The girl's face was working, tears welling up in her eyes. "I had to--I had to win with them." "Then you knew you were doing it!" Jeff stared at her. "And when both of us started tampering, opposing each other, the probabilities governing the games went wild, completely wild." The girl was sobbing, her face in her hands. "I could always control it. It always worked. It was the only thing I could do that came out right. Everything else has always gone wrong." She sobbed like a baby, her shoulders shaking as she choked out great, racking sobs. Jeff leaned forward, almost cruelly, his eyes burning at her. "When did you find out you could ... make dice fall the way you wanted them to?" The girl shook her head helplessly. "I didn't know it. I didn't have any idea, until I came here. It was the only thing I could win at. Everything else I lost at. All my life I've been losing." "What have you been losing?" "Everything, everything--everything I touch turns black, goes sour, somehow." "But what, _what_?" Jeff leaned toward the girl, his voice hoarse. "Why did you come here? How did you get here?" The girl's sobs broke out again, her shoulders shaking in anguish. "I don't know, I don't know. Oh, I could take it, up to a limit, but then I couldn't stand it any more. Everything I tried went wrong; everyone that was near me went wrong too. Even the rackets wouldn't work with me around." "What rackets?" Her voice was weak and cracking. "Any of the rackets. I've been in a dozen, two dozen, ever since the war. Dad was killed in the first bombing of the Fourth War, when I was just a kid--twelve, thirteen, I can't remember now. He died trying to get us out of the city and through to the Defense area north of the Trenton section. Radiation burns got him, maybe pneumonia, I don't know. But it got Dad first and Mom later." She straightened up and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "We never did get out of the devastated area. We were killing dogs and cats for food for a while. Then when things did get straightened out, we ran into the inflation, the burned-out crops, the whole rat-race. The dirty breaks were coming in hard then. First we were guerrillas, then we were bushwhackers. Then we came into the city again and started shaking down the rich ones that came back from the mountains where they hid." "But you came in here," Jeff grated. "Why here, if you were doing so well in rackets?" "I wasn't. Can't you understand? The luck--it was running wrong, worse and worse all the time. And then I got hooked on dope. Narcotics control was all shot to pieces during the war; heroin was all over the place. But they knew I had this hard-luck jinx. They caught me on it, until I was hooked bad."