Hedgeworth

Hedgeworth set down his clipboard, pushed up his spectacles, and read her results sheet. Then he read it again, more slowly, and the quills along his back lifted just slightly, the way they do when he has noticed something that everyone else walked past.

"Twenty-six won," he said. "And how many lost?"

"Eight," said Pip.

He counted softly, touching the tip of one claw to the paper. "Twenty-six and eight make thirty-four. But you tested forty deals. What became of the other six?"

Pip's tail wilted a little. "Oh. Those. The solver marked them not sure yet. It ran out of time before it finished them. I just, sort of, left them out."

"Ah," said Hedgeworth, and there was no scolding in it at all. "Then we have to be careful about the sentence we say."

He flipped his clipboard to a clean page and drew a single long bar across it. "Let's think about the six we don't know. Could all six secretly be wins, deals the solver simply didn't finish in time?"

Pip thought about it honestly. "I suppose they could."

"Could all six secretly be losses?"

"That too."

"Then the truth is somewhere between those two extremes," said Hedgeworth, "and we can find exactly where the edges are." He printed two numbers at the ends of his bar. "If every one of the six is really a loss, Rule B won twenty-six of forty. That's the lowest the truth could possibly be. If every one is really a win, Rule B won thirty-two of forty. That's the highest it could be. Those two numbers aren't guesses. They're guaranteed. The real answer cannot fall outside them."

He tapped the page with his pencil. "So the honest sentence is this: Rule B won at least twenty-six and at most thirty-two of these forty deals. As percentages, somewhere from sixty-five to eighty."

Pip frowned at the bar. "That's much less exciting than sixty-five percent."

"It is," Hedgeworth agreed. "But look closely at what sixty-five percent was quietly claiming. It pretended all six unknowns were losses. You don't know that. You left them out, and leaving something out is still a kind of claim. Suppose a friend runs a longer search tomorrow and three of those six turn out to be wins. Then your sixty-five was wrong the whole time, and everyone who repeated it was wrong too. My sentence would still be true. It will stay true no matter what the longer search finds. Nobody can ever catch a careful sentence out."

Pip read the sentence again. At least twenty-six. At most thirty-two. Slowly, it stopped feeling like a letdown. It began to feel like armor, a claim she could stand behind in front of anyone, forever.