Odds On: A Novel by Michael Crichton (Writing as John Lange)

Author:Michael Crichton (Writing as John Lange) [Crichton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction, Crime
ISBN: 9781453299234
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1966-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

FRIDAY, JUNE TWENTIETH

ONE DAY TO GO. Steven Jencks awoke in a philosophical mood. He was still slightly depressed by the fact that their work had fallen behind schedule, but somehow everything looked better in the morning.

He allowed his mind to wander over the scheme, and its basis, the marvelous mathematic concept of probability, of chance.

To the layman, chance meant risk, uncertainty, weakness. Jencks had a more sophisticated understanding, the kind of understanding a physicist has when he talks about diffraction through a double slit. It was, basically, an awareness that chance governs—not in an individual case, but in many cases. He could accept that paradox and all it implied. You could not predict what would happen in a single instance, a single throw of the dice, a single pitch in the seventh inning, a single toss of the coin. But you could predict three out of five, four out of ten, seven out of sixteen, and to that extent chance governed everyone, all the time.

Just as surely as two equals two.

He got out of bed, and went into the bathroom to shave. For some reason, quotations came into his head.

Henri Poincaré: “Chance is only the measure of our ignorance.”

Laplace: “Probability is relative, in part to our ignorance, in part to our knowledge.”

And one quotation which occurred to him, for no particular reason, and amused him as he ran the razor over his chin. C.S. Pierce: “To be logical men should not be selfish.”

Well, he was embarked upon a venture of chance, and it was a most logical and selfish venture. He was not afraid; he welcomed this opportunity to test his mind against the vagaries and uncertainties of life among three hundred souls temporarily inhabiting the Hotel Reina. In fact, it was the element of chance, of carefully calculated—no, computed—risk, which made the project so interesting.

Jencks was not a man given to broad generalizations, but he fervently believed that mathematics was the foremost source of power in the modern world. Its potentialities, for both good and evil, far outstripped atomic energy. Because mathematics was a source of discovery, a tool of inquiry. It was mathematics, after all, which made atomic energy possible in the first place. One little white-haired German refugee working with chalk and a blackboard. He shook his head, half-amused, half-wonderingly. It was really quite incredible.

And in his own modest way, Steven Jencks was making a contribution to knowledge. He was using mathematics, and using the computer, to carry out the first genuinely scientific crime in the history of mankind.

He had to admit he was eager to begin.

Annette opened her eyes slowly and stared across the room. She saw her dress and stockings placed carefully across a chair, her shoes on the floor. She looked outside; the sun was shining, but she could not see the ground—this room was on a higher floor than her own. She had a brief moment of panic until she remembered where she was.

“Hello,” Bryan said. He was sitting up in bed, smoking.

“Hi,” she said, stretching.

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