Posted by Brian McCue on May 05, 1999 at 17:20:26:
In Ports of Call, the "shell game" with Pook, Snook, and Flook is a nice Vancian game, and as is pointed out, Moncrief has the odds on his side because he pays off at even odds, and yet there are three young ladies.
But there are a couple of things I don't get (perhaps because of reading in short segments just prior to falling asleep):
1) Flook (I think it is) has her hair parted on the left, unlike the other girls. (This is in Moncrief's description, and in the painting on the cover of the trade paperback). No mention is made of the girls' final pose being such that the left sides of their heads cannot be seen--but then Flook's part would give the game away.
2) On the cover of the trade paperback, a sixth female appears, crouching to the right of Pook, Snook, and Flook. Covers of Vance books are much more faithful to the text than the covers of many an SF book (this is a trait that goes back a long time, back to when most books had completely extraneous covers on them), and yet in neither presentation of the game does such a sixth woman appear. Judging by her curly brown hair, I was hoping she was Tibbet, and spent much of the latter portion of the book waiting for another Moncreif show in which she would suddenly appear on stage. But no. Is it possible that such a scene was cut, at a late moment, from the manuscript?