The schedule was less a plan than a theory. When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they’d posed a yes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded more like “yes” than like “no.” They didn’t know that inside Sam’s mind was a dial, with zero on one end and one hundred on the other. All he had done, when he said yes, was to assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time.
