“Of course, you little idiot! Don’t you understand yet? The war is lost! Completely, irrevocably.”
Ellsner turned angrily to Branch. The general sighed and stood up.
“That’s right, Ellsner. The war is lost and every man in the fleet knows it. That’s what’s wrong with the morale. We’re just hanging here, waiting to be blasted out of existence.”
The fleets shifted and weaved. Thousands of dots floated in space, in twisted, random patterns.
Seemingly random.
The patterns interlocked, opened and closed. Dynamically, delicately balanced, each configuration was a planned move on a hundred thousand mile front The opposing dots shifted to meet the exigencies of the new pattern.
Where was the advantage? To the unskilled eye, a chess game is a meaningless array of pieces and positions. But to the players—the game may be already won or lost.
The mechanical players who moved the thousands of dots knew who had won—and who had lost.
“Now let’s all relax,” Branch said soothingly. “Margraves, mix us a couple of drinks. I’ll explain everything.” The colonel moved to a well-stocked cabinet in a corner of the room.
“I’m waiting,” Ellsner said.
“First, a review. Do you remember when the war was declared, two years ago? Both sides subscribed to the Holmstead Pact, not to bomb home planets. A rendezvous was arranged in space, for the fleets to meet.”
“That’s ancient history,” Ellsner said.
“It has a point. Earth’s fleet blasted off, grouped and went to the rendezvous.” Branch cleared his throat.
“Do you know the CPCs? The Configuration-Probability-Calculators? They’re like chess players, enormously extended. They arrange the fleet in an optimum attack-defense pattern, based on the configuration of the opposing fleet. So the first pattern was set.”
“I don’t see the need—” Ellsner started, but Margraves, returning with the drinks, interrupted him.
“Wait, my boy. Soon there will be a blinding light.”
“When the fleets met, the CPCs calculated the probabilities of attack. They found we’d lose approximately eighty-seven percent of our fleet, to sixty-five percent of the enemy’s. If they attacked, they’d lose seventy-nine percent, to our sixty-four. That was the situation as it stood then. By extrapolation, their optimum attack pattern—at that time—would net them a forty-five percent loss. Ours would have given us a seventy-two percent loss.”
“I don’t know much about the CPCs,” Ellsner confessed. “My field’s psych.” He sipped his drink, grimaced, and sipped again.
“Think of them as chess players,” Branch said. “They can estimate the loss probabilities for an attack at any given point of time, in any pattern. They can extrapolate the probable moves of both sides.
“That’s why battle wasn’t joined when we first met. No commander is going to annihilate his entire fleet like that.”
“Well then,” Ellsner said, “why haven’t you exploited your slight numerical superiority? Why haven’t you gotten an advantage over them?”
“Ah!” Margraves cried, sipping his drink. “It comes, the light!”
“Let me put it in the form of an analogy,” Branch said. “If you have two chess players of equally high skill, the game’s end is determined when one of them gains an advantage. Once the advantage is there, there’s nothing the other player can do, unless the first makes a mistake. If everything goes as it should, the game’s end is predetermined. The turning point may come a few moves after the game starts, although the game itself could drag on for hours.”
“And remember,” Margraves broke in, “to the casual eye, there may be no apparent advantage. Not a piece may have been lost.”
“That’s what’s happened here,” Branch finished sadly. “The CPC units in both fleets are of maximum efficiency. But the enemy has an edge, which they are carefully exploiting. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“But how did this happen?” Ellsner asked. “Who slipped up?”
“The CPCs have deduced the cause of the failure,” Branch said. “The end of the war was inherent in our take-off formation.”
“What do you mean?” Ellsner said, setting down his drink.
“Just that. The configuration the fleet was in, light-years away from battle, before we had even contacted their fleet. When the two met, they had an infinitesimal advantage of position. That was enough. Enough for the CPCs, anyhow.”
“If it’s any consolation,” Margraves put in, “it was a fifty-fifty chance. It could have just as well been us with the edge.”
“I’ll have to find out more about this,” Ellsner said. “I don’t understand it all yet.”
Branch snarled: “The war’s lost. What more do you want to know?”
Ellsner shook his head.
“Wilt snare me with predestination ‘round,” Margraves quoted, “and then impute my fall to sin?”
Lieutenant Nielson sat in front of the gunfire panel, his fingers interlocked. This was necessary, because Nielson had an almost overpowering desire to push the buttons.
The pretty buttons.
Then he swore, and sat on his hands. He had promised General Branch that he would carry on, and that was important. It was three days since he had seen the general, but he was determined to carry on. Resolutely he fixed his gaze on the gunfire dials.
Delicate indicators wavered and trembled. Dials measured distance, and adjusted aperture to range. The slender indicators rose and fell as the ship maneuvered, lifting toward the red line, but never quite reaching it.
The red line marked emergency. That was when he would start firing, when the little black arrow crossed the little red line.
He had been waiting almost a year now, for that little arrow. Little arrow. Little narrow. Little arrow. Little narrow.
Stop it.
That was when he would start firing.
Lieutenant Nielson lifted his hands into view and inspected his nails. Fastidiously he cleaned a bit of dirt out of one. He interlocked his fingers again, and looked at the pretty buttons, the black arrow, the red line.
He smiled to himself. He had promised the general. Only three days ago.
So he pretended not to hear what the buttons were whispering to him.
“The thing I don’t see,” Ellsner said, “is why you can’t do something about the pattern? Retreat and regroup, for example?”
“I’ll explain that,” Margraves said. “It’ll give Ed a chance for a drink. Come over here.” He led Ellsner to an instrument panel. They had been showing Ellsner around the ship for three days, more to relieve their own tension than for any other reason. The last day had turned into a fairly prolonged drinking bout.
“Do you see this dial?” Margraves pointed to one. The instrument panel covered an area four feet wide by twenty feet long. The buttons and switches on it controlled the movement of the entire fleet
“Notice the shaded area. That marks the safety limit. If we use a forbidden configuration, the indicator goes over and all hell breaks loose.”
“And what is a forbidden configuration?”
Margraves thought for a moment. “The forbidden configurations are those which would give the enemy an attack advantage. Or, to put it in another way, moves which change the attack-probability-loss picture sufficiently to warrant an attack.”
“So you can move only within strict limits?” Ellsner asked, looking at the dial.
“That’s right. Out of the infinite number of possible formation, we can use only a few, if we want to play safe. It’s like chess. Say you’d like to put a sixth row pawn in your opponent’s back row. But it would take two moves to do it. And after you move to the seventh row, your opponent has a clear avenue, leading inevitably to checkmate.
“Of course, if the enemy advances too boldly the odds are changed again, and we attack.”
“That’s our only hope,” General Branch said. “We’re praying they do something wrong. The fleet is in readiness for instant attack, if our CPC shows that the enemy has over-extended himself anywhere.”