West o' Mars by Charles L. Fontenay
Traveling weather-control salesman Peache is invited to dine with the reclusive tycoon Samlaan Britt at West o' Mars, Britt's fantastical dome-and-tower estate perched above the Aeolia Desert on Mars in 2081. Warmed by cigars and firelight, Peache advances his pet theory that every successful man's achievements are driven by a woman's influence, and presses Britt—who has never married—to explain the legends surrounding the mansion's founding. Britt obliges with his own account. Decades earlier on Earth, Britt was a broke architectural draftsman with a gambling addiction and a dream of building spectacular structures on Mars. At a club dinner he watched a stage act performed by an old drunk and his thin, plain daughter, Dori, who silently and impossibly controlled a bouncing ball, a coin toss, and dice rolls through psychokinesis. Recognizing her power instantly, Britt maneuvered his way backstage, got the alcoholic father drunk, and manipulated Dori—starved for affection and eager to escape her father—into a same-day marriage proposal, which she accepted with genuine, total devotion. Britt abandoned her father to die in poverty and turned Dori's dice-controlling gift into a criminal engine for wealth, fleecing high-stakes gamblers across Earth until his methods became too well known and enemies too dangerous, forcing the couple to emigrate to Mars. The voyage out was grim: cramped quarters, doctored food to suppress tension among the crew, and a suffocating lack of privacy. During the trip, Britt got drunk with the ship's astrogator, Kei, in the weightless cargo hold and, in a maudlin, boastful confession, mocked Dori as colorless and merely "useful," admitting he'd never truly love her. Dori, clinging to the companionway, overheard everything. She confronted him only once, coldly declaring she would hate him forever. Settling near Mars City, Britt built respectable wealth through legitimate business and largely stopped gambling, living a quiet, loveless marriage with Dori. Years later, at a lavish house party hosted by rival tycoon Leswill Odaan in the lowland of Lacus Lucrinus, Britt first glimpsed the desert buttes from the western cliffs and conceived his obsessive vision for West o' Mars—but the land belonged to Odaan, who refused to sell. Noticing that Odaan was both an avid gambler and visibly infatuated with Dori, Britt engineered a high-stakes card game between them. Dori, asked to choose dice or cards, pointedly chose cards to deny Britt his usual advantage, but Britt's cardsharp skill couldn't overcome Odaan's mounting winning streak, and Britt gambled away his entire fortune—home, holdings, everything—hand by hand. Facing total ruin, Britt spotted Dori watching from the doorway and made a final, desperate wager: his wife against everything Odaan had won. Odaan, transfixed, agreed, and switched the game to dice at Britt's insistence, using a freshly sealed, certifiably honest set. Britt begged Dori privately to use her power one last time to save him, invoking whatever remained of their past bond; she coldly agreed. On the deciding roll, Britt needed a six after setting his point—and watched in horror as the second die seemed to drift under invisible guidance toward a two (which would have given Odaan the win) before rolling on to a one, producing the six and handing Britt total victory. Odaan, stunned, called the dice loaded and stumbled away in defeat. In that moment of triumph, Britt realized, too late, that he genuinely loved Dori. The reveal lands as bitter irony: Dori left with Odaan the very next day. Under Martian law of the time forbidding women to leave the planet (due to the gender imbalance), Odaan took a menial job at Marsport just to stay near her, and the two eventually married and returned to Earth once the law was repealed, raising a family together. Baffled, Peache asks why Dori would have thrown the game to Britt if she loved Odaan and hated her husband. Britt explains the story's final twist: Dori had intended to nudge the die to a two, which would have produced a seven and given Britt's stake—and herself—to Odaan. But it was her first attempt at psychokinesis since leaving Earth, and she misjudged the force needed, forgetting that Martian gravity is only four-tenths that of Earth's—her mental "push" was too strong, sending the die past the two and on to a one, inadvertently winning her freedom for the man she despised rather than the man she loved. West o' Mars stands, then, as a monument built on a fortune won by a physics miscalculation: the desert palace of Britt's lifelong dream, purchased with the woman he lost through her own failed act of love for someone else.
By Charles L. Fontenay · First published 1958 · Genre: Science Fiction, Romance, Noir