Читать книгу The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 18

Back upstairs in my living room I stared dreamily at the exposed one on the die. I scratched my balls and shook my head in dazed awe. Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods – the die – rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die’s being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape was obviously dictated by fate. Not guilty.

Of course I could simply have broken my verbal promise of following the dictates of the die. True? True. But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor! Can we expect a professional man, a member of PANY, to break his word because the die, with the odds heavily against it, determined rape? No, obviously not. I am clearly not guilty. I felt like spitting neatly into some conveniently located 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 go to bed; if it’s 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 dice can show almost as poor judgment as a human.