“You don’t understand.”

“Probably not. But I really want to. I’m a relatively recent arrival, but you’ve been here for over three years. Why do you stay?”

“You have the reason sitting right there on your wall.” He pointed to the hand-embroidered sign. “I agree with Niels Bohr, prediction is difficult. What will happen in the next ten years, or the next fifty? We don’t know. I just happen to think that it’s the most important question in the solar system.”

“I’m with you. And maybe the hardest.”

Kate said nothing more, but sat waiting patiently until Alex at last took a huge gulp from the tumbler, swallowed hard, and burst out, “The models in use when I came here were useless. They couldn’t even predict the past. They’d been run over and over for the years leading up to the Great War, and they never saw it coming until the Armageddon Defense Line was gone and Oberth City was destroyed, and by then it was too late.”

“What about your models?”

“You saw today’s run. You said the right word: garbage.”

“But isn’t that a problem of inputs, and of computer limitations? You designed the models to run with more than ten billion Faxes. That should be enough to include a simulation of every individual in the System, even if you let the prediction run for a whole century. You’ve always been forced to aggregate to a million or less. What do you think of the models themselves?”

“They’re pretty good.”

“I think I ought to call that Lie Number Two. I’m not able to judge what you’re doing, but before I took this job I talked to people whose judgment I respect. I also love modest men, but tell me true. Don’t you have an entirely new theoretical basis for predictive modeling?”