When hard times come to the party, dignity is one of the first guests to leave. - Charles Sheffield

That’s why we want it. Impossible gadgets are always the most valuable.

At stake with something more important than sex. At stake was life and death.

Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.
There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck—even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.
Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.
Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.