"That's all you carry?" Eleanor indicated the array of charms dangling between her bare breasts. "I don't understand how people get by with only one charm." Her green eyes danced. "Maybe you don't get by. Maybe that's why you have bad luck."

"I have a high positive scale," Benteley began irritably. "And I have two other charms. Somebody gave me this."

"Oh?" She leaned close and examined it intently. "It looks like the kind of charm a woman would buy. Expensive, but a little too flashy."

"Is it true," Benteley asked her, "that Verrick doesn't carry any charms?"

"That's right," Wakeman spoke up. "He doesn't need them. When the bottle twitched him to One he was already class 6-3. Talk about luck—that man has it. He's risen all the way to the top, exactly as you see on the children's edutapes. Luck leaks out of his pores."

"I've seen people touch him hoping to get some of it," Eleanor said, with shy pride. "I don't blame them. I've touched him myself, many times."

"What good has it done you?" Wakeman asked quietly; he indicated the girl's discolored temples.

"I wasn't born at the same time and place as Reese," Eleanor answered shortly.

"I don't hold with astro-cosmology," Wakeman said calmly. "I think luck can be won or lost. It comes in streaks." Speaking slowly and intently to Benteley, he continued, "Verrick may have it now, but that doesn't mean hell always have it. They—" He gestured vaguely upward toward the floor above, "They like to see some kind of balance." He added hastily, "I'm not a Christian or anything like that, you understand. I know it's all random chance." He breathed

a complicated smell of peppermint and onions into Benteley's face. "But everybody gets his chance, someday. And the high and mighty always fall."