I know that much about probability.”
“And what makes you think that we’re trying to set up
the future?”
“It’s obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the
one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had
time-travel. It’s especially obvious to all the individuals and
governments and entire populations that the Service has
bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single
failure.” Jo shrugged. “A man can be asked to safeguard
only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes,
as an agent, that what the Service is safeguarding is the
future children of those meetings. Ergothe Service knows
what those children are to be like, and has reason to want
their future existence guaranteed. What other conclusion is
possible?”
Krasna took out a cigarette and lit it deliberately; it was
obvious that he was using the maneuver to cloak his response.
“None,” he admitted at last. “We have some foreknowl-
edge, of course. We couldn’t have made our reputation with
espionage alone. But we have obvious other advantages:
genetics, for instance, and operations research, the theory of
games, the Dirac transmitterit’s quite an arsenal, and of
course there’s a good deal of prediction involved in all those
things.”
“I see that,” Jo said. He shifted in his chair, formulating
all he wanted to say. He changed his mind about the
cigarette and helped himself to one. “But these things don’t
add up to infallibilityand that’s a qualitative difference,
Kras. Take this affair of the Black Horse armada. The mo-