Montaro Caine, CEO of the Fitzer Corporation, is losing control of the company he built. At this moment of crisis, a man and woman appear at his office with a coin of unknown provenance, composed of a metal unknown on Earth. Montaro immediately recognizes it as the companion of a coin he analyzed as a graduate student working in a lab at MIT, which was later returned to its unidentified owner. But the value of the coin lies not in its monetary worth but in its hold on the people who come into contact with it.