Free Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber Page A

prestidigitator.
    “It seems to have gone away now,” said Mrs. Carr, waving aside Tansy’s handkerchief and experimentally blinking her eyes, which looked unpleasantly naked until she replaced her thick glasses. “Oh, that must be the others,” she added, as the chimes sounded. “Isn’t it marvelous that everyone at Hempnell is so punctual?”
    As Norman started for the front door he imagined for one crazy moment that someone must be whirling a bull-roarer outside, until he realized it could only be the rising wind living up to Professor Carr’s description of it.
    He was confronted by Evelyn Sawtelle’s angular form, wind whipping her black coat against her legs. Her equally angular face, with its shoe-button eyes, was thrust toward his own.
    “Let us in, or it’ll blow us in,” she said. Like most of her attempts at coy or facetious humor, it did not come off, perhaps because she made it sound so stupidly grim.
    She entered, with Hervey in tow, and made for Tansy.
    “My dear, how are you? Whatever have you been doing with yourself?” Again Norman was struck by the eager and meaningful tone of the question. For a moment he wondered whether the woman had somehow gotten an inkling of Tansy’s eccentricity and the recent crisis. But Mrs. Sawtelle was so voiceconscious that she was always emphasizing things the wrong way.
    There was a noisy flurry of greetings. Totem squeaked and darted out of the way of the crowd of human beings. Mrs. Carr’s voice rose above the rest, shrilling girlishly.
    “Oh, Professor Sawtelle, I want to tell you how much we appreciated your talk on city planning. It was truly significant! ” Sawtelle writhed.
    Norman thought: “So now he’s the favorite for the chairmanship.”
    Professor Carr had made a beeline for the bridge tables and was wistfully fingering the cards.
    “I’ve been studying the mathematics of the shuffle,” he began with a brighteyed air, as soon as Norman drifted into range. “The shuffle is supposed to make it a matter of chance what hands are dealt. But that is not true at all.” He broke open a new pack of cards and spread the deck. “The manufacturers arrange these by suits — thirteen spades, thirteen hearts, and so on. Now suppose I make a perfect shuffle — divide the pack into equal parts and interleaf the cards one by one.”
    He tried to demonstrate, but the cards got away from him.
    “It’s really not as hard as it looks,” he continued amiably. “Some players can do it every time, quick as a wink. But that’s not the point. Suppose I make two perfect shuffles with a new pack. Then, no matter how the cards are cut, each player will get thirteen of a suit — an event that, if you went purely by the laws of chance, would happen only once in about one hundred and fifty-eight billion times as regards a single hand, let alone all four.”
    Norman nodded and Carr smiled delightedly.
    “That’s only one example. It comes to this: What is loosely termed chance is really the resultant of several perfectly definite factors — chiefly the play of cards on each hand, and the shufflehabits of the players.” He made it sound as important as the Theory of Relativity. “Some evenings the hands are very ordinary. Other evenings they keep getting wilder and wilder — long suits, voids and so on. Sometimes the cards persistently run north and south. Other times, east and west. Luck? Chance? Not at all! It’s the result of known causes. Some expert players actually make use of this principle to determine the probable location of key cards. They remember how the cards were played on the last hand, how the packets were put together, how the shufflehabits of the maker have disarranged the cards. Then they interpret that information according to the bids and opening leads the next time the cards are used. Why, it’s really quite simple — or would be for a blindfold chess expert. And of course any really good bridge player should —”
    Norman’s