ment the armada appeared, we’ll assume, Earth heard about
it by Dirac, and started to assemble a counteramiada. But
it takes finite time to bring together a concentration of ships
and men, even if your message system is instantaneous.
“The Service’s counterarmada was already on hand. It had
been building there for so long and with so little fuss that
nobody even noticed it concentrating until a day or so before
the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and
take notice, and be uneasy about what was going to break.
But not very uneasy; the Service always winsthat’s been
a statistical fact for centuries. Centuries, Kras. Good Lord,
it takes almost as long as that, in straight preparation, to
pull some of the tricks we’ve pulled! The Dirac gives us an
advantage of ten to twenty-five years in really extreme cases
out on the rim of the Galaxy, but no more than that.”
He realized that he had been fuming away on the cigarette
until the roof of his mouth was scorched, and snubbed it out
angrily. “That’s a very different thing,” he said, “than knowing
in a general way how an enemy is likely to behave, or what
kind of children the Mendelian laws say a given couple
should have. It means that we’ve some way of reading the
future in minute detail. That’s in flat contradiction to every-
thing I’ve been taught about probability, but I have to believe
what I see.”
Krasna laughed. “That’s a very able presentation,” he said.
He seemed genuinely pleased. “I think you’ll remember that
you were first impressed into the Service when you began