Free Spaceland by Rudy Rucker Page B

They think the Earth’s hollow.”
    â€œSeeing in the fourth dimension is kind of like seeing inside of things,” I said, tapping the plane window. I didn’t like the way I kept losing control of the conversation. “When I look down, I can see under the Earth,” I continued. “News flash, guys, it’s not hollow.” But now Jena was watching Spazz draw a picture of the pot he claimed he’d bought.
    It was early evening by the time we got onto the Strip. I rented a Lincoln Navigator SUV, just to compare it with my Explorer. The Navigator was another Ford Motors product, but higher end. It turned out to be a hell of a nice vehicle, if a bit mushy on the turns.
    Jena directed me to the Hog Heaven, up at the north end of the Strip. Once we were inside, it took about fifteen seconds to pay a clerk for a couple of rooms next to each other. Outside the casino’s back door was a maze of asphalt lanes, all lined with pre-fab beige rooms, stacked two high all along the endlessly branching avenues and side alleys of the Hog Heaven motel complex. There might have been a thousand rooms. The clerk gave us detailed instructions on how to drive to our assigned cubicles, but even so it took a couple of tries. Every row of rooms looked alike. Once we’d parked the Navigator and used our bathrooms, we took off on foot for Nero’s Empire.
    What a place. Nero’s was like a city inside, complete with malls and restaurants, even bigger than Caesar’s. It was designed kind of like a fish trap. Once you’d walked in twenty feet past the entrance, you couldn’t see how to find your way back out. The slots were whooping and blinking and there were lights on the ceiling to steer you to the gaming tables. I stopped and watched one of the slots for a minute; I could see its insides. If I’d had more of a mechanical
bent of mind, maybe I could have figured out how to tell when it was about to pay off. But blackjack was the sure thing. According to Jena, the casino didn’t have to tell the IRS about winnings at the gaming tables. Jena said no matter how many chips you won, the casino would redeem them for cash and send you on your way.
    I stepped up to the cashier’s cage and bought seventeen of Nero’s one-thousand-dollar chips with the cash that Momo had given us. They were impressive-looking things, shiny and gold, unlike the lowlier denominations, which were plain colors.
    At Jena’s advice, I took a seat at a shoe-dealt blackjack table with a minimum bet of a hundred dollars. At the shoe-dealt tables you didn’t touch your cards at all, so there was less chance of my doing something wrong.
    With the exception of the dealer’s hole card, all cards were dealt face up from the fat wooden shoe, which held something like ten decks. The dealer was a sharp faced, heavily made up woman with a stiff red wig and a starched white shirt. In her forties. One of those hard-bitten Wild West types; Mom had had co-workers like her back in Matthewsboro. With my subtle vision, I noticed a tear gas aerosol in little holster inside her blouse.
    â€œHowdy do!” she said, eyeing my stack of thousand-dollar chips. “Bettin’ the farm.” She gave me an encouraging smile. “I admire that.”
    â€œToday’s gonna be my lucky dray,” I said.
    â€œDon’t forget to take care of the dealer when you win.”
    On my first hand, the dealer had an eight showing. Using my subtle vision, I could see that her turned-down hole card was a ten. To beat her, I had to get a total between nineteen and twenty-one. I got a six and a jack, both dealt face up from the shoe—no hole card for the players. Sixteen points. The face cards count ten in blackjack, and an ace can count either one or eleven, whatever the player likes. The best hand is a face card and an ace: blackjack.

    The dealer looked at me. Did I want another card? With my subtle vision I could see