Each Saturday, townspeople had collected in sullen, resentful crowds to watch the troops squirt gasoline on the cars and toasters and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes that nobody could buy, igniting them in a blinding conflagration. In each town there was a burning-place, fenced off, a kind of rubbish and ash heap, where the fine things that could not be purchased were systematically destroyed.

The Quizzes had helped, a trifle. If people couldn't afford to buy the expensive manufactured goods, they could still hope to win them. The economy was propped up for decades by elaborate give-away devices that dispensed tons of glittering merchandise. But for every man who won a car and a refrigerator and a tv set there were millions who didn't. Gradually, over the years, prizes in the Quizzes grew from material commodities to more realistic items: power and prestige. And at the top, the final exalted post: dispenser of power—Quizmaster, and that meant running the Quiz itself.

The disintegration of the social and economic system had been slow, gradual, and profound. It went so deep that people lost faith in natural law itself. Nothing seemed stable or fixed; the universe was a sliding flux. Nobody knew what came next. Nobody could count on anything. Statistical prediction became popular... the very concept of cause and effect died out. People lost faith in the belief that they could control their environment; all that remained was probable sequence: good odds in a universe of random chance.

The theory of Minimax—the M-Game—was a kind of Stoic withdrawal, a nonparticipation in the aimless swirl in which people struggled. The M-game player never really committed himself; he risked nothing, gained nothing... and wasn't overwhelmed. He sought to hoard his pot and Strove to outlast the other players. The M-Game player sat waiting for the game to end; that was the best that could be hoped for.