as the great liberator or life-enhancer. What he failed to admit was that too much chance is like too much order – it ruins the fun. The only thing worse than fascist order is total anarchy, and that’s what diceliving leads to.’
    ‘Well, I agree completely,’ said Honoria.
    ‘So,’ I concluded, hoping I’d won whatever argument we’d been having, ‘both my father and I enjoy risk-taking, enjoy – I admit it – the existence of chance, but I see it as an adversary that must be continually overcome while he saw it as a … as a …’
    ‘As a friend whom he liked playing with,’ finished Honoria.
    ‘Mmmmm,’ I muttered, feeling that somehow I hadn’t won the argument quite as convincingly as I would have liked.
    When I finally turned my car off the last paved highway shown on Arlene’s map we were deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Virginia. The dirt road the sketchmap put us on was deeply rutted and narrow. It curved and climbed and dipped through spectacular fall scenery which neither Honoria nor I noticed in the least, both being too busy feeling annoyed at being lost and pummelled around by the ruts and potholes. My Mercedes bottomed out half a dozen times, was coated with a quarter-inch of dust, and hated going in low gear almost as much as I did. If I loved my car as much as did most healthy American men I’d have been in tears.
    Finally the tortuous road spilled out on to a wider dirt road, and fifty yards from the intersection was a gate and a guardhouse with a tiny sign that said simply ‘Lukedom’. We had arrived.
    When we came to a halt near the guardhouse a young man emerged dressed in a uniform of some kind – military cap, jacket, boots and trousers, but each apparently of some different military service. He approached thewindow on my side with a decidedly unmilitary amble. I was already feeling annoyed.
    He leaned down and peered in at us.
    ‘Password?’ he asked.
    ‘Fuck the password,’ I shot back. ‘Just let us in.’
    ‘No problem,’ said the guard, amiably enough. ‘But you have to give me the password.’
    Honoria leaned towards the guard.
    ‘Chance,’ she said.
    The guard shook his head but continued to lean in.
    ‘Look, we don’t know the password,’ I said. ‘All we wan –’
    ‘You have to guess,’ said the guard.
    ‘Garbage, I said.
    The guard shook his head.
    ‘You each get one more try,’ he added helpfully.
    ‘Dice,’ said Honoria.
    ‘Bullshit,’ I suggested.
    The guard peered down at a small green notebook that appeared in one hand.
    ‘Close,’ he said, ‘but no cigar.’ He straightened. ‘The password is “February”,’ he said.
    ‘February,’ I