Of course, it was not true. It would not be like that. It could never be like that except in the self-indulgent imagination of one of them, like Luhon. Only in imagination could pygmies join in battle with giants without being destroyed. The lucky chances that had saved them time and again in Luhon’s visualization of the attack in actual fact would not be. The Fighting Rowboat would get her chance to fight only at the price of almost certain destruction. That was something they all had to face.
Miles found himself facing it with a cold and settled determination. As the feeling of that determination solidified like some hard and massive diamond within the very core of his being, he felt the minds of Eff and Luhon linking with his in pattern once again, and he felt a comparable hardness of decision and determination in them.
Good. It was settled then. Now the center point of the three-mind pattern, Miles began instinctively to reach out. He reached out and drew into the pattern of three the fourth mind, that of Chak’ha, then that of Vouhroi, and so on down the line of weapons on each side of the ship, as the psychic pattern reached out to enclose all those aboard her.
The skill with which he did this was clearly another of the abilities that the Center Aliens had given him. He had not suspected that he had it until he used it. But now that he had used it, he became suddenly conscious of how little the Center Aliens had expected it to be used in this way before the moment in which the larger pattern of the total battle line should activate them all as part of itself. Now, however, the pattern had set itself up alone in the minds of them all as one unit aboard the ignored and overlooked tiny Fighting Rowboat. A fierce and angry pride kindled within the pattern, and Miles was not sure whether he was its kindling point or not. But as the heat of that feeling spread out among them all, it illuminated within each individual the same hard, diamondlike core of decision to fight, even at the cost of dying, that Miles had found in himself, Luhon, and Eff.
They were barbarians in the sight of the Center Aliens. A thousand bloody, primitive battle cries out of their near and savage ancestry clamored in the mind and memory of each one of the twenty-three who was now locked in the pattern. They clamored also in the brain of Miles, at the leading point of that trianglelike pattern. Out of that welter of recalled sound a single phrase he had once read leaped clear and plain into his mind. No proud and noble speech of the battlefield, but the grim and sordid chorus rising from the bloody sand of the arena. The onetime salute of the gladiators of imperial Rome to Rome’s Emperor: Morituri te salutamus!
“We who are about to die salute thee!”
11
The weapons did not warm up quickly. Somewhere in their combined physical and psychic mechanism was some sort of minimum operating level of potency. Until each weapon was warmed by the response of an intelligent mind to a certain value or effectiveness, it would not be capable of working, even if the Center Aliens should unlock the firing mechanism. It was three weeks before they had all the guns on the vessel capable of responding—in theory—when Miles should call upon them for mass fire.
Meanwhile, the actual approaching Silver Horde had been sighted. It was not yet visible on the vision screen in the control room of the Fighting Rowboat, but a pale ring of light circled the spot on the screen where it would first become visible. Even this much was like a stimulant to the twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat. They worked eagerly now with their weapons and the ship—dry-firing, for the weapons remained locked. But that fact made little difference. As far as the feedback of response from weapon to the one man handling it was concerned, the feeling was the same as if he had actually used it against one of the ships of the Silver Horde.
With Miles now in command, they also practiced actually lifting the ship from its platform, running half a dozen light-years out beyond the Battle Line, and there slashing at the computer-created enemy.
The computer element itself was evidently a smaller version of those large calculative mechanisms which they had been taught to understand were possessed by the Center Aliens in their enormous ships. It would be those larger computers which, calculating up until the last moment before the attack of the Horde, would decide whether opposition would be worthwhile or whether it would not be better for the warships assembled here to break up and run, to hide and try to survive—so that they might protect what few worlds were ignored, from stragglers and small hunting parties of the silver invaders. The small computer aboard the Fighting Rowboat, however, would have no hand in this decision. But it could be used like this to program an imaginary attack of the Silver Horde, calling on the crew of the spaceship to repulse it. More than this, it could rate their performance.
In the several weeks that followed that first takeoff, with all guns now operating, in dry-fire at least, the computer aboard the Fighting Rowboat charted a steady increase in the ability and effectiveness of the ship and crew. However, as the line marking their progress mounted on the chart, it began to level off. Soon it became plain that they were approaching a plateau of skill. Miles, Luhon, and Eff sat down together to figure out what might be the problem that was keeping them from progressing further.
“I don’t understand it,” said Luhon, as they sat together in the control room of the ship, in conference. The ship lay on its platform, and the rest of the crew had abandoned their weapons for rest after a long session of dry-firing and simulated battle. “We’ve all handled those weapons at one time or another. You can feel there’s no theoretical limit to the psychic energies those weapons can take from us. There couldn’t be, because whatever we can feed into them, it’s going to be many times multiplied when the full psychic pattern of the total Battle Line locks in and takes over.”
“It’s plain enough,” Eff put in. “It’s not the weapons that’re at fault. It has to be us. For some reason it looks as if we’re reaching the limit of our capabilities. But I don’t believe that.”
“I don’t either,” said Miles thoughtfully. “As I understand it, from the information the Center Aliens put in me when they changed me—check me on this, both of you—any individual’s psychic power is like the power of any one of his muscles. Continual exercise should increase psychic power, just as it increases muscle power. All right, eventually maybe a limit has to be reached, depending on individual capacity, but it doesn’t feel to me that we ought to be reaching ours this quickly. Do you two feel the same?”
“It checks,” said Luhon briefly. His pointed ears twitched restlessly. “If those Center Aliens were halfway decent, we could get in touch with them and ask them what’s wrong. But they wouldn’t be interested in helping us.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” said Miles thoughtfully.
The other two looked at him curiously.
“What we may be having trouble with”—Miles hesitated—“may be outside their experience. Either because it’s something they’ve never run up against. Or because it’s something they had so far back in their own history that they’ve forgotten what it was like. Look—these Center Aliens can get many more times the effectiveness out of one of those weapons than one of us can. The one I talked to told me that he had more power in himself than all of us on this ship put together.”
“I can believe it,” said Luhon. “But I don’t see any help in knowing that.”