The partners were in an unfamiliar place, a territory the modelers hadn't explored. Stavis felt the partners had gotten to "a kind of volatility they didn't understand." Theoretically, the odds against a loss such as August's had been prohibitive; such a debacle was, according to the mathematicians, an event so freakish as to he unlikely to occur even once over the entire life of the Universe and even over numerous repetitions of the Universe.