Miles found his voice at last. His voice and his argument.
“I see,” he said, “you’re never wrong—not even on a statistical basis?”
“Of course—on a statistical basis, we can be wrong,” answered the Center Alien.
“Then there has to be a chance you’re wrong about us now,” said Miles.
“Of course,” replied the Center Alien, “there is always a chance—but a chance too small to merit practical consideration.”
“Still,” said Miles grimly, “no matter how small that chance is, with the galaxy facing a fight for its life, you owe it to yourself and us at least to examine what we’ve done, to see if even that infinitely small chance may not be fact.”
The Center Alien continued to pilot the little ship onward, back toward the end of the line. But he did not seem to Miles to be thinking so much as communicating with some one or ones elsewhere.
Without warning, Miles found himself no longer in the little ship. Instead, he and a Center Alien in human form, who looked like the same one who had just been sitting beside him in the small craft, now stood in an area—it was hard to call it a room—that was walled and floored and ceilinged with shimmering yellow light. Directly before them in one wall a milky blue and white globe seemed either to float or to spin at an incredible speed.
It hurt Miles’ eyes to watch the globe. He looked away toward the steadily flowing yellow light of the wall, which was more bearable. Swarming in suddenly upon the heightened perceptivity that the aliens had given him came an impingement, a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by many minds. All at once he realized that he was inside—literally inside—one of the huge ships of the Center Aliens.
“You will look at—” The last word said by the Center Alien had meanings beyond the ability of Miles’ mind to grasp. It translated vaguely in his mind as words like “eye” or “window.” But he understood that it was the globe to which the Center Alien referred.
He forced his eyes back to the globe, which caught and held his gaze with a strength and intensity that were so great as to be almost painful. He felt himself, his mind, his memories, everything about him, being some way examined.
For a long moment the examination continued. Then, abruptly, it was over. He found himself free to look again at the yellow, flowing light of the walls, which he did gratefully.
“It’s settled then,” said the voice of the Center Alien beside him. “You will be given the observational test for which you’ve asked.”
Abruptly he was back in the small ship. The Center Alien sat beside him again, and they were still headed back toward the end of the line where the Fighting Rowboat waited on her platform.
No, they were not headed back. Looking sideways at the Center Alien beside him and feeling the emotional response under the illusory appearance of humanity that clothed him, Miles sensed that this was a different individual from the Center Alien who had first picked him up.
Miles opened his mouth to comment on this and then closed it again. They rode in silence back to the platform where the Fighting Rowboat waited.
However, when they left the small ship and Miles started up the ladder into the Fighting Rowboat, he became conscious of the fact that the Center Alien was not following him. Turning about, halfway up the ladder, he saw the Center Alien standing still on the platform about a dozen steps off.
“Go ahead,” said the Center Allen. “I will observe from here.”
Miles went on up the ladder and closed the entrance port of the Fighting Rowboat behind him. The air of tension and excitement within struck him like a physical blow. He stalked rapidly through the lounge and into the control room, where Eff and Luhon were already in their seats. Their faces looked a question at him, but he did not answer that question to them, alone. Instead, he sat down in his own seat before the central console and, touching a communications control, spoke to everyone aboard the ship.
“Calm down,” he said. “All of you, calm yourselves. We can’t put on any demonstration, keyed up the way we are now. I’m giving everybody two minutes to damp down his emotions. Remember we’re under observation here, and we’re going to be judged from the moment we lift off the platform.”
He dropped his finger from the control and sat back limply in his chair, trying to relax. He did not look to either right or left at his two underofficers. Before him on the console, a chronometer marked off those secondlike sections of time which made up intervals roughly analogous to Earth minutes.
As he sat there, Miles could feel his own tension lowering like the red line of the spirit level in a thermometer plunged into ice water on a warm day. Not only that, but—he could feel now—the general air of tension in the vessel was also slipping away. At the end of two minutes those aboard the Fighting Rowboat were almost calm.
Miles touched the controls, and the ship lifted. For a moment he wondered how the Center Alien was going to observe them when they would be light-years out from the Battle Line in intergalactic darkness. But that was the Center Alien’s worry. He dismissed the thought and put his whole mind to handling the craft.
The emotion of the twenty-three aboard the ship had evaporated now. There was left only the hard purpose—the hard, cold purpose—of their intentness on the exercise. The Fighting Rowboat was now a good dozen light-years out in front of the rest of the Battle Line. Miles pressed a control on the console before him. The illusory Silver Horde ships that were the first phase of their battle exercise were produced by the computer on the screen before him and on the screens that were the transparent bubbles enclosing the weapons lining the ship’s sides.
Miles’ hands leaped over the console before him, and the hands of Luhon and Eff followed him on either side as the small ship flung itself against its smaller, imaginary enemies, some fifteen or twenty of the Silver Horde’s scout ships backed up by one of the ships of the Horde’s second line, which was several times as large and with many times the firepower. As they closed with the imaginary enemy under Miles’ direction, the Fighting Rowboat altered direction, using her mobility, which was greater than that of the second-line Horde ship, to keep a screen of Horde scout ships always between herself and the superior weapons of the second-line ship. As she did so, the Fighting Rowboat’s own weapons flashed outward, killing off the enemy scout ships one by one.
Then, when the number of enemy scout ships was down to only four, the Fighting Rowboat turned and fled, having done a maximum amount of damage to the ships she was able to kill, and having held up for a number of precious moments a larger ship that she was not able to destroy. In theory, the Horde second-line ship, delayed in this way, should have been a sitting duck for the larger ships on the galactic side that were able to outgun it. The total effect of the exercise had demonstrated, in theory, an effectiveness in the Fighting Rowboat that was better than three times what she had possessed originally.
Glowing with inner triumph, Miles turned the small vessel back toward the platform. Inside him was a sort of quiet pride for the other twenty-two aboard. Not one of them had broken emotional discipline. They had remained as cool-headed and objective about their fighting as—Miles thought—any Center Alien would have done.