He delved into a lower drawer, hauled out a graph. "The amplitude is more than twice as great and we haven't reached peak. What the peak will be I don't dare guess three separate rhythms, reinforcing."

She peered at the curves. "You mean that the laddy with the artic real estate deal is somewhere on this line?"

"He adds to it. And back here on the last crest are the flag- pole sitters and the goldfish swallowers and the Ponzi hoax and the marathon dancers and the man who pushed a pea- nut up Pikes Peak with his nose. You're on the new crest- or you will be when I add you in."

She made a face. "I don't like it."

"Neither do 1. But it's as clear as a bank statement. This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying, 'Wubba, wubba, wubba."'

She shivered. "Do you suppose I could have another drink? Then I'll go."

"I have a better idea. I owe you a dinner for answering questions. Pick a place and we'll have a c.o.c.ktail before."

She chewed her lip. "You don't owe me anything. And

I don't feel up to facing a restaurant crowd. I might . . . I might"

"No, you wouldn't," he said sharply. "It doesn't hit twice."

"You're sure? Anyhow, I don't want to face a crowd." She glanced at his kitchen door. "Have you anything to eat in there? I can cook."

"Urn, breakfast things. And there's a pound of ground round in the freezer compartment and some rolls. I some- times make hamburgers when I don't want to go out."

She headed for the kitchen. "Drunk or sober, fully dressed ornaked, I can cook. YouTI see."

He did see. Open-faced sandwiches with the meat mar- ried to toasted buns and the flavor garnished rather than suppressed by sc.r.a.ped Bermuda onion and thin-sliced dill, a salad made from things she had scrounged out of his re- frigerator, potatoes crisp but not vulcanized. They ate it on the tiny balcony, sopping it down with cold beer.

He sighed and wiped his mouth. "Yes, Meade, you can cook."

'"Some day III arrive with proper materials and pay you back. Then III prove it."

"You've already proved it. Nevertheless I accept. But I tell you three times, you owe me nothing."

"No? If you hadn't been a Boy Scout, I'd be in jail."

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 a.s.sembled 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 b.u.t.tons?"

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- 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 a.s.sociation 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?"