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 moment 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.”