Well, they weren't just making things up; there clearly was information that they had, that I wanted, but that they were initially reluctant to give me. At that point ultimate survival did not seem to be the issue, but I had no idea whether the answer to "how long" was going to be hours or months! Even if the statistics they had was something like N=5, that was still (mathematically) infinitely more than the N=0 that I had.