Gambler's Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman - Patch Merrick and Zaarrgon Try to Win a Stake in Order to Escape the Vengeance of a Dazzling but Dangerous Beauty!

The asteroid Hector was once a jagged space-crumb with few attractions, little gravity and no atmosphere whatever, but a shrewd Venusian opportunist changed all that. He had encased the tiny world in glassite and artificially speeded up an already lively spin. What fuel fed his atomic turbines was a mystery, but it was powerful stuff indeed. Centrifugal force did the rest. The glassite sheath prevented the oxygen from escaping and the glassite served as a transparent floor for visiting gamblers.

Gambling supported Hector. There were cafes, entertainers, luxury apartments, but gambling drew the crowds. Many fortunes were lost at Hector's tables, and not so many won. Even king gamblers came to brief. And big Patch Merrick, for all his many skills, was no king gambler.

He stood at a silvery table in the main salon. From somewhere seeped Venusian chirp-water music. A Martian joy-lamp shed stimulus-rays overhead. The televisos on the walls presented a variety of spectacles-formalized comi-tragedy for Martians, Terrestrial news events for Earthmen, and an attitude dance by a Ganymedean girl for outer planet inhabitants. Under the glassite floor whirled Heaven's star-sparked abyss. In the midst of this splendor, Merrick wagered his last value-units.

"Play" chorused the fringe of gamblers. There were froggy Venusians, Terrestrial junketers, Jovian colonials of varied descent. Only Martians, who sometimes read minds, were excluded from play. They only watched, their squidlike bodies metal-harnessed beneath their robes, their flowery craniums nodding, their artificial larynxes slurring amused comment.