The Year of the Jackpot Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ll show you.”
    T hey 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 job as a junior actuary with Midwestern Mutual—the insurance outfit. That was fun. No 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 lovely—and 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 that the instruments 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 consultation—if I hadn’t gotten interested in something else.”
    “‘Business consultation?’” repeated Meade. “Income tax work?”
    “Oh, no. That’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 can 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 I’m right. I’m 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.”
    “Huh?”
    “Never mind. I got interested in something else—cycles. 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?”
    “Is
that
why I’m still a doddering old maid?”
    “You’re twenty-five?” He pondered. “Maybe, but your chances are improving again; the curve is swinging up. Anyhow, remember you are just one statistic; the curve applies to the group. Some girls get married every year.”
    “Don’t call me a statistic,” she repeated firmly.
    “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 probably superstition. But the same cycle shows a peak in house building right after a peak in marriages.”
    “Now that makes sense.”
    “Does it? How many newlyweds do you know who can afford to build a house? You might as well blame it on wheat acreage. We don’t know
why;
it just
is
.”
    “Sun spots, maybe?”
    “You can correlate Sun spots with stock prices, or Columbia River salmon, or woman’s skirts. And you are just as much justified in blaming short skirts for Sun spots as you are in blaming Sun spots for salmon. We don’t know. But the curves go on just the same.”
    “But there has to be some
reason
behind it.”
    “Does there? That’s mere assumption. A fact has no ‘why.’ There it stands, self-demonstrating. Why did you take your clothes off today?”
    She frowned. “That’s not fair.”
    “Maybe not. But I want to show you why I’m worried.”
    H e went into the bedroom,