“Okay, good. Next we looked at the life-span statistics of individuals lucky enough under current procurement and distribution protocols to get a new organ, be it a lung, a heart, a liver, a kidney, or a pancreas, depending on which degenerative disease is involved. We found that getting an organ alters these people’s life expectancies to a marked degree. Understand that we already factored in standard organ replacement rates in the preliminary data that we all approved, and it was at that time a small variable. But the new circumstances, the potential new circumstances, I should say, caused us to drill down into those statistics further and find different research that previously wasn’t relevant.”

Henry paused again to take a drink. Edmund was fit to burst.

“There are newer statistics which show how well new organs work for patients over a long period. The older figures implied that organ recipients still had the propensity, whatever it was, to affect the new organ and often adversely. But to a greater extent than we initially would have expected, new organs, or at least a large percentage of them, do very well over many years provided it’s a good match. Of course newer antirejection drugs have helped as well. In many or most cases, ten to fifteen years of life expectancy can be added to patients’ lives. In lay terms, it appears that you can put a new radiator in a beat-up car engine, and it doesn’t matter so much how you drive. The radiator’s going to hold up.

“We applied these newly developed statistics to the bell curves of LifeDeals’ policyholders and there’s no way around it—the implications are pretty catastrophic for cash flow if a percentage of policyholders get new organs. The higher the percentage, of course, the more catastrophic the effect.”

“What percentage?” Edmund barked.

“Well, the problem seems to be that the cash flow issue starts almost immediately with just a small shift to the right. Just a few percentage points.”

“What do you mean by ‘a few’? Five? Ten?”

“Er, five’s not good, ten would be, as I said, catastrophic.”

“So we’d need five to ten percent of diabetics to get a new pancreas,” said Edmund. “What are the chances of that happening?”

There was silence.

“These are not rich people. They won’t be able to afford it. It’s fucking pie in the sky.”