Year of the Jackpot 10

ments were good for. Compared with astronomy the other
sciences were mere carpentry and kitchen chemistry.
"I found there were nooks and crannies in astronomy
where individual numbers won't do, where you have to go
over to statistics, and I became even more interested. I
joined the Variable Star Association and I might have gone
into astronomy professionally, instead of what I'm in now
business consultationif I hadn't gotten interested in
something else."
'"Business consultation'?" repeated Meade. "Income tax
work?"
"Oh, nothat's too elementary. I'm the numbers boy for a
firm of industrial engineers. I can tell a rancher exactly how
many of his Hereford bull calves will be sterile. Or I tell a
motion picture producer how much rain insurance to carry
on location. Or maybe how big a company in a particular
line must be to carry its own risk in industrial accidents.
And 1m right, 1m always right."
"Wait a minute. Seems to me a big company would have
to have insurance."
"Contrariwise. A really big corporation begins to resemble
a statistical universe."
"Hub?"
"Never mind. I got interested in something elsecycles.
Cycles are everything, Meade. And everywhere. The tides.
The seasons. Wars. Love. Everybody knows that in the
spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to what the girls
never stopped thinking about, but did you know that it runs
in an eighteen-year-plus cycle as well? And that a girl born
at the wrong swing of the curve doesn't stand nearly as good
a chance as her older or younger sister?"
"What? Is that why I'm a doddering old maid?"
"You're twenty-five?" He pondered. "Maybebut your
chances are picking up again; the curve is swinging up. Any-
how, remember you are just one statistic; the curve applies
to the group. Some girls get married every year anyhow."
"Don't call me a statistic."
"Sorry. And marriages match up with acreage planted to
wheat, with wheat cresting ahead. You could almost say
that planting wheat makes people get married."
"Sounds silly."
"It is silly. The whole notion of cause-and-effect is proba-
bly superstition. But the same cycle shows a peak in house
building right after a peak in marriages, every time."
"Now that makes sense."
"Does it? How many newlyweds do you know who can