boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

Public Eye 395
never to feed the defense ammunition by trying to claim that an odds-on chance is
an unshakable fact. And you’ve still got the best possible personal identification in
two or more prints. You noticed that all the other fingers on those two men were
completely different. Chances on two prints coinciding are about one in forty quadrillion,
which is good enough for us. For a while. And we don’t have words for the
chances on all ten matching up. That works out to the sixtieth power of two times
the eightieth power of ten—if you want to see what it looks like, put down a one
and write ninety-eight zeroes after it.”
Captain Wark looked like himself again. Happily he raised his beer mug in a toast.
“I propose we drink to the identification man of the future Inter-Galactic Empire,”
he proclaimed, “who first discovers two sets of ten matching prints!”