The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  “We’re running Letty on the hand-eye coordination program,” Doyne says. “This is the old Human vs. Machine experiment, where you get to see how spastic you are in clocking the ball compared to an optron. Letty is basically doing fine, although there’s something funny going on, and we can’t put our finger on it. We set the parameters and the predictions look great. But then half an hour later we find the ball falling short by an octant or two. For some reason the predictions are drifting.”

  Throughout the past week, heavy weather has been blowing in from the west. The sun shines and then disappears in a chop of clouds and wind across the Bay. Waves roll over the town pier and wash up on the boardwalk, while out in Steamer Lane only the best of them are surfing the swells. The weather has been fickle under a full moon, undecided between clearing into blue skies or sending more clouds scudding up the San Lorenzo River valley, where they hang in the redwoods like a soggy tent. With a thunderclap and torrents of rain, another storm breaks outside.

  Mark pushes open the Shop door. Wearing only a T-shirt and pants, with rainwater dripping off his beard, he shakes himself like a dog. “I’ve got it,” he exclaims. “I found the problem. Take a look at this.” He picks up a half dozen roulette balls and stands over the wheel. In rapid succession he spins all the balls at once. They differ in size and shape and in the sound they make circling the track—from the taut, high-pitched note of plastic, to the mellower sound of ivory on wood. They also vary greatly in speed. The fast ones bump into the slow ones, bounce backward, and catch up again to the laggards.

  “At the widest spread,” says Mark, “the Teflon ball decelerates a hundred percent faster than the composite ball. That gives you an idea how sensitive these things are. We’re setting the parameters all right for the different balls, but the balls themselves aren’t staying the same. The problem is the air. I mean air isn’t just air. Some of it’s more viscous and harder to travel through than other air. I notice this when I ride my bicycle on a foggy day. I was watching Rob and Letty making histograms this morning. Everything was working great, until a half hour later they found their predictions slipping off center. The longer they played, the farther the ball traveled away from its original exit point. I went home to think about it and came back during lunch to conduct a little experiment. It was sunny outside, and I left the Shop door open. The parameters for the ball began to drift. I shut the door. They swung back an octant. The ball was clearly traveling farther with the door open.

  “I went home again and phoned Bill Burke at the university. I knew he played billiards and thought he might have some advice on what was happening with our balls. He told me this kind of problem is familiar to anyone who’s played billiards with the original ivory balls. They actually change shape and go out of round with variations in barometric pressure; tournaments used to be delayed until the pressure stabilized. Since we’re dealing with acetates and plastics our problem is a little different, but he still thinks that what we’re noticing is caused by alterations in the pressure and viscosity of the air. I figure we’re getting a five to ten percent drift every hour. We always knew that different balls had different rates of deceleration, but no one guessed that the air could change so fast in so little time.”

  “It should be better out in the desert,” Letty speculates. “I imagine the casinos are climatically more stable.”

  “Mario Puzo tells a story in Fools Die about a casino owner wanting to liven up the action,” Doyne says. “So at three o’clock every morning he’d pump in a few tanks of pure oxygen. Who knows what kind of ball drift you’d get then.”

  As the storm passes and the sun reappears, Doyne turns to me. “Let’s bag some endorphins,” he says. We put on our track shoes and sprint along the levee overlooking the San Lorenzo. The river is fast and muddy. Ahead of us a wall of clouds is pushed against the mountains. We cut through the town cemetery and slow for the long climb up into the hills. The air is thick with the smell of eucalyptus and bay laurel. The bark on the manzanitas shines burnt orange under a varnish of rainwater. On reaching the fog line, where patches of mist drift among the redwoods, we turn back toward the ocean.

  Below us, straggled over the flood plain of the San Lorenzo, lies the town of Santa Cruz. Among the major landmarks, we make out the Mission church, rebuilt after a fire to three-quarters scale, the Ferris wheel turning over the boardwalk, and the big “D” illuminated on top of the Dream Inn. Dark on the edge of town are the Brussels sprout fields to the north and the forests and clustered campuses of the university. A touch of red neon glows in front of the fishmongers on the wharf. The lighthouse blinks over the surfers in Steamer Lane catching the last waves of the day. Directly in front of us lies the sweep of the Bay and a hook of land on the far side that sparkles at night with the lights of Monterey. As we sprint home down the levee the clouds above us break into patches of blue, while out in the Bay shafts of sunlight illuminate the golden V’s of fishing boats towing their wakes back into harbor.

  For dinner Grazia has cooked pasta and chicken breasts in cream. There is a big commotion tonight over Norman, who is making his debut singing in a concert of Renaissance music. Lorna bustles around getting him dressed. “Packard, it’s amazing what you think is cool,” she says of his first attempt. “It’s not cool at all.” Norman reappears wearing skinny black pants and a beige, open-necked shirt. Lorna wraps a scarf around his neck. We rush through dinner and bundle him out the door.

  The church is filled to overflowing as Norman comes on stage. Looking like a choir boy sprouting through prolonged adolescence, he sets the pitch and tempo for the opening madrigal. His tenor is sweet, but not yet warmed enough to carry through the hall. A chorus and solo voices, accompanied by an orchestra of lutes, cornets, sackbuts, violas, and a small organ, perform what the program notes describe as “Music of the Serene Republic.” A mixture of church and secular songs composed in Venice during the seventeenth century, the music expresses an order and coherence that have long since disappeared from the world. Grazia, sitting next to me, lapses into Italian. “La stella,” she exclaims over the soprano. “Brava. Brava.” This is the music of a free people, say the program notes, who were far enough removed from the center of the Roman Empire to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility and refinement of their own. “They think they’re describing Santa Cruz,” says Grazia, laughing. “Far from Washington and New York, this is the Venice of the American Empire.” Whatever truth there may be in the analogy, there is indeed a resonance and lightness to the music that corresponds perfectly to the graciousness of a mild night on the shores of Monterey Bay.

  First thing in the morning, Doyne, Norman, Mark, Letty, Rob and I gather in the dining room for a Project meeting. Norman, yawning hugely, is wrapped in a red dressing gown. Mark, wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt, chinos, and Nike running shoes, squats on the window bench, where he bounces on his toes like a football coach hunkered down on the sidelines. Letty is in blue jeans and a cotton shirt rolled up at the sleeves. “Last night I dreamed that bubble gum got stuck on the wheel and melted down into the bearings, where it totally gummed up the works,” she says. “God, it was awful.” Rob Lentz shows everyone his new haircut and freshly trimmed mustache. “I’m cleaning up my act for Las Vegas,” he reports.

  Doyne, wearing Patagonia pants and an Icelandic wool sweater, his hair still wet from a morning shower, opens the meeting by handing out photocopies of “Predicting Roulette,” the Project’s twenty-five-page manual on how to beat roulette with computers. “You’ve seen this before,” he says, “but some of you were missing a few pages. I’ve also thought of a neat improvement for the program, a way to adjust one of the parameters automatically while we’re playing. It would take a couple of days to implement, and I don’t know whether we want to wait around that long.”

  Nailed to the dining room door is a blackboard that Doyne covers with equations while launching into a miniseminar on the physics of roulette. Long strings of variables unfurl between the brackets o
f logarithmic functions. Deltas pop up in front of adjustable parameters. Parentheses fence off measurable rates and periods. Preset values and “fudge factors” are used sparingly throughout. Chalk dust floats in the sunbeams slanting in at the window as Doyne finishes writing the last of three multifunctional equations on the board. “These are the two equations of motion for the ball and the rotor,” he concludes, “and here’s the solution, which is an algorithm that combines these equations and solves them.”

  After writing down the equations in a notebook, Rob looks up and strokes his mustache. “Doyne,” he asks, “do I really need to know all this stuff? I mean, so long as the hardware works, all I want to do is get in there and use it.”

  “Hold it,” says Mark, rocking back and forth on his toes. “I’m really paranoid about this. Every time someone talks about something going wrong with the system, they blame it on the hardware. But our screw-ups have come just as often from software.”

  “Boy, you’re jumpy today,” says Rob. “I wasn’t blaming you for anything. I was asking Doyne if I could play roulette without knowing all the physics. I’d like to know the physics, but I thought we wanted to get out of town as fast as possible.”

  “I agree with Rob,” says Letty, who is curled up in a beanbag chair in the corner of the room. “I really haven’t been following much of this. What we need right now is a benevolent dictator. Why don’t you just tell us what to do, and we’ll go do it?”

  “I think two of you should leave for Las Vegas as soon as possible,” Mark insists, “without changing the program or waiting for a second set of computer sandwiches to be waxed. I know you want a back-up system,” he tells Doyne. “But I can get one finished and sent out to you in a couple of days. You should forget about the extra testing with the feedback device and get on the road.”

  “But it’s been a couple of years since we ran a complete set of eye-toe coordination tests,” says Doyne.

  “I know,” Mark agrees, “but how badly has your nervous system deteriorated since then?”

  I am wearing a pair of magic shoes, fully loaded, as I stand in the basement getting buzzed with signals from the betting practice box. Clarks, nice looking walkers, there is nothing unusual about these shoes except for the computer inside that’s tickling my right foot.

  This is my final fitting—or “tweaking up,” as we call it—to get my buzzers adjusted correctly. Letty has become expert at manufacturing the metal plungers that bob up and down in the solenoids. As the last step in the process, she form-fits the plungers by filing them down to points. There is a knack to wearing a computer in your Wallabees. You want to walk without a gimp, but tread gingerly on the microprocessor underfoot. A slight lift to the heel allows the plungers to jump like popcorn. But after the split second it takes to read them, a push on the tarsus can damp down the solenoids completely.

  Wearing his own pair of magic shoes, Doyne paces around the roulette wheel. “My computer went bye-bye. I just got a nine,” he announces, referring to the “no-bet” buzz, a high pulse on the back solenoid. “As soon as I put on the shoes they stop working.”

  “Do you have smelly feet?” Rob asks. “I’ve been thinking we should run a smell test on the computer.”

  Doyne’s face breaks into a lopsided grin. “Yeah,” he agrees. “We should test everything.”

  The other joke of the day has to do with Mark’s touchiness about taking the rap for delays in the Project. Everyone tends to blame these on hardware rather than software, although Mark has a point. A mistake in the program—allowing an errant electron to slip through a logic gate once in a million operations—can burn up your circuits as thoroughly as a bad solder joint. Yet, when presented with fried transistors, it’s often hard to trace their sorry state back to a logical mishap. The joke is that no longer will problems with the system be identified as originating in either hardware or software. Instead, they will be referred to as “user irregularities.”

  I spend the afternoon working out with the betting practice box. Solenoids pop under the arch and heel of my foot as I receive a range of signals from one to nine. I translate them into patterns of numbers on the layout and scatter chips across the baize. I stand at the dining room table fielding buzz after buzz. I learn to distinguish the solenoids. I master the different frequencies. I memorize the numbers in each octant on the wheel. Bending over the baize with what becomes thoughtless precision, I concentrate on the task like a method actor intent on becoming the Marlon Brando of predictive roulette.

  Doyne, still wearing the second pair of shoes in our set, walks into the room. “Let’s do a range test,” he says. Toggling microswitches with his toes, he simulates the clicking of mode and data switches during an actual game of roulette. For the first time the signals buzzing in my shoe are being transmitted from his computer to mine, exactly as they will be in Las Vegas. We run a dozen trials as Doyne walks progressively farther from me across the room.

  “That was an eight,” he says, referring to a midrange buzz on the back solenoid.

  “Ditto,” I confirm, getting the signal.

  “Five.”

  “Five.”

  “Another eight.”

  “No. I got a nine.”

  “That’s the limit on our range. Beyond nine or ten feet, you’re only going to get ‘no-bet’ signals.” He turns on the betting practice box and watches me field numbers and toss chips onto the layout. “You’re covering the patterns nicely,” he observes, “but your technique is all wrong. As a big player, you’d better learn how to handle your chips.”

  He picks up a stack and covers numbers on the layout at twice my speed. “Instead of using two hands and dealing chips between your fingers like cards, you want to load them in one hand and drop them between your fingers like a coin dispenser. By not moving your wrist, you can get them out in half the time.”

  He steps back and watches me practice the new technique. “And there’s one more thing. When you have everything else under control, relax. If all you’re doing is gambling, you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.”

  Letty comes in through the front door. “Are you ready to go?” she asks, pulling a wad of bank notes out of her purse. “Here’s the betting capital, twenty-five hundred dollars in cash. They were surprised at the bank when I walked in and asked for it. ‘We usually don’t hand out that much money without advance notice,’ the manager told me. ‘You’ll have to believe me,’ I said, ‘but the circumstances are a bit unusual.’”

  It had been agreed at the last Project meeting that we’d split up and drive to Las Vegas in two waves. Doyne and I are to leave momentarily in Letty’s blue Fiat. As soon as they’ve finished a second set of shoes, Rob and Letty will follow in his Plymouth Duster. Mark intends to stay behind in Santa Cruz. He has several reasons, compounded out of pride and paranoia, for not wanting to go to Las Vegas. Either the computers work as he says they will, or they don’t. Do we trust him? As for his paranoia, Letty has tried to convince him that the gambling statutes of Nevada do not explicitly forbid the carrying of predictive devices into casinos. Mark nonetheless pictures Mafiosi as big as Watusi tribesmen working him over in the back room of Caesars Palace, or suing him for every stick of furniture in his already modest house.

  Toward evening I walk out the back gate to find Doyne inside the Blue Bus. The engine cover is off, and he is buried deep among the pistons with a variety of socket wrenches. Not running for the past month, the Bus had been parked in front of the house until the police came and threatened to tow it away. This being the first Las Vegas trip with no need of the Bus, Doyne had said he was going to push it into the barn. So I am surprised to find him now covered with grease and surrounded by engine parts. “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “It’s a psychological thing,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I feel better when the Bus is running. I wouldn’t want to leave town without it showing signs of life.”

  At dinner that night two items get passed around the table. T
he first is a clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle. Datelined Carson City, Nevada, it reads: “Gamblers lost $688.3 million in Nevada casinos during the three summer months, an increase of 8.1 percent from a year ago, which a state official says is pretty healthy in light of the recession.”

  “Who would think there were so many suckers in the world?” Letty asks.

  The second item is a ten-page letter. “I’d like your comments on this,” Doyne says. “I’m thinking of sending a copy to all the shareholders in Eudaemonic Enterprises. Now that we have a new generation of equipment, I think everyone with a slice of Pie should know what’s going on.”

  Addressed “Dear Eudaemons,” the letter begins: “Now that the christening of the ultimate pair of magic roulette shoes is imminent, the time is long past ripe to give an accounting of the status of the Project. Contained herein is a tentative division of the Eudaemonic Pie, together with a substantial revision and amplification of the original agreement. The enclosed photo of ‘the sandwich’ and ‘the boat’ should give you an idea of the current level of roulette technology. The sandwich shown is a complete data-taking computer, and the boat contains all the batteries, antennas, and two of three foot massagers (the other is on the computer).”

  The letter describes our upcoming expedition “to the Nevada lettuce patch,” where the new equipment is going to be tested during “a month of high-stakes playing.” The letter also clarifies recent mutations in the Eudaemonic Pie, particularly the fact of its having gained a “front end,” and proposes the following general division of the Pie, out of which will come Project members’ individual slices.