The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  We drive into the parking garage at Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Club and circle up the ramp to the third floor. We park the Fiat and change into our gambling shoes. Stepping away from the car, Doyne clicks a range of data into his computer. A second later I get a prediction buzzed into my shoe.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  “A three.”

  “Right. And this one?”

  “A nine.”

  “O.K. And this one?”

  “A five. Maybe a six.”

  “That’s strange. I got a nine. We should be transmitting ten feet from shoe to shoe. But the bad signals mean we’re not doing any better than six feet. You’ll have to stick close to me along the layout.”

  Doyne hands me a roll of hundred-dollar bills and walks to the elevator. I wait five minutes before following him down into Glitter Gulch. After strolling the casinos and noting the action, I reach the Sundance a half hour later. I skirt the gambling floor and head for the rear of the casino. From there I watch Doyne standing at one of the two roulette wheels in play. Giving him time to finish setting parameters on the computer, I walk past the table, and on my second tour he places a side bet on the even numbers: my signal to buy into the game.

  Seated to my left is a man wearing a string tie and a Stetson. To my right is a Filipino smoking a cigar. “Let’s see how Lady Luck is doing tonight,” I say, placing my first bet. “It sure is a warm night for November,” complains the man in the hat.

  I pick up a solenoid buzz and easily cover the numbers on the layout. I chat about the weather and then suffer a sweet rush as my chosen octant on the wheel is hit dead-center. With a payout at thirty-five to one, this is a tender moment. I feel myself getting big with consumptive excess. I imagine money dribbling from my pockets as I give myself over to the delights of fast horses and women, Caribbean hideaways, duck hunting in the Urals, balloon excursions with Malcolm Forbes. There will be more than enough left over to support all the good causes in the world. I intend to be the rare example of a nice guy who gets rich and stays nice. Beating roulette isn’t going to go to my head, just my pocket. As the croupier rakes a stack of chips toward me across the table, I turn and order a drink from the hostess.

  But then I notice something strange about the computer’s signals. There seems to be a problem with the solenoids. Every few seconds, apparently at random, they pop off with different vibrations. I start to place a bet with one signal and then switch midway on getting another. Or I wait for a buzz and get nothing. Thinking my receiver might be out of range, I move closer to Doyne. While trying to distinguish the good signals from the bad, I find myself tossing out chips at random to cover my confusion.

  The computer underfoot tinks and whirs from one prediction to the next. Extraneous buzzes pop off when the ball isn’t even in motion. They follow rapid-fire, one on top of another. Some are clean and readable. Others feel like accidents—little mechanical stutters from a computer embarrassed at how badly it’s performing. With more and more buzzes coming out of nowhere, my shoe feels like a foot massager run amuck. I’m getting a ten-week course in acupuncture all in one night. I place bets indiscriminately and wait for a sign from Doyne. Mr. String Tie has been cleaned out, and the Filipino is losing his touch. Sucking hard on his cigar, he scatters chips across the layout. A pile of them straight up on number 17 tumbles over and has to be straightened up by the croupier. Standing next to me at the wheel, his face tightened into an edgy frown, Doyne bets the house minimum on odd or even numbers.

  I am doing my best to make sense out of the Chinese foot massage. So as not to quail before the law of probability, which allows for the remote chance that a bettor with a 40 percent advantage over the house can still get wiped out, I have been told to play roulette until given the sign to quit. I am headed for the cleaners by the time Doyne places a chip on 00. “It just doesn’t feel like my lucky night,” I tell the croupier. He claps his hands and the pit boss come over to watch my roulette chips get converted back into casino currency.

  I walk to the cashier’s cage and then out onto Fremont Street. Meeting me later at the Golden Nugget, Doyne joins me in a booth at the back of the coffee shop. His face is gray with fatigue. “My computer was crashing left and right,” he says, “but what’s really killing us is random buzzes. We’re getting swamped by spurious noise.” Noise is the term in electronics for a signal with no function. Over the next few days, I am going to hear a lot about noise.

  I wake late the next morning and walk out onto our balcony. Across the central oasis, with its swimming pool and palm tree, I look into the facing apartment to see a man wearing a stocking cap. He sits in a chair tilted against the wall and smokes a cigarette. A woman in a bathrobe serves him a plate of what look like scrambled eggs with ketchup. Below us, the manager is fishing soda cans out of the swimming pool with a net. The day is bright and dry. Too dry. Even in November the desert could desiccate you.

  On Paradise Road the signs are lit in front of the abortion clinic, the acupuncturist, and the specialist in cosmetic breast surgery. Women park their cars behind the buildings and pause for a moment before stepping out. In the opposite direction, past the neon humming over Foxy’s Firehouse Casino, lie avenues and housing projects laid over the desert like a printed circuit. Out beyond the copper bowl of the city stretch the red hills of the Las Vegas Range.

  I leave the curtains closed and step back inside our two-room apartment. It comes complete with kitchen and dining nook, although the dining nook table is now buried under a pile of computer sandwiches, battery boats, alligator clips, ohmmeters, solder, and electrical tape. Scattered over the rest of the apartment are wiring diagrams, data manuals, and shoes with their insoles flopping out. Doyne lies supine in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. This is a prophylactic measure for a bad back. Down feathers cling to his hair as he sticks his head out of the bag and yawns. His face, rumpled and out of true, is not yet gathered into cognition.

  “I had the weirdest dream,” he says. “I was inside a casino, one of the large ones, maybe the MGM Grand or Caesars Palace. But it was also a church, with candles and incense burning and Gregorian chants coming over the loudspeakers. There were nuns and priests officiating at what looked like a roomful of altars. Everyone was praying, and it seemed to be a very religious and holy place. But then when you got up close you saw that the nuns had bare legs. The priests were really croupiers, and the worshipers at these altars were blackjack and roulette players taking the Holy Sacrament in the form of casino chips and Bloody Marys.”

  After breakfast, Doyne calls Santa Cruz for a consultation with Mark. We have no phone in the apartment, so he uses the pay phone in the courtyard next to the swimming pool. A long conversation is interrupted for continuity tests and other electronic probes into the hardware. The tests produce no solution. Worse yet, they discover no problem. Random errors in computers that sometimes work and sometimes don’t are the hardest of all to troubleshoot. There is no way to shake a bug out of a computer until it manifests itself.

  Doyne hikes upstairs from his last call to California. “Mark wants us to do a reality check. He thinks we’ve gone weird on him out in the desert. We’re supposed to go back into the casinos and run a range test.”

  We load our shoes with computers and batteries and drive around the block to the Strip. Here great white wings flicker over the Silverbird. The nose on a huge clown blinks on and off at Circus Circus. A firmament of light shoots above the Stardust. A massive red R beckons at the Riviera. As we drive down the Boulevard, an afternoon sandstorm whips over the waste lots. The air silts up with dust. Bundles of tumbleweed blow across the road, and the hookers working the street take shelter behind the signposts. After turning into the parking lot at the Stardust, Doyne hands me a plastic bag into which he has stuffed the betting practice box. “Give me a five-minute lead,” he orders. “Then switch on the box and follow me into the casino.”

  Designed originally to hold canceled checks, the box looks
inconspicuous from the outside. But on peering under the lid one discovers a small computer, bundles of batteries, a radio transmitter, and a light-emitting diode flashing numbers from one to nine. Engineered to blast out solenoid buzzes at random, the box is now getting pressed into service as a portable transmitter. I am supposed to follow Doyne around the casino while he compares the strong signals coming from the box to those generated by the computer sandwich in his shoe.

  “In case anyone asks,” I inquire, “what exactly am I carrying here?” An extortion ring had recently blown up Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, and the bomb, disguised as a computer, had been detonated by radio signals.

  “You could say you’re making a movie. This is a remote control device for your camera.” Doyne is already out the door before I can remind him that movie making is also forbidden in casinos.

  I wait five minutes before switching on the box. On entering the Stardust I pause to let my eyes adjust to the light. Except for a general layering of plush and twinkling of light bulbs up in the rafters, this cavernous hall could double as the Cleveland convention center or part of the Newark airport. The only action at the tables comes from a few diehards. I spot Doyne at the far end of the room and make a slow pass in front of him. As he walks under the Eye in the Sky, I shadow him around the floor.

  “The signals were coming in all right,” he tells me back in the car. “But the range was good only up to six or seven feet.”

  Driving south on the Strip toward Caesars Palace and the really big casinos, we turn into the parking lot at the Silver Slipper. “I’m going back in,” Doyne says. “This time I’ll transmit out of the shoe and hold the receiving computer in my hand.” He wraps my computer sandwich in a plastic case borrowed from the Project’s tape recorder and puts it to his ear. “What do you think?” he asks. “Does it look like I’m listening to the radio, or something like that?”

  He loads the transmitting computer and fresh batteries into his shoe, bucks the wind on the tarmac, and disappears through the front door of the Silver Slipper. I follow a few minutes later, again carrying the betting practice box in a plastic sack. Doyne and I are engaged in the process of experimental physics. When theory fails to produce an answer, a scientist has no choice but to head for the field and gather data. I stop near the entrance to watch the race results go up on the big board, and then walk to the casino floor.

  I find Doyne standing in front of the craps tables with the computer held to his ear. Wearing blue jeans and a striped cotton shirt, he looks like a farmboy dressed for a visit to the local Sears catalogue store. But if this is a radio he’s holding, it’s odd that no sound is coming out of it. There’s no finger clicking, gum chewing, bebop, or sign of anything on Doyne’s face other than total stupefaction. This means he’s driving around the mode map with his toes. But I’m not the only one who thinks he looks suspicious.

  The shift boss stands elevated on a podium behind the craps tables. A red light flashes on his telephone. Pit bosses from all over the floor look to his desk. A half dozen men in brown suits converge on Doyne, who by now has joined me in a record-breaking strut toward the door. We run to the car and lay a patch out the driveway as the brown suits hit the parking lot.

  “Luckily we have enough to spare,” says Doyne, “but that’s one casino we definitely won’t be playing.”

  “There are two ways to proceed,” Doyne explains as he plugs the soldering gun into the kitchen socket. “We can spend another couple of years testing the computer for sources of noise, or we can try for a quick fix. Mark suggests I look at the top of the sandwich and resolder the on-off line. It’s a bolt-tightening operation, like checking to see if your steering wheel is connected to the car. Then I’m going to solder another capacitor into the circuitry of the receiving computer. That should boost its power and make the solenoid buzzes stronger. We worried a lot in the past about keeping them quiet, but at the moment all I care about is blasting out a signal. Why worry about the Mafia listening in on your shoes when you can’t even play roulette?”

  Doyne examines the computer sandwich in front of him and looks for the little cul-de-sac of copper that constitutes the on-off circuit. Under the solder points on this section of the PC board lies the microprocessor, for which the on-off line acts as a gate governing access to the CPU. “I hate this part more than anything,” he mutters, poking the sandwich with an ohmmeter. “I seem to spend most of my time on these trips troubleshooting equipment. There are usually four or five people sitting around waiting for me to pull off the miraculous fix. This time at least it’s just the two of us.”

  I sit on the couch, reading back issues of Gambling Times. A TV hangs in front of me on a rack bolted to the wall. “News flash,” a man comes on the screen to announce. “William Holden, the actor who played the all-American good guy, has just died. The romantic hero of Bridge on the River Kwai and Sunset Boulevard, Holden was best man at the 1952 wedding of Nancy and Ronald Reagan. President Reagan, when informed of his friend’s death, said he was shocked and has a great sense of grief.”

  I stand up and change channels through a soap opera, an I Love Lucy rerun, and a PBS special, “The Expanding Universe.” While spinning the dial I notice something strange. On the coffee table between the couch and the TV sit one of our two computers and a battery boat. As I flip the channel selector, the solenoids start popping like Mexican jumping beans. I squelch the volume and whirl the dial through TV snow. I call Doyne over, and together we stare at the twitching solenoids.

  “That’s it,” he says. “You found the problem. The Eye in the Sky is nothing but a giant TV installation. No wonder we’re getting killed by noise. It’s like the Russians jamming the Voice of America. They throw out so many signals that only garbage gets through.”

  The casinos are a swamp of electronic noise. It comes from the surveillance systems, but also from low-frequency radiation given off by the neon signs and slot machines. As defined by Claude Shannon, information is the amount of surprise in a system. Noise, in this case, is an unpleasant amount of surprise, which is why Shannon chose to measure it in terms of entropy. As in Grand Central Station at rush hour, when the face you search to retrieve from those standing under the clock refuses to materialize, noise is the too-muchness of everything happening all at once. Noise is the audible trace of a system slipping from order into chaos. Bad trips, static, psychoses, and the random buzzing of solenoids are all examples of excess information.

  “We can change our radio frequency and retune the equipment,” Doyne says. “The computer’s already designed to float above the ambient noise. We’ll just have to float it higher.”

  Resoldered and retuned, the sandwiches get loaded into our shoes by late afternoon. We drive out for dinner and then head downtown. Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, Doyne uses the other to hold a shoe up to his ear. “I want to listen to the solenoids. I wonder if they’ll start popping in front of the neon.” As we slow at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard South and Flamingo Road, a black man in a Cadillac pulls alongside. He lowers his window and points to the shoe. “I can hear it, man,” he calls to Doyne. “It sure do got a funky beat.” The man laughs uproariously and drives off snapping his fingers.

  On a chilly night in November, before the gamblers arrive for the holidays, business is slow in Glitter Gulch. The neon whines overhead and the barkers on the pavement seem to be hustling each other. I walk from the Mint to the Union Plaza, which straddles Fremont Street and caps the far end of the Gulch. I watch the wheels in play and jot notes on their tilt. At the Golden Gate, I push through the crowd around the craps tables to find Doyne facing the single roulette wheel in play. He places a bet on red, my signal to take a five-minute walk.

  Sitting in front of the keno board, I chew on my pencil and pretend to fill out betting forms. I know things are bad when the solenoids in my shoe start popping off at random. Spurious noise is back for a visit. Whenever I drift over to the roulette wheel, Doyne places a bet on r
ed. It turns into a long night of five-minute walks.

  “We have a new problem,” he says, meeting me later in the coffee shop at the Golden Nugget. “My computer keeps crashing. I get warning buzzes on the solenoids, a lot of nines, and then the system goes dead. It seems to be powering up and down at will, as if it’s getting lost in its program and doesn’t know where to go. Finally, it died completely. I’ve replaced all the batteries and checked the connections, but no go. It’s just sitting in my shoe, not doing anything.”

  Doyne looks pale. His fingers curl and uncurl a corner of the placemat. “It’s only midnight,” I say, trying to cheer him up. “You want to do something fun? Like go gambling? We could play the slot machines at the Jolly Trolly and win a free hamburger. Or we could catch the last show at the Lido de Paris and finish up on the Strip with a dollar-twenty-nine steak-and-egg breakfast.”

  Instead of playing the slots at the Jolly Trolly, we phone Len Zane. “We need an oscilloscope,” Doyne tells him. “Can you help us out?” As head of the physics department at the University of Nevada, Zane is fond of Doyne and tinkerers in general. “Come by the house,” he says, “and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  Zane sets us up for the night at a workbench complete with solder guns, AC-DC multivoltage power supplies, and a large Tektronix oscilloscope covered with dials. Doyne plugs two needle-nosed probes into the scope and hesitates a moment over the sandwich lying in front of him. With its chips packed inside, the only visible parts of the computer are the backsides of its PC boards, which are covered with nubbins of solder wherever a chip has been stuck. The solder points shine like tin roofs over the silicon sheds hidden beneath them, and these silvery dots are Doyne’s sole guide to what lies inside the computer. Only by probing for sine waves can one diagnose whether there is life below.