got." I kicked myself. My brother would not approve my helping the salesman along like that.

"Ah, yes! Certainly! When you have a hundred million, an extra million won't seem nearly as important to you as when you have twenty-five. We understand! Our technical expression for this is that the value of money to the investor is not a linear function of dollars. Logarithmic, some say—but that depends on the investor. Whatever relationship you select as a matter of fiscal policy. That is a part, a critical part, of the information which you give the Statistomat when you work out your time-dependent utility function, or risk function, as we call it for short."

"No risk! Can't afford risk!"

"Mr. Borch, I speak with confidence when I assure you that your estate can be subject to as little risk when its direction is assigned to the Statistomat as in any other way." I almost called him on that, until I reflected that he had really made only one specific claim: that you could feed just as excessively conservative a risk function into the Statistomat, if you were compulsively conservative, as you could into the G.C. Incomac. That might be true.

He went on, "Two of the soundest business research agencies in the country have been invited to inspect all our operations and have okayed us, not once but repeatedly: the S.E.C. and the F.T.C."

Darn right they've checked you, I thought—by law. And don't think they'll stop.

But it didn't do any good to spot a steep slant in his formulations. He was a salesman, after all. Just so he stayed clear of demonstrable falsehoods and "fraudulent tendencies" (as defined by the 1978 Commerce Act), he was within his rights.

He was staying clear. Some of his claims a stickler might want to check up on; but I wasn't going to bother any more to watch for things like that. I thought the stickler would find in each case that he'd been wasting his time. This little salesman seemed awfully good at skating just at the edge. He really knew his profession.

I didn't let my bafflement show. I just looked at him dully and made noises as if I was about to say something. I was, but I didn't know what.

There just had to be something bad about this Statistomat venture. Without (apparently) any new gimmick, a small new company was producing just as good a product as one of General Computers' best-managed divisions. How 

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