“Urn,” she said. “Personnel trouble? What does he mean?
He hasn’t got any personnel on that station.”
This was no news to me. CIG provided the figures that got the SV-I into its orbit in the first place, and it was on our advice that it carried only one man. The crew of a space vessel either has to be large or it has to be a lone man; there is no intermediate choice. And SV-I wasn’t big enough to carry a large crewnot to carry them and keep the men from flying at each other’s throats sooner or later, that is.
“He means himself,” I said. “That’s why I don’t think this is a job for the computer. It’s going to have to be played person-to-person. It’s my bet that the man’s responsibility-happy; that danger was always implicit in the one-man recommendation.”
“The only decent solution is a full complement,” Joan agreed. “Once the Pentagon can get enough money from Congress to build a big station.”
“What puzzles me is, why did he call us instead of his superiors?”
“That’s easy. We process his figures. He trusts us. The Pentagon thinks we’re infallible, and he’s caught the disease from them.”
“That’s bad,” I said.
“I’ve never denied it.”
“No, what I mean is that it’s bad that he called us instead of going through channels. It means that the emergency is at least as bad as he says it is.”
I thought about it another precious moment longer while Joan did some quick dialing. As everybody on Earthwith the possible exception of a few Tibetansalready knew, the man who rode SV-I rode with three hydrogen bombs im-mediately under his feetbombs which he could drop with great precision on any spot on the Earth. Gascoigne was, in effect, the sum total of American foreign policy; he might as well have had “Spatial Supremacy” stamped on his forehead.