“It suggests something,” said Miles.
“What?” asked Eff.
“Well,” said Miles, “obviously, we’re different from the Center Aliens. Maybe it’s the difference that’s tripping us up. Suppose we ask ourselves just how we are different.”
Eff gave his short bark of a laugh.
“We’re barbarians,” he said. “They told us that.”
“That’s right,” said Miles. “So maybe it’s some barbarian quality of ours that’s getting in the way of our doing better with these weapons.” He glanced from Eff to Luhon and back again. “What do you think?”
“Well,” Luhon began slowly, “we don’t have their knowledge obviously. But as I understand it, it isn’t knowledge that feeds the psychic force. It’s”—again he hesitated—“something like the spirit in the individual.”
“Spirit, that’s it! The whole emotional pattern we have!” said Miles. He looked closely at Luhon. “You see what I think I see, in that direction?”
Luhon’s ears flicked. He stared back without answering.
“I don’t see anything at all,” put in Eff.
“Wait a minute,” said Luhon slowly. “Miles, you mean that something about our emotional pattern is holding us back?” Abruptly he stiffened in his chair. “Of course—they don’t react the way we do! They don’t lose their tempers. They don’t…”
His voice trailed off thoughtfully.
“That’s what I mean,” said Miles. “We get wound up, self-intoxicated on our own emotion, when we fight. The Center Aliens don’t.” He paused and glanced at Eff and Luhon again, holding them both in his gaze. “Maybe our trouble’s just that—intoxication, this battle fury of ours that keeps us from making better use of the weapons.”
“But if that’s it—” Luhon broke off sharply. “What’re we going to do about it?”
“Practice,” answered Miles harshly. “That’s what we can do. Practice using the weapons without getting worked up about it. I know it won’t be easy to do,” he went on as Luhon opened his mouth to speak again, “but we can try—and maybe we can break through what’s blocking us this way.”
“There’s always the possibility,” Eff put in, “that the plateau of effectiveness we’re on is something temporary. Maybe after staying at a constant level for a little while, we’ll break out and start another stretch of improvement.”
“The Silver Horde has already been indicated on the far instruments,” retorted Miles bluntly. “Do you want to mark time and take the chance?”
Eff hesitated, then slowly shook his head.
“You’re right, Miles,” said Luhon. “Time’s too short. We’ve got to experiment. When do you want to try this business of operating the weapons without emotional involvement?”
“Right now,” said Miles evenly. “And I’ll tell you why. Right now we’re all dead tired. It should make it that much easier to damp out our emotional reactions.”
Eff laughed. Luhon spun about and sounded the signal throughout the ship that summoned all crew members to their battle stations. The gray-skinned alien gave the slight body twitch that was his symptom of amusement.
“They’ll enjoy this,” he said. He began announcing Miles’ plan to the ship.
Meanwhile, Miles was calling on the computer element of the little ship for another simulated attack of the Silver Horde. It was not merely the rest of the crew that was weary. He, Luhon, and Eff were weary as well. As he lifted the ship from the platform and headed out into the interstellar darkness, he deliberately relaxed the tension that searching for an answer to their problem had built within him, and he felt weariness flood through him like a depressant drug.
It was several hours before they brought the ship back to her platform and had a chance to examine the computer’s rating of their performance. It was down, of course, from what they had been scoring, but the interesting thing was that it was several points above what the computer calculated it should be with their weariness fed in as part of the performance equation.
Triumph fought with exhaustion within Miles. He heard Luhon’s voice beside him and turned.
“Friend Miles,” said Luhon, his eyes burning into Miles, “I think you’ve found the answer!”
Wearily they straggled off to their bunks. And the whole ship rested.
The next emotionless trial run that they held after that was a fiasco. The rested minds of the twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat could not contain their emotional reactions, and the results were wildly spotty—highly successful in the case of some individuals, disastrous in the case of some others. But they kept at it until they had once again reached the stage of weariness they had reached on the first occasion.
With weariness, the individual performances evened out. But the total performance was still less than their previous best. Stubbornly Miles clung to the possibility that, with practice, they would be able to hold their emotions down and break free of the plateau after sufficient practice.
So it finally turned out. By the time the Silver Horde was close enough to show as a small bright dot in the midst of the control room vision screen, the general performance of the twenty-three was well above the earlier plateau and still climbing.
By the time the Silver Horde was identifiable as a small crescent shape in the control room screen the ship’s computer showed that they had tripled their fighting effectiveness from what it had been at the plateau level.
It was time, thought Miles, for the Center Aliens to be told. Once the Center Aliens saw what the Fighting Rowboat could do, they could no longer reasonably withhold permission for the little ship to join the vessels actually engaging the Silver Horde.
He left word with Luhon of what he intended to do, took the small ship that was parked on the platform, and once more headed in toward the center of the Battle Line.
This time he had not made it even to within sight of the first great globe-shaped ship of the Center Aliens before one of them appeared beside him in the other seat of the little craft he was piloting.
“You have been told once,” said the Center Alien calmly, but with a cold note in his voice, “that you were not to leave the immediate neighborhood of your ship and its platform. Such incursions must cease—”
He broke off abruptly and gazed steadily at Miles.
“Oh, I see,” he went on in the same calm tone. “So you think that this situation now is somehow different?”
“Not only different but entirely new—for you, as well as us!” said Miles.
“No,” said the Center Alien. “That is not possible. It is symptomatic of your lack of knowledge that you think that you might have discovered or produced anything outside our knowledge.”
“We’ve become an effective fighting ship,” said Miles slowly, unyielding. “We only ask you to come and see for yourselves.”
The alien gazed at him for a moment without speaking.
“Suppose this were true,” said the Center Alien. “Suppose that you actually had done the impossible and had qualified for a place among the fighting ships. Do you realize that if you joined in the actual battle, there would be no real possibility your ship could survive even the first contact with the Horde?”
“We understand that,” said Miles.
“But still you want to throw your lives away in a gesture that can have little or no profit for you, let alone for the rest of the galaxy?” replied the Center Alien. “That in itself is a reasonless, emotion-laden reaction to a situation too large for you to comprehend. Since your basic reaction is flawed by emotion, how can any improvement that has come out of it be superior to that emotion?”
Miles opened his mouth, but there was no answer immediately ready to his tongue.
“You see,” said the Center Alien, and under his hands the small boat turned about and began to head back once more toward the end of the line where the Fighting Rowboat waited, “you see yourself how you have stated an impossibility. A creature without wings may practice jumping in the air and flapping his limbs to the point where he can jump higher and flap harder—but this is not flying and never will be.”