Читать книгу The Search for the Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 24

The next day we ploughed on. Crossing the flat heartland of the central valley of Virginia I concluded that after you’d seen one cornfield you’d seen them all – unless of course I was long or short corn futures, in which case I’d have gotten out of the car every thirty miles to measure the height of the corn.

After two hours I took over the driving and Honoria settled back into the passenger seat. But I continued a silent brooding that had begun at breakfast and Honoria apparently noticed it.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘the reason you’re all hung up about your father is the old cliché that you’re probably more like him than you admit.’

‘I’m nothing like him,’ I said.

‘Not in any way?’ she persisted.

‘I suppose we both like the excitement of taking risks,’ I finally said. ‘That’s the only thing we have in common.’

‘Taking risks?’ said Honoria with a frown. ‘How so?’

‘That’s my job!’ I said with some exasperation. ‘You know that. There are two kinds of trading in futures. As you know, the whole purpose of hedging is to reduce risk – a kind of insurance policy against other positions one has in other markets. But I’m not a hedger. Jeff is our firm’s hedger. My job is to make money for clients by pure speculation.’

‘Gambling, you mean.’

‘It’s not gambling!’ I shot back, taking a hand off the wheel to gesture emphatically. ‘It’s intelligent risk-taking. I suppose you could call it loaded-dice risk-taking. Gamblers at something like roulette or craps rely totally on chance, whereas I rely on knowledge, skill and analysis to overcome chance.’

‘But if your knowledge always beats out chance then there’s no risk,’ said Honoria with annoying reasonableness.

‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘It’s still risk-taking! I sometimes lose millions in a week! It’s just that in the long run my knowledge and skill beat out the pure diceplayer – beat out chance.’

‘You don’t have to get so excited,’ Honoria said, reaching forward to retrieve a map that had fallen on to the floor.

‘Look at it this way,’ I said a little more calmly. ‘I like sailing in strong winds. That’s risk-taking. But I like to prepare my boat carefully, have a skilled crew member aboard with me. and carry all the latest safety equipment. But it’s still risk-taking – intelligent risk-taking.’ I frowningly thought of my father. ‘My father, on the other hand, also liked to sail. But he thought nothing of taking some junkheap out on to the ocean without charts or safety equipment or weather projections and with a crew that had never been further out to sea than a bathtub. That’s what I call stupid risk-taking – gambling, if you will. And of course his dice decisions were the stupidest gambling of all.

‘I see what you’re driving at,’ said Honoria. ‘But it seems to me that the whole meaning of risk-taking is that you subject yourself to …’ she hesitated to say the word, maybe fearing it would provoke a diatribe, ‘… letting chance into your life.’

I didn’t explode.

‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘I guess my futures speculation is a declaration of war against chance. But as you said, if chance were actually beaten, then the game and the risk and the fun would be over. Yeah, I see that, but my father somehow wants to turn that fact into some sort of worship of chance as the great liberator or life-enhancer. What he failed to admit was that too much chance is like too much order – it ruins the fun. The only thing worse than fascist order is total anarchy, and that’s what diceliving leads to.’

‘Well, I agree completely,’ said Honoria.

‘So,’ I concluded, hoping I’d won whatever argument we’d been having, ‘both my father and I enjoy risk-taking, enjoy – I admit it – the existence of chance, but I see it as an adversary that must be continually overcome while he saw it as a … as a …’