Year of the Jackpot 9

Breen shook his head. "The police have orders to keep it
quiet at all coststo keep it from growing. You saw that.
And, my dear, you weren't a person to me at the time. I
didn't even see your face; I"
"You saw plenty else!"
"Truthfully, I didn't look. You were just aa statistic."
She toyed with her knife and said slowly, "I'm not sure,
but I think I've just been insulted. In all the twenty-five
years that I've fought men off, more or less successfully, I've
been called a lot of namesbut a 'statistic'why I ought to
take your slide rule and beat you to death with it."
"My dear young lady"
"1m not a lady, that's for sure. But I'm not a statistic."
"My dear Meade, then. I wanted to tell you, before you
did anything hasty, that in college I wrestled varsity
middleweight."
She grinned and dimpled. "That's more the talk a girl
likes to hear. I was beginning to be afraid you had been
assembled in an adding machine factory. Potty, you're
rather a dear."
"If that is a diminutive of my given name, I like it. But if
it refers to my waist line, I resent it."
She reached across and patted his stomach. "I like your
waist line; lean and hungry men are difficult. If I were cook-
ing for you regularly, I'd really pad it."
"Is that a proposal?"
"Let it lie, let it liePotty, do you really think the whole
country is losing its buttons?"
He sobered at once. "It's worse than that."
"Hub?"
"Come inside. Ill show you." They gathered up dishes
and dumped them in the sink, Breen talking all the while.
"As a kid I was fascinated by numbers. Numbers are pretty
things and they combine in such interesting configurations.
I took my degree in math, of course, and got a ]'ob as a
junior actuary with Midwestem Mutualthe insurance out-
fit. That was funno way on earth to tell when a particular
man is going to die, but an absolute certainty that so many
men of a certain age group would die before a certain date.
The curves were so lovelyand they always worked out.
Always. You didn't have to know why; you could predict
with dead certainty and never know why. The equations
worked; the curves were right.
"I was interested in astronomy too; it was the one science
where individual figures worked out neatly, completely,
and accurately, down to the last decimal point the instru-