The bottle has twitched, and ambitious young 8-8 Ted Benteley signs on with Reese Verrick at a cusp of power, just as Verrick is ousted by a new Quizmaster, an unclassified Prestonite, Leon Cartwright. The new Quizmaster is unlikely to survive the televised Challenge, despite his official corps of teeper bodyguards, especially as Verrick has offered 1 million gold dollars to the assassin who gets him. But Verrick is not trusting to amateurs; he plans to dispatch Cartwright himself using the killer android, Pellig.

Meanwhile a battered GM oil freighter carries John Preston's disciples on pilgrimage to the limits of the solar system, in search of his prophesied 10th planet, the Flame Disc.

A substantially different version of the novel was published in the U.K. in 1956 as World of Chance.