There had been harbingers.

Early in May of 2203 newsmachines were excited by a flight of white crows over Sweden. A series of un­explained fires demolished half the Oiseau-Lyre Hill, an industrial pivot of the system. Small stones fell near work-camp installations on Mars. At Batavia, the Directorate of the nine-planet Federation, a two-headed calf was born, a sign that something of incredible magni­tude was brewing.

Everybody speculated on what the forces of Nature in­tended. Everybody guessed, consulted, and argued about the bottle—the socialized instrument of chance. Directorate fortune-tellers were booked up weeks in advance.

But one man's harbinger is another man's event. The first reaction from Oiseau-Lyre to its limited catastrophe was to create total catastrophe for half its employees. Fealty oaths were dissolved, and a variety of research technicians were tossed out. Adrift, they became a further symptom of the approaching moment-of-importance for the system. Most of these technicians floundered and were lost among the masses. But not all.

Ted Benteley yanked his dismissal notice from the board and as he walked to his office he tore the notice to bits. His reaction differed from that of those around him; he was glad to have his oath severed. For thirteen years he had been trying to break his fealty oath with Oiseau-Lyre.

He locked his office door, snapped off his Inter-Plan Visual Industries Corp. screen, and did some thinking. It took only an hour to develop his plan of action.

At noon Oiseau-Lyre's outworker department returned his power card. His one chance out of six billion in the great lottery. His fragile possibility of being twitched by the random motion of the bottle to the Number One class position. Politically speaking, he was back thirty-three years; the power-card was coded at the moment of birth.