Explore "Storm Cloud on Deka" by E.E. Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
During the following days Tellurian Pharmaceuticals entertained Cloud. Not insistently -- Graves was an expert in such matters -- but simply by letting him know that the planet was his. He could do anything he pleased; he could have any number of companions to help him do it. And as a result he did -- within limits -- exactly what Graves wanted him to do. In spite of the fact that he did not want to enjoy life, he liked it.
One evening, however, he refused to play a slot machine, explaining to his laughing companion that the laws of chance were pretty thoroughly shackled in such mechanisms -- and the idle remark backfired. What was the mathematical probability that all the things that had happened to him could have happened by pure chance?