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"That's okay, Billy," Bob Ripley said. "We'll come to yours."
"Thirty men in 1961, ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two with a median age of twenty-six. Thirty-two years later, how many would you expect to find alive?"
"I don't know."
"Neither did I," Hildebrand said. "After the di
"But it seemed to me we were way over the probabilities. My mind kept coming up with different explanations, and I decided the first thing to do was find out if my sense of things was accurate. So I called up a fellow I know who's always trying to sell me more life insurance and told him I had an actuarial problem for him. I ran the numbers for him and asked him what percentage of deaths you'd expect over that span of time in a group like that. He said he'd make a couple of calls and get back to me. Take a guess, Matt. How many deaths would you expect in a group of thirty?"
"I don't know. Eight or ten?"
"Four or five. There ought to be twenty-five of us left and instead we're down to fourteen. What does that say to you?"
"I'm not sure," I said, "but it certainly gets my attention. The first thing I'd do is ask your friend another question."
"That's just what I did. Tell me your question."
"I'd ask him to gauge the significance of a sample with three or four times the expected number of deaths."
He nodded. "That was my question, and he had to call somebody to find out. The answer that came back to me was that sixteen deaths out of thirty was remarkable, but it wasn't significant. Do you know what he meant by that?"
"No."
"According to him, the sample's too small for any result to be significant. We could have one hundred percent surviving or one hundred percent dying and it wouldn't really signify anything. Now if we had the same percentage in a substantially larger group, then it would mean something from an actuarial standpoint. See, actuaries like large numbers. The bigger the group, the more they can read into the statistics. If we had a hundred forty survivors in a group of three hundred, that would have some significance. Fourteen hundred out of three thousand, that would be even more significant. A hundred forty thousand out of three hundred thousand, that would begin to suggest that the sample was composed of people who lived inChernobyl, or whose mothers took DES during pregnancy. It would really set the sirens wailing."
"I see."
"I've had some experience in direct-mail advertising. We tested everything. You have to. If we had a list of half a million names, and we did a test mailing to a thousand of those names, we knew we'd get the same response ratio within a point or two from the entire list. But we knew better than to send out a test mailing to thirty names, because the results wouldn't mean anything."
"Where does that leave you?"
"It leaves me impressed with the percentages, and never mind the size of the sample. I can't get past the fact that statistically we should have suffered four or five deaths and instead we took a hit three or four times as heavy. What do you make of it, Matt?"
I gave it some thought. "I don't know anything about statistics," I said.
"No, but you're an ex-cop and a detective. You must have instincts."
"I suppose I do."
"What do they tell you?"
"To look for special circumstances. You mentioned one man who died inVietnam. Were there any other combat deaths?"
"No, just Jim Severance."
"How about AIDS?"
He shook his head. "We had two gay members, although I don't believe anybody knew they were gay when the chapter was founded. I wonder if that would have made a difference. In 1961? Yes, I'm sure it would have, and when we stood up and recounted the most interesting fact about ourselves at that first meeting, that particular fact went unmentioned. But later on both of the fellows saw fit to tell the group about their sexuality. I don't know when those revelations burst upon us, but we were still meeting at Cu
"Oh?"
"They found him in his apartment inChelsea. He lived just around the corner from Cu
"Yes."
"After I spoke to my insurance man, I spent a few nights sitting up late and trying to concoct explanations. The first, of course, is sheer chance. There might be long odds against such a high number of deaths, but any gambler will tell you that long shots come in all the time. In the long run you'll go broke betting on them, but what is it they say? In the long run we're all dead, which, when you stop and think of it, is one of the club's underlying principles." He picked up his glass, but he still didn't drink the damn thing. "Where was I?"
"Sheer chance."
"Yes. No way to rule it out, but I set it aside and looked for other explanations. One that occurred to me was that the group was composed of men with a strong predisposition toward early death. It seemed at least arguable that natural selection might have operated to steer such persons into our club. A person genetically destined for an early grave might be aware of his fate on some unconscious level, and might thus be more likely than the next fellow to accept an invitation to join a group preoccupied with death. I don't know whether or not I believe in fate, it probably depends when you ask me, but I certainly believe in genetic predisposition. So that's one possibility."
"Tell me some of the others."
"Well, another one that came to me is a little more mind-over-matter. It strikes me as possible that the club itself could have the effect of increasing its members' chances of dying young."
"How?"
"By focusing our attention on our own mortality to an u
"I suppose it could." I wanted more coffee, and I'd barely raised my head to look around for the waiter when he hurried over to fill my cup. I said, "Homer Champney sounds like a fellow with a pretty strong life urge."
"He was a remarkable man. He had more energy and zest for living well into his nineties than most men ever have. And don't forget he was of a generation that didn't live as long as we do today, or stay as active. A man our age was supposed to be ready for a rocking chair, assuming he still had a heartbeat."