For a moment he stood looking down on the slack face. A youngster, hardly out of his teens; there was something strangely innocent about him as he slept. About this whole world. They were too kind here, they didn’t belong in a universe of wolves.
He had no doubt they would fight bravely and skillfully. Dromm would have to pay for her conquest. But the age of heroes was past. War was not an art, it was a science, and a set of giant computers joylessly chewing an involved symbolism told ships and men what to do. Given equal courage and equally intelligent leadership, it was merely arithmetic that the numerically superior fleet would win.
No time to lose! He spun on his heel and crouched over the door. His instruments traced out its circuits, a diamond drill bit into plastic, a wire shorted a current…the door opened for him and he went into a hollow darkness of corridors.
Lightly, even in the clumsy armor, he made his way toward the main file room. Once he stopped. His instruments sensed a black-light barrier and it took him a quarter of an hour to neutralize it. But thereafter he was in among the cabinets.
They were not locked, and his flashbeam picked out the categories held in each drawer. Swiftly, then, he took the spools relating to ships, bases, armament, disposition…he ignored the codes, which would be changed anyway when the burglary was discovered. The entire set went into a small pouch such as the men of Kwan-Yin carried, and he had a micro-reader at the hotel.
The lights came on.
Before his eyes had adjusted to that sudden blaze, before he was consciously aware of action, Ganch’s drilled reflexes had gone to work. His faceplate clashed down, gauntlets snapped shut around his hands, and a Mark IV blaster was at his shoulder even as he whirled to meet the intruders.
They were a score, and their gay holiday attire was somehow nightmarish behind the weapons they carried. Wayland was in the lead, harshness on his face, and Christabel at his back. The rest Ganch did not recognize; they must be naval officers but—He crouched, covering them, a robot figure cased in a centimeter of imperviousness.
“So.” Wayland spoke quietly, a flat tone across the silence. “I wondered—Ganch, I suppose/1
The Dromman did not answer. He heard a thin fine singing as his helmet absorbed the stun beam Chris was aiming at it.
“When my men reported you had been ten hours in the joyhouse, I thought it best to check up: first your quarters and next…” Wayland paused. “I didn’t think you’d penetrate this far. But it could only be you, Ganch, so you may as well surrender.”
The spy shook his head, futile gesture inside that metal box he wore. “No. It is you who are trapped,” he answered steadily. “I can blast you all before your beams work through my armor…Don’t move!”
“You wouldn’t escape,” said Wayland. “The fight would trip alarms bringing the whole Fort Canfield garrison down on you.” Sweat beaded his forehead. Perhaps he thought of his niece and the gun which could make her a blackened husk; but his own smallbore flamer held firm.
“This means war,” said Chris. “We’ve wondered about Dromm for a long time. Now we know.” Tears glimmered in her eyes. “And it’s so senseless!”
Ganch laughed without much humor. “Impasse,” he said. “I can kill you, but that would bring my own death. Be sure, though, that the failure of my mission will make little difference.”
Wayland stood brooding for a while. “You’re congenitally unafraid to die, he said at last. “The rest of us prefer to live, but will die if we must. So any decision must be made with a view to planetary advantage.”
Ganch’s heart sprang within his ribs. He had lost, unless—
He still had an even chance.
“You’re a race of gamblers,” he said. “Will you gamble now?”
“Not with our planet,” said Chris.
“Let me finish! I propose we toss a coin, shake dice, whatever you like that distributes the probabilities evenly. If I win, I go free with what I’ve taken here. You furnish me safe conduct and transportation home. You’ll have the knowledge that Dromm is going to attack, and some time to prepare.
If you win, I surrender and cooperate with you. I have valuable information, and you can drug me to make sure I don’t lie.”
“No!” shouted one of the officers.
“Wait. Let me think…I have to make an estimate.” Wayland lowered his gun and stood with half-shut eyes. He looked as he had down in the traders’ hall, and Ganch remembered uneasily that Wayland was a gambling analyst.
But there was little to lose. If he won, he went home with his booty; if he lost…he knew how to will his heart to stop beating.
Wayland looked up. “Yes,” he said.
The others did not question him. They must be used to following a tipster’s advice blindly. But one of them asked how Ganch could be trusted. “I’ll lay down my blaster when you produce the selection device,” said the Dromman. “All the worlds know you do not cheat.”
Chris reached into her pouched belt and drew out a deck of cards. Wordlessly, she shuffled them and gave them to her uncle. The spy put his gun on the floor. He half expected the others to rush him, but they stood where they were.
Wayland’s hands shook as he cut the deck. He smiled crookedly.
“One-eyed jack,” he whispered. “Hard to beat.”
He shuffled the cards again and held them out to Ganch. The armored fingers were clumsy, but they opened the deck.
It was the king of spades.
Stars blazed in blackness. The engines which had eaten light-years were pulsing now on primary drive, gravities, accelerating toward the red sun that lay three astronomical units ahead.
Ganch thought that the space distortions of the drive beams were lighting the fleet up like a nova for the Hermesian detectors. But you couldn’t fight a battle at translight speeds, and their present objective was to seek the enemy out and destroy him.
Overcommandant wan Halsker peered into the viewscreens of the dreadnaught. Avidness was on his long gaunt face, but he spoke levelly: “I find it hard to believe. They actually gave you a speedster and let you go.”
“I expected treachery myself, sir/’ answered Ganch deferentially. Despite promotion, he was only the chief intelligence officer attached to Task Force One. “Surely, with their whole civilization at stake, any rational people would have—But their mores are unique. They always pay their gambling debts.”
It was quiet down here in the bowels of the supernova ship. A ring of technicians sat before their instruments, watching the dials unblinkingly. Wan Halsker’s eyes never left the simulacrum of space in his screens, though all he saw was stars. There was too much emptiness around to show the five hundred ships of his command, spread in careful formation through some billions of cubic kilometers.
A light glowed, and a technician said: “Contact made. Turolin engaging estimated five meteor-class enemy vessels.”
Wan Halsker allowed himself a snort. “Insects! Don’t break formation; let the Turolin swat them as she proceeds.”
Ganch sat waiting, rehearsing in his mind the principles of modem warfare. The gravity drive had radically changed them in the last few centuries. A forward vector could be killed almost instantaneously, a new direction taken as fast, while internal pseudograv fields compensated for accelerations which would otherwise have crumpled a man. A fight in space was not unlike one in air, with this difference: the velocities used were too high, the distances too great, the units involved too many, for a human brain to grasp- It had to be done by machine.
Subspace quivered with coded messages, the ships’ own electronic minds transmitting information back to the prime computers on Dromm—the computers laid out not only the overall strategy, but the tactics of every major engagement. A man could not follow that esoteric mathematics, he could merely obey the thing he had built.
No change of orders came, a few torpedo ships were unimportant, and Task Force One continued.
Astran was a clinker, an airless, valueless planet of a waning red
dwarf star, but it housed a key base of the Hermesian navy. With Astran reduced, wan Halsker’s command could safely go on to rendezvous with six other fleets that had been taking care of their own assignments; the whole group would then continue to New Hermes herself, and let the enemy dare try to stop them!
Such, in broad outline, was the plan; but only a hundred computers, each filling a large building, could handle the details of strategy, tactics, and logistics.
Ganch had an uneasy feeling of being a very small cog in a very large machine. He didn’t matter; the commandant didn’t; the ship, the fleet, the gray mass of commoners didn’t; nothing except the Cadre, and above them the almighty State, had real existence.
The Hermesians would need a lot of taming before they learned to think that way.
Now fire was exploding out in space, great guns cutting loose as the outnumbered force sought the invaders. Ganch felt a shuddering when the supernova’s own armament spoke. The ship’s computer, her brain, flashed and chattered, the vessel leaped on her gravity beams, ducking, dodging, spouting flame and hot metal. Stars spun on the screen in a lunatic dance. Ten thousand men aboard the ship had become robots feeding her guns.
“Compartment Seven hit…sealed off.”
“Hit made on enemy star-class; damage looks light.“
“Number Forty-two gun out of action. Residual radioactivity…compartment sealed off.“
Men died, scorched and burned, air sucked from their lungs as the armored walls peeled away, listening to the clack of radiation counters as leaden bulkheads locked them away like lepers. The supernova trembled with each hit. Ganch heard steel shriek not far away and braced his body for death.
Wan Halsker sat impassively, hands folded on his lap, watching the screens and the dials. There was nothing he could do; the ship fought herself, men were too slow. But he nodded after a while, in satisfaction.
“We re sustaining damage,“he said, “but no more than expected.” He stared at a slim small crescent in the screen. “Yonder’s the planet. We’re working in…we’ll be in bombardment range soon.”
The ships’ individual computers made their decisions on the basis of information received; but they were constantly sending a digest of the facts back to their electronic masters on Dromm. So far no tactical change had been ordered, but…
Ganch frowned at the visual tank which gave a crude approximation of the reality ramping around him. The little red specks were his own ships, the green ones such of the enemy as had been spotted. It seemed to him that too many red lights had stopped twinkling, and that the Hermesian fireflies were driving a wedge into the formation. But there was nothing he could do either.
A bell clanged. Change of orders! Turolin to withdraw three megakilometers toward Polaris, Colfin to swing around toward enemy Constellation Number Four, Hordes to—Watching the tank in a hypnotized way, Ganch decided vaguely it must be some attempt at a flanking movement. But a Hermesian squadron was out there!
Well…
The battle snarled across vacuum. It was many hours before the Dromman computer gave up and flashed the command: Break contact, retreat in formation to Neering Base.
They had been outmaneuvered. Incredibly, New Hermes’ machines had out-thought Dromm’s and the battle was lost.
Wayland entered the mapping room with a jaunty step that belied the haggardness in his face. Christabel Hesty looked up from her task of directing the integrators and cried aloud: “Will! I didn’t expect you back so soon!”
“I thumped a ride home with a courier ship,” said Wayland. “Three months’ leave. By that time the war will be over, so…” He sat down on her desk, swinging his short legs, and got out an old and incredibly foul pipe. “I’m just as glad, to tell the truth. Planetarism is all right in its place, but war’s an ugly business.”
He grimaced. A Hermesian withstood the military life better than most; he was used not only to moments of nerve-ripping suspense but to long and patient waiting. Wayland, though, had during the past year seen too many ships blown up, too many men dead or screaming with their wounds. His hands shook a little as he tamped the pipe full.
“Luck be praised you’re alive!”
“It hasn’t been easy on you either, has it? Chained to a desk like this. Here, sit back and take a few minutes off. The war can wait.” Wayland kindled his tobacco and blew rich clouds. “At least it never got close to our home, and our losses have been lighter than expected.”
“If you get occupation duty…
“I’m afraid I will.”
“Well, I want to come too. I’ve never been off this planet; it’s disgraceful.”
“Dromm is a pretty dreary place, I warn you. But Thanit is close by, of course. It used to be a gay world, it will be again, and every Hermesian will be luck incarnate to them. Sure, I’ll wangle an assignment for you.”
Chris frowned. “Only three months to go, though? That’s hard to believe.”
“Two and a half is the official estimate. Look here.” Wayland stumped over to the three-dimensional sector map, which was there only for the enlightenment of humans. The military computers dealt strictly in lists of numbers.
“See, we whipped them at the Cold Stars, and now a feint of ours is drawing what’s left of them into Ransome’s Nebula.”
“Ransome’s…oh, you mean the Queen of Clubs? Mmm-hm. And what’s going to happen to them there?”
“Tch, tch. Official secrets, my dear inquisitive nieceling. But imagine what could happen to a fleet concentrated in a mess of nebular dust that blocks their detectors!”
Wayland did not see Ganch again until he was stationed on Dromm. There he grumbled long and loudly about the climate, the food, and the tedious necessity of making sure that a subjugated enemy stayed subjugated. He looked forward to his next furlough on Thanit, and still more to rotation home in six months. Chris, being younger, enjoyed herself. They had no mountains on New Hermes, and she was going to climb Hell’s Peak with Commander Danson. About half a dozen other young officers would be jealously present, so her uncle felt she would be adequately chaperoned.
They were working together in the political office, interviewing Cadre men and disposing of their cases. Wayland was not sympathetic toward the prisoners. But when Ganch was led in, he felt a certain kinship and even smiled.
“Sit down,” he invited. “Take it easy. I don’t bite.”
Ganch slumped into a chair before the desk and looked at the floor. He seemed as shattered as the rest of his class. They weren’t really tough, thought Wayland; they couldn’t stand defeat; most of them suicided rather than undergo psychorevision.
“Didn’t expect to see you again,” he said. “I understood you were on combat duty, and…um…”
“I know,” said Ganch lifelessly. “Our combat units averaged ninety per cent casualties, toward the end.” In a rush of bitterness: “I wish I had been one of them.”
“Take it easy,” repeated Wayland. “We Hermesians aren’t vindictive. Your planet will never have armed forces again—it’ll join Corrid and Oberkassel as a protectorate of ours—but once we’ve straightened you out you’ll be free to live as you please.”
“Free!” mumbled Ganch.
He lifted tortured red eyes to the face before him, but shifted from its wintry smile to Chris. She had some warmth for him at least.
“How did you do it?” he whispered. “I don’t understand. I thought you must have some new kind of computer, but our intelligence swore you didn’t…and we outnumbered you, and had that information you let me take home, and—”
“We’re gamblers,” said the girl soberly.
“Yes, but—”
“Look at it this way,” she went on. “War is a science, based on a complex paramathematical theory. Maneuvers and engagements are ordered with a view to gaining the maximum advantage for one’s own side, in the light of known information. But of course, all the information is never available, so intelligent guesswork has to fill in the gaps.
> “Well, a system exists for making such guesses and for deciding what move has the maximum probability of success. It applies to games, business, war—every competitive enterprise. It’s called games theory.”
”I—” Ganch’s jaw dropped. He snapped it shut again and said desperately: “But that’s elementary! It’s been known for centuries.”
“Of course,” nodded Chris. “But New Hermes has based her whole economy on gambling—on probabilities, on games of skill where no player has complete information. Don’t you see, it would make our entire intellectual interest turn toward games theory. And in fact we had to have a higher development of such knowledge, and a large class of men skilled in using it, or we could not maintain as complex a civilization as we do.
“No other planet has a comparable body of knowledge. And, while we haven’t kept it secret, no other planet has men able to use that knowledge on its highest levels.
“For instance, take that night we caught you in the file room. If we cut cards with you, there was a fifty-fifty chance you’d go free. Will here had to estimate whether the overall probabilities justified the gamble. Because he decided they did, we three are alive today.”
“But I did bring that material home!” cried Ganch.
“Yes,” said the girl. “And the fact you had it was merely another item for our strategic computers to take into account. Indeed, it helped us: it was definite information about what you knew, and your actions became yet more predictable.”
Laughter, gentle and unmocking, lay in her throat. “Never draw to an inside straight,” she said. “And never play with a man who knows enough not to, when you don’t.”
Ganch sagged farther down in his chair. He felt sick. He replied to Wayland’s questioning in a mechanical fashion, and heard sentence pronounced, and left under guard.
Seven Conquests Page 13
