She caught sight of Jeffrey Thompkins at a distance, frowning at her but not in any very troubled way; and she realized after a moment that he evidently was undisturbed by her defection to the tall man’s side and simply wanted to know which turtle Holt was backing. She held up her hand, five fingers outspread. He nodded and went scurrying up to the tote counter.

Number Five won easily. The payoff was seven to three. Denise looked at Holt with amazement.

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“Concentration,” he said. “Some people have the knack.”

He seemed very distant, suddenly.

“Are you concentrating on the next race, now?”

“It’ll be Number One,” he told her, as though telling her that the weather tomorrow would be warm and fair.

Thompkins stared at her out of the crowd. Denise flashed one finger at him.

She felt suddenly ill at ease. Nicholas Holt’s knack, or whatever it was, bothered her. He was too confident, too coolly certain of what was going to happen. There was something annoying and almost intimidating about such confidence. Although she had bet fifty Jamaican dollars on Number One, she found herself wishing perversely that the turtle would lose.

Number One it was, though, all the same. The payoff was trifling; it seemed as if almost everyone in the place had followed Holt’s lead, and as a result the odds had been short ones. Since the races, as Denise was coming to see, were truly random—the turtles didn’t give a damn and were about equal in speed—the only thing governing the patterns of oddsmaking was the way the guests happened to bet, and that depended entirely on whatever irrational set of theories the bettors had fastened on. But the theory Nicholas Holt was working from didn’t appear to be irrational.