There was a fleet on the way to Kandar. It could not be said to be
traveling in space, of course. If there had been an observer somewhere,
he could not conceivably have detected the ships. There would be no
occultations of stars; no blotting out of any of the hundreds and
thousands of millions of bright specks which filled all the firmament.
There would be no drive-radiation which even the most sensitive of
instruments could pick up. The fleet might be at one place to an
observer's right--where it was imperceptible--and then it might be at a
place to the observer's left--where it was undetectable--and nobody
could have told the difference.
Actually, each ship of the Mekinese fleet was in overdrive, which meant
that each had stressed the space immediately around it so that it was
like a cocoon of other-space; as if it were out of this cosmos
altogether and in another. In sober fact, of course, nothing of the sort
had happened. An overdrive field changed the physical constants of
space. The capacity of a condenser in an overdrive field was different
from that of a condenser out of it. The self-induction of a coil in an
overdrive field was not the same as in normal space. Magnetic and
gravitational fields also did not follow the same laws in stressed space
as in unstressed extension. The speed of light was different. Inertia
was different. In short, a ship could drive at many hundreds of times
the velocity of light and the laws of Einstein did not apply, because
his laws referred to space that men had not tampered with.
But though ships in overdrive had to be considered as in motion, and
though their speed had to be considered as beyond the astronomical,
there were such incredible distances to be covered that time piled up.
Aside from double stars, there were no suns yet discovered which were
less than light-years apart. The time required for travel between
inhabited planets was still comparable to the time needed for
surface-travel between continents on a world. So the fleet of Mekin,
journeying faster than the mind could imagine, nevertheless drove and
drove and drove in the blackness and darkness and isolation of each
ship's overdrive field. They had so driven for days. They would continue
to do so for days to come.
When Captain Bors burned the documents in the Ministry for Diplomatic
Affairs, the enemy fleet might have been said to be at one place. When a
submerged space-cruiser, planning assassination, was itself blown to
bits with no chance to strike back, the Mekinese fleet was approximately
somewhere else. When a cabinet meeting disheartened King Humphrey, the
fleet was much nearer to Kandar. But days of highly-tedious
eventlessness were still ahead of the war-fleet.
So Bors and Gwenlyn and Morgan got a ground-car and were driven to
Kandar's commercial spaceport. There they found the _Sylva_. It was far
larger than the usual space-yachts. There were commercial space-craft
which were no larger. But it was a workmanlike sort of ship, at that. It
had two lifeboat blisters, and there were emergency rockets for landings
where no landing-grids existed. The armored bands of overdrive-coil
shielding were massive. The _Sylva_, in fact, looked more like a service
ship than either a commercial vessel or a yacht. It was obviously
unarmed, but it had the look of a craft that could go very nearly
anywhere.
"You'll find the Talents a bit odd," said Gwenlyn, as they drove up
under the hull's wide bulge. "When they meet new people they like to
show off. Most of them were pretty well frustrated before Father found a
use for them. But they're quite pleasant people if you don't treat them
like freaks. They're not, you know."
Bors had nothing to say. Until he was fifteen he'd lived on Tralee,
which was then a quiet, pacific world, as Kandar had been. As the nephew
of a monarch at least as resolutely constitutional as King Humphrey,
he'd been raised in a very matter-of-fact fashion. The atmosphere had
been that of a comfortable, realistic adjustment to facts. He was taught
a great respect for certain facts without being made fanatically opposed
to anything else. He'd been trained to require reasonable evidence
without demanding that all proofs come out of test tubes and electronic
apparatus. He was specifically taught that arithmetic cannot be proved
by experimental evidence, but that sound experimental evidence agrees
with arithmetic. So he was probably better qualified than most to deal
with something like Talents, Incorporated. But it was not easy for him.
The ground-car stopped. An exit-port in the space yacht opened and an
extension-stair came down. The three of them mounted it. The inner
lock-door opened and they entered the _Sylva_.
An incredibly fat woman regarded Bors with warm and sentimental eyes. A
man no older than Bors, but with prematurely gray hair, nodded at him. A
man in a chair lifted a hand in highly dignified greeting. Everyone
seemed to know who he was. There was a blonde woman who might be in her
late thirties, a short, scowling man with several jewelled rings on his
fingers, and a gangling, skinny adolescent. There were still others.
Morgan addressed them with enthusiasm. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said.
"I present Captain Bors! He's come to arrange to use your talents in the
gravest of all possible situations for his world!"
There were nods. There were bows. The dignified man in the chair said
confidently, "The ship was where I specified."
"Exactly!" said Morgan, beaming. "Exactly! A magnificent piece of work!
Which is what I expected of you!"
He made individual introductions all around. Bors did not begin to catch
the names. This was so-and-so, said Morgan, "our Telepath." Still
another, "our ship-arrival Precognizer--he predicted the coming of the
liner, you remember." He came to the scowling man with rings. "Captain
Bors, this is our Talent for Predicting Dirty Tricks. You've reason to
thank him for disclosing that Mekinese cruiser underwater."
Bors followed the lead given him.
"There are many of us," he said, "with reason to thank you for a most
satisfying operation. We smashed that cruiser!"
The scowling man nodded portentously. The introductions went on. The
skinny adolescent was "our Talent for Locating Individuals." The
enormously fat woman: "our Talent for Propaganda."
Bors was confused. He had to steel himself not to decide flatly that all
this was nonsense. Morgan and Gwenlyn took him away from what appeared
like a sort of social hall for these externally commonplace persons.
They arrived at a smaller compartment. It was a much more personal sort
of place. Morgan waved his hand.
"Gwenlyn and I live here," he observed. "Our cabins are yonder and you
might call this our family room. Gwenlyn finds the undiluted society of
Talents a bit wearing. Of course, handling them is my profession, though
I have some plans for retirement. We'll see our Mathematics Talent in a
minute or two. He knows it's expected that he'll be the most useful of
all our Talents at the moment. He will make an entrance."
Gwenlyn sat down. She regarded Bors with amusement.
"I think the Captain's halfway unconvinced again, Father."
"I'm not unconvinced," said Bors grimly. "I'm desperate. It's not easy
either to ignore what's happened or to believe that it will continue.
And I--well--if the Mekinese fleet does arrive, I don't want to miss
going with our fleet to meet it."
"You won't miss anything, Captain," said Morgan happily. "Have a cigar.
Gwenlyn, do you think I should--"
"Let me," said Gwenlyn. "I know how the Captain feels. I'm an outsider,
too. I haven't any talent--fortunately! Sit down, Captain."
Bors seated himself. Morgan offered a cigar. He seemed too impatient and
much too pleased to be able to sit down himself. Bors lighted the
cigar; at the first puff he removed it and looked at it respectfully.
Such cigars were not easy to come by.
"I think," said Gwenlyn amiably, "that Father himself has a talent,
which makes him not too easy to get along with. But it has had some good
results. I hope it will have more here. The whole business is
unbelievable, though, unless you think of some very special facts."
Bors nodded. He puffed again and waited.
"He told you some of it," said Gwenlyn. "About the ship arrival Talent
and the dowser. There've always been such people with gifts that
nobody's ever understood, but that are real. Only they've always been
considered freaks. They feel that they're remarkable--and they are--and
they want people to recognize this. But they've never had a function in
society. They've been _denied_ all function. Take the Mathematical
Talent! He can do any sort of mathematics in his head. Any sort! He used
to hire out to work computers, and he always got discharged because he
did the computations in his head instead of using the machines. He was
always right, and he was proud of his ability. He wanted to use it! But
nobody'd let him. He was a miserable misfit until Father found him and
hired him."
Bors nodded again, but his forehead wrinkled.
"Talents, Incorporated is merely an organization, created by my father,
to make use of people who can do things ordinarily impossible, and
probably unexplainable, but which exist nevertheless. There are more
talents than Father has gathered, of course. But what good are their
gifts to them? No good at all! They're considered freaks. So Father
gathered them together as he found them. First, of course, he needed
capital. So he used them to make money. Then he began to do useful
things with them, since nobody else did. Now he's brought them here to
help."
Bors said painfully, "They don't all have the same gift."
"No," agreed Gwenlyn.
"And there are limits to their talents?"
"Naturally!"
Morgan broke in, amused. "Gwenlyn insists that I have the talent of
finding and using talents."
"A mild talent, Father," said Gwenlyn. "Not enough to make you
revolting. But--"
A door opened. A tweedy man with a small mustache stood in the doorway.
"I believe I'm wanted?" he said offhandedly.
Morgan introduced him. His name was Logan. He was the lightning
calculator, the mathematical talent of Talents, Incorporated. Bors shook
his hand. The tweedy man sat down. He drew out a pipe and began to fill
it with conscious exactitude. He looked remarkably like a professor of
mathematics who modestly pretended to be just another commuter. He
dressed the part: slightly untidy hair; bulldog pipe; casual, expensive
sports shoes.
"I understand," he said negligently, "that you want some calculations
made."
"I'm told I do," said Bors, harassedly. "But I don't know what they
are."
"Then how can I make them?" asked Logan with lifted eyebrows.
"Naturally," said Morgan, "you'll find out the kind of calculations he
needs, that he can't get anywhere else. That'll be the kind he needs
from you."
"Hm," said Logan. He blew a smoke-ring, thoughtfully. "Where do you use
calculations in space-travel?"
"Everywhere," said Bors. "But we've computers for it. And they're quite
adequate."
Logan shrugged. "Then what do you need me for?"
"You tell me!" said Bors, nettled. "Certainly we don't need calculations
for space-travel. We've no long journey in mind. We're simply going to
go out and do some fighting when the Mekinese fleet gets here."
Logan blew another smoke-ring.
"What calculations do you use in space-fighting?"
"Courses and distances," said Bors. He could see no sense in this, but
he went on. "Allowing for acceleration and deceleration in setting our
missiles on targets. Allowing for the motion of the targets. Again we
have computers for this. In practice they're too good! If we send a
missile at a Mekinese ship, they set a computer on it, and it computes a
course for a counter-missile which explodes and destroys our missile
when it's within a certain distance of it."
"Then your missile doesn't hit," said Logan.
"All too often, it doesn't," admitted Bors.
"Then their missiles don't hit either."
"If they send a hundred missiles at us, they're cancelled out if we send
a hundred to destroy them. Unfortunately, if they send more than we can
counter, we get wiped out."
Bors found his throat going dry. This, of course, was what he'd
desperately been denying to himself. It was the fundamental reason for a
total lack of hope. The history of warfare is the history of rivalry
between attack and defense. In the matter of missiles in space, there
was a stalemate. One missile fired in attack could always be destroyed
by another fired in defense. It was an arithmetic balance. But it meant
that three ships could always destroy two, and four ships three. In the
space-fight ahead, there would be at least ten Mekinese ships to every
one from Kandar. The sally of Kandar's fleet would not be a rush into
battle, but an advance into annihilation. "What we need," said Bors
desperately, "is a means to compute courses for our missiles so they'll
hit, and that the enemy can't counter-compute--so that his missiles
can't compute how to change course in order to cancel ours out."
He was astonished as the words left his mouth. This was what was needed,
of course. But then he realized that it couldn't be done.
Logan blew a smoke-ring.
"Mechanical computers," he said, "have limits. They're designed to
calculate a trajectory with constant acceleration or no acceleration.
But that's all."
Bors frowned. "What else could there be?"
"Changing acceleration," said Logan condescendingly. "A mechanical
computer can't compute that. But I can."
Bors continued to frown. One part of his mind assured him that the
statement that mechanical computers could not calculate trajectories of
missiles with changing acceleration was incorrect. But the rest of his
mind tried to imagine such a trajectory. He couldn't. In practice, men
do not have to handle the results of variable acceleration as cumulative
effects.
"I think," said Bors carefully, "that if you can do that--"
Logan blew a smoke-ring more perfect than any that had gone before.
"I'll calculate some tables," he said modestly. "You can use them on
your computer-results. Then if you arrange your missiles to change their
acceleration as they go, the Mekinese missiles can't intercept them."
He waved his hand with the grand air of someone assuring a grammar-grade
pupil that multiplication tables were quite reliable and could be used
with confidence. But his eyes fixed themselves on Bors's face. As the
Captain realized the implications of his statement, the eyes of the
Mathematical Talent of Talents, Incorporated shone with gratified
vanity.
"We'll go out in a couple of tin cans," said Bors fiercely, "and try
this out with dummy warheads!"
Gwenlyn said quickly, "Marvelous! Marvelous, Logan!"
"It's nothing," said Logan modestly.
But it was a very great deal. Bors, impatient to try it out,
nevertheless realized that Logan hadn't made the suggestion out of a
brilliant perception of a solution to a problem in ballistics, but
because he thought in terms of mathematical processes. He didn't think
of a new missile operation, but a new kind of computation. And he
reveled in the fact that he had showed off his brilliance.
In the ground-car on the way to the fleet, Bors said helplessly to
Gwenlyn, "I'm not the right man to be the liaison with you people. But
this might make us a pretty costly conquest for Mekin! With luck, we may
trade them ship for ship! They won't miss the ships they lose, but
it'll be a lot of satisfaction to us!"
"You expect to be killed," Gwenlyn said flatly.
"My uncle," explained Bors, "considers that he should have gotten killed
when Mekin took over Tralee. It would have set a good example. Since we
didn't do it for Tralee, we'll do it for Kandar. The king's going along
too. After all, that's one of the things kings are for."
"To get killed?"
"When necessary," Bors told her. "Kandar shouldn't surrender even though
there will be at least ten Mekinese to one Kandarian."
She smiled at him, very oddly.
"I suspect," she said, "that not everybody on the fleet will be killed.
I'm sure of it. In fact, as my father would say, that's Talents,
Incorporated information!"
Bors frowned worriedly.
The fleet of Mekin continued in overdrive, heading for Kandar. Each
second it traversed a distance equal to the span of a solar system, out
to its remotest planet. A heartbeat that would begin where a pulsing
Cepheid, had it been possible to see, would have seemed at its greatest
brilliance, and would end where the light from that same giant star
seemed dimmed almost to extinction. Of course no such observation could
be made from any ship in overdrive. Each one of the many, many ugly
war-machines was sealed in its own cocoon of overdrive-stressed space.
Even in the armed transports that carried officials and bureaucrats and
experienced police organizers to set up a puppet government on Kandar,
there was not the faintest hint of anything that happened outside the
individual ship. But, what might be termed the position of the fleet,
changed with remarkable swiftness. It traveled light-hours between
breaths. Light-days between sentences. Light-months and light-years....
But it would not arrive on Kandar for a long while yet. Not for three
whole days.