He gave me a suffering look. "Don't you suppose I tried that? I get indeterminate solutions—the machine can't find any curves that answer the data."
Pheola got her own answers out of that. "Then you don't know whether I am right about Maragon or not."
"We know that you may not be right, that's something," I reminded her. "Come on up to the apartment. This calls for some thinking."
Pheola protested that. "Please, Lefty," she said, "this has got me all shaken up. I'd like to be alone for a while. Will you come and get me for dinner?"
"Sure," I said.
Pheola was in better spirits by dinner time, and didn't exactly pick at her food. At any rate, she was ready to talk when we finally got back to my apartment.
"Did you understand what I said to Norty about the sine waves, Pheola?" I asked her.
She shook her head. Her education had not proceeded to calculus, and her trig was too far behind her for quick recollection of what sine waves were.
I drew some sketches of overlapping sine waves for her to explain what I thought was going on. "You are making predictions on this one path, and actual events are on another path, do you see?" I said. "When the two paths cross, the events that you predict and actual events are the same, and at those times you're right."