Free The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart Page A

spittoon in front of my jury.
    But on the whole it seemed a pretty weak defense, and I began vaguely hunting for a new one when I became ablaze at the thought: I am right: I must always obey the dice. Lead where they will, I must follow. All power to the die! Excited and proud, I stood for a moment on my own personal Rubicon. And then I stepped across. I established in my mind at that moment and for all time, the never-to-be-questioned principle that what the die dictates, I will perform.
    The next moment was anticlimactic. I picked up the die and announced: `If it's a one, three or five, I'll to go bed; if its a two I'll go downstairs and ask Jake if I can try to rape Arlene again; if it's a four or a six I'll stay up and think about this some more.'
    I shook the die violently in the cup of my two hands and flipped it, out onto the poker table, it rolled to a stop: five. Astonished and a bit let down, I went to bed. It was a lesson I was to learn many times in subsequent casts; the dive can show almost as poor judgment as a human.

Chapter Ten
    By training I have learned to look for the casual insignificance of every overt cause. In the morning, after a caressless, buttockless period before breakfast, lukewarm coffee, and Lil's hungover imprecations, I wander into the living room to recreate the scene of the crime. Pacing back and forth I tried to demonstrate to myself that I would have gone down to Arlene whether the die had been a one, a four, or a box of matches. I remained unconvinced. I knew in my big hardpumping heart that only the die could have pushed me down those stairs and into Arlene's entranceway.
    I tried then to prove that I had seen the die that was on the side table before it had been covered with a card or at any rate before I made my solemn vow to commit holy rape if it turned out to have a one face up. I tried to determine who had left the card and die there and guessed it must have been Lil during her headlong flight to the bathroom. It seemed thus that I couldn't have known that it was a one. Had I seen from the angle of my chair the sides of the die and thus unconsciously known that the die must have turned upward either a one or a six? I walked over to the little table and tumbled a die onto it and, without looking at what came face up, covered the die with the queen of spades more or less as it had been covered the night before. I went back and sat at the poker table. From there, staring through my glasses, squinting, straining, trying with superhuman effort, I managed to make out the table and the slightly humped playing card. If there was a die under the card it was unpublished news as far as my eyes were concerned. For me to have seen the die from my chair at the poker table I would have had to have an unconscious with telescopic sight. The case was clear: I couldn't possibly have known what was under the queen of spades; my rape was determined by fate.
    `What happened to the picture of Freud?' asked Lil, who had come in from the kitchen after turning the kids over to the maid.
    Seeing that Freud's portrait was still facing the wall, I said `I don't know. I assumed you did that last night as you went to bed. A symbolic rejection of me and my colleagues.'
    Lil, her messed blonde hair, reddish eyes and uncertain frown making her look unusually like a mouse approaching chase in a trap, looked at me suspiciously.
    `I did it?' she asked, her mind stumbling over the events of last night. `Sure. Don't you remember? You said something like "Now, Freud can look into the bowels of the house," and staggered off to the john.'
    `I did not,' she said. `I strode with great dignity.'
    `You're right. You strode with great dignity in a variety of directions.'
    'But essentially I moved east'
    'True.'
    `East and johnward.'
    We laughed and I asked her to bring another cup of coffee and a doughnut to my study. Evie and Larry momentarily escaped from the clutches of the maid and swooped through the living room like two