Block is summoned by The Chairman to Mahmudabad, a religious center in India representative of the out-of-the-way places The Chairman now uses after the attempt on his life at The Crystal Palace. The Chairman's probability program has kicked out incidents leading to the inescapable conclusion that someone was attempting to destroy an entire generation, the generation The Chairman is counting on to occupy the administrative posts of The Representative World Government he is nursing into existence. Without that generation, The Representative World Government will die.

Block's search takes him deep into the heart of Romania where, on the eastern slopes of the Carpathians, Jeremy Jarred has set up a factory for the production of mysterious generators that use microcurrents, apparently to carry information. The Chairman, who has intelligence on the generators and suspects they might be involved in the incidents, realizes that the underlying process could provide the proof of concept for an entirely new generation of computers.

When Block traces the lead down, he discovers that Jarred has indeed been producing such generators, as well as the microstructures that could be influenced by the microcurrents and thus used to produce the rage that underlay the series of incidents in the target generation.

Worse, he finds that Jarred, who's reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in the world, has been stealing funds from the giant multinational program of reclamation in the Amazon that he heads. This finding hurtles Block to Jarred's gigantic palace at the mouth of the Amazon and an encounter that leads him to an act he never thought himself capable of performing.