Is That What People Do? (20 page)

“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.”

“And that’s the reason for the crack-ups,” Ellsner said. “Every man in the fleet on nerves’ edge, waiting for a chance he’s sure will never come. But having to wait anyhow. How long will this go on?”

“This moving and checking can go on for a little over two years,” Branch said. “Then they will be in the optimum formation for attack, with a twenty-eight percent loss probability to our ninety-three. They’ll have to attack then, or the probabilities will start to shift back in our favor.”

“You poor devils,” Ellsner said softly. “Waiting for a chance that’s never going to come. Knowing you’re going to be blasted out of space sooner or later.”

“Oh, it’s jolly,” said Margraves, with an instinctive dislike for a civilian’s sympathy.

Something buzzed on the switchboard, and Branch walked over and plugged in a line. “Hello? Yes. Yes.... All right, Williams. Right.” He unplugged the line.

“Colonel Williams has had to lock his men in their rooms,” Branch said. “That’s the third time this month. I’ll have to get CPC to dope out a formation so we can take him out of the front.” He walked to a side panel and started pushing buttons.

“And there it is,” Margraves said. “What do you plan to do, Mr. Presidential Representative?”

The glittering dots shifted and deployed, advanced and retreated, always keeping a barrier of black space between them. The mechanical chess players watched each move, calculating its effect into the far future. Back and forth across the great chess board the pieces moved.

The chess players worked dispassionately, knowing beforehand the outcome of the game. In their strictly ordered universe there was no possible fluctuation, no stupidity, no failure.

They moved. And knew. And moved.

“Oh, yes,” Lieutenant Nielson said to the smiling room. “Oh, yes.” And look at all the buttons, he thought, laughing to himself.

So stupid. Georgia.

Nielson accepted the deep blue of sanctity, draping it across his shoulders. Bird song, somewhere.

Of course.

Three buttons red. He pushed them. Three buttons green. He pushed them. Four dials. Riverread.

“Oh-oh. Nielson’s cracked.”

“Three is for me,” Nielson said, and touched his forehead with greatest stealth. Then he reached for the keyboard again. Unimaginable associations raced through his mind, produced by unaccountable stimuli.

“Better grab him. Watch out!”

Gentle hands surround me as I push two are brown for which is for mother, and one is high for all the rest.

“Stop him from shooting off those guns!”

I am lifted into the air, I fly, I fly.

“Is there any hope for that man?” Ellsner asked, after they had locked Nielson in a ward.

“Who knows,” Branch said. His broad face tightened; knots of muscles pushed out his cheeks. Suddenly he turned, shouted, and swung his fist wildly at the metal wall. After it hit, he grunted and grinned sheepishly.

“Silly, isn’t it? Margraves drinks. I let off steam by hitting walls. Let’s go eat.”

The officers ate separate from the crew. Branch had found that some officers tended to get murdered by psychotic crewmen. It was best to keep them apart.

During the meal, Branch suddenly turned to Ellsner.

“Boy, I haven’t told you the entire truth. I said this would go on for two years? Well, the men won’t last that long. I don’t know if I can hold this fleet together for two more weeks.”

“What would you suggest?”

“I don’t know,” Branch said. He still refused to consider surrender, although he knew it was the only realistic answer.

“I’m not sure,” Ellsner said, “but I think there may be a way out of your dilemma.” The officers stopped eating and looked at him.

“Have you got some superweapons for us?” Margraves asked. “A disintegrator strapped to your chest’”

“I’m afraid not. But I think you’ve been so close to the situation that you don’t see it in its true light. A case of the forest for the trees.”

“Go on,” Branch said, munching methodically on a piece of bread.

“Consider the universe as the CPC sees it. A world of strict causality. A logical, coherent universe. In this world, every effect has a cause. Every factor can be instantly accounted for.

“That’s not a picture of the real world. There
is no
explanation for everything, really. The CPC is built to see a specialized universe, and to extrapolate on the basis of that.”

“So,” Margraves said, “what would you do?”

“Throw the world out of joint,” Ellsner said. “Bring in uncertainty. Add a human factor that the machines can’t calculate.”

“How can you introduce uncertainty in a chess game?” Branch asked, interested in spite of himself.

“By sneezing at a crucial moment, perhaps. How could a machine calculate that?”

“It wouldn’t have to. It would just classify it as extraneous noise, and ignore it.”

“True.” Ellsner thought for a moment. “This battle—how long will it take once the actual hostilities are begun?”

“About six minutes,” Branch told him. “Plus or minus twenty seconds.”

“That confirms an idea of mine,” Ellsner said. “The chess game analogy you use is faulty. There’s no real comparison.”

“It’s a convenient way of thinking of it,” Margraves said.

“But it’s an
untrue
way of thinking of it. Checkmating a king can’t be equated with destroying a fleet. Nor is the rest of the situation like chess. In chess you play by rules previously agreed upon by the players. In this game you can make up your own rules.”

“This game has inherent rules of its own,” Branch said.

“No,” Ellsner said. “Only the CPCs have rules. How about this? Suppose you dispensed with the CPCs? Gave every commander his head, told him to attack on his own, with no pattern. What would happen?”

“It wouldn’t work,” Margraves told him. “The CPC can still total the picture, on the basis of the planning ability of the average human. More than that, they can handle the attack of a few thousand second-rate calculators—humans—with ease. It would be like shooting clay pigeons.”

“But you’ve
got
to try something,” Ellsner pleaded.

“Now wait a minute,” Branch said. “You can spout theory all you want. I know what the CPCs tell me, and I believe them. I’m still in command of this fleet, and I’m not going to risk the lives in my command on some harebrained scheme.”

“Harebrained schemes sometimes win wars,” Ellsner said.

“They usually lose them.”

“The war is lost already, by your own admission.”

“I can still wait for them to make a mistake.”

“Do you think it will come?”

“No.”

“Well then?”

“I’m still going to wait.”

The rest of the meal was completed in moody silence. Afterward, Ellsner went to his room.

“Well, Ed?” Margraves asked, unbuttoning his shirt.

“Well yourself,” the general said. He lay down on his bed, trying not to think. It was too much. Logistics. Predetermined battles. The coming debacle. He considered slamming his fist against the wall, but decided against it. It was sprained already. He was going to sleep.

On the borderline between slumber and sleep, he heard a click.

The door!

Branch jumped out of bed and tried the knob. Then he threw himself against it.

Locked.

“General, please strap yourself down. We are attacking.” It was Ellsner’s voice, over the intercom.

“I looked over that keyboard of yours, sir, and found the magnetic door locks. Mighty handy in case of a mutiny, isn’t it?”

“You idiot!” Branch shouted. “You’ll kill us all! That CPC—”

“I’ve disconnected our CPC,” Ellsner said pleasantly. “I’m a pretty logical boy, and I think I know how a sneeze will bother them.”

“He’s mad,” Margraves shouted to Branch. Together they threw themselves against the metal door.

Then they were thrown to the floor.

“All gunners—fire at will!” Ellsner broadcasted to the fleet.

The ship was in motion. The attack was underway!

The dots drifted together, crossing the no man’s land of space.