in several ways he had reduced his entries so that he could study them. At this moment, he was using what he called his "sequence" scanner; it involved opaque replicas of entries, in which the point admitted light to flash in the form of a dot. By having the entries fly by in order, he could view the dot in motion. The dot of light bounced in and out, up and down, and to him its motions formed a pattern. To her it never formed a pattern of any sort. But that was why he was able to win. She had entered the contest a couple of times and won nothing.

"How far along are you?" she asked.

Ragle said, "Well, I've got it placed in time. Four o'clock, P.M. Now all I have to do--" he grimaced, "is get it in space."

Tacked up on the long plywood board was today's entry on the official form supplied by the newspaper. Hundreds of tiny squares, each of them numbered by rank and file. Ragle had marked off the file, the time element. It was file 344; she saw the red pin stuck in at that point. But the _place_. That was harder, apparently.

"Drop out for a few days," she urged. "Rest. You've been going at it too hard the last couple of months."

"If I drop out," Ragle said, scratching away with his ballpoint pen, "I have to drop back a flock of notches. I'd lose--" He shrugged. "Lose everything I've won since January 15." Using a slide rule, he plotted a junction of lines.

Each entry that he submitted became a further datum for his files. And so, he had told her, his chances of being correct improved each time. The more he had to go on, the easier it was for him. But instead, it seemed to her, he was having more and more trouble. Why? she had asked him, one day. "Because I can't afford to lose," he explained. "The more times I'm correct, the more I have invested." The contest dragged on. Perhaps he had even lost track of his investment, the mounting plateau of his winnings. He always won. It was a talent, and he had made good use of it. But it was a vicious burden to him, this daily chore that had started out as a joke, or at best a way of picking up a couple of dollars for a good guess. And now he couldn't quit.