The Colonel's eyes hardened. "You were with a crowd that was trying to
talk the government into junking the Rocket projects--right?"
"That's right. We predicted the impending crash even then--"
"Hogwash," said the Colonel. "A lot of statistical blather."
"Unfortunately, statistics is a scientific technique, and our
predictions were not blather. We predicted the crash almost to the day.
We said the 30th of July, 1995. We had no way of predicting the Iranian
oil decision, which happened last April. That precipitated the crisis
by a month, so it came on the first of July instead of the thirtieth.
But socio-mathematics were far beyond the blather stage then. We hope
we can still salvage something from the country now."