“I’m waiting.” Targett blinked to clear his vision. Bright-rimmed black spots had begun to dance across it.
“Now.”
A torpedo appeared an instant later and Targett squeezed the trigger. The ultralaser ray raked along the nose section—but after an initial tremor the black cylinder drifted steadily out of view without changing direction.
“Now.”
Targett fired again, with the same result.
“Now.”
Once again the beam of energy flicked across a torpedo—with no serious effect.
“This isn’t working out too well.” Targett focused his eyes with difficulty on the indicator on the butt of the pistol. “I’m down to eight charges. I’m beginning to think…to think I ought to go ahead with my own plan while I…’
“You are wasting time, Michael. Now.”
Targett squeezed the trigger and another torpedo drifted heedlessly on, effectively unharmed.
“Now.”
Hopelessly, Targett fired again. The torpedo had passed out of sight before it dawned on him that perhaps it had begun to change direction.
“Aesop,” he managed to say, “I think maybe…’
He heard a dull explosion and the triangular segment of sky turned a blinding white. Only the immediate darkening of his helmet’s face plate saved Targett’s eyes from the full fury of the motor’s self-annihilation. The brilliance continued unabated for seconds as the alien engine consumed itself. He imagined it burning out the primary and back-up sensors on the swarming robots, which would blunder down to the ground or fly into the hillside and…’
Just in time, Targett squeezed his eyes shut and buried his head in his arms while a prolonged cataclysm raged all around him, laying waste to the area. I can still die, he thought. Captain Aesop has done his best for me, but if I’m not lucky—this is where I go down.
When the extended rumble of explosions and the almost palpable torrent of brilliance had died away, he crawled out from under the rocks and forced his legs to accept his weight. He opened his eyes cautiously. The plateau was littered with inert torpedoes, their motor compartments vaporized. A number of the robot hunters were still airborne, but they paid no attention to him as he ran, weaving drunkenly, towards the spot where he had left the backpack.
On the way across the plateau the thought occurred to him that one of the torpedoes could have landed right on the pack—something that even Captain Aesop would have been powerless to forestall—but he found it lying safely beside the stripped down cylinder, which had not flown. He opened the pack with trembling fingers, took out the spare oxygenerator and experienced a moment of exquisite dread as the ruined generator refused to let itself be detached from the suit’s breather hole. With the last dregs of his strength he wrenched it off, clicked the replacement into position and lay down to await the renewal of life.
“Mike?” Surgenor sounded hesitant. “You all right?”
Targett breathed deeply. “I’m all right, Dave. Captain Aesop got me out of it.”
“Did you say ‘Captain’?”
“You heard me.” Targett rose to his feet and surveyed the littered battlefield upon which he and a distant computer had vanquished an enemy host which had lain in wait for seven thousand years. In all probability he would never know what the torpedoes’ original purpose had been, or why they had been dumped on Horta VII—but his taste for archaeology seemed to have faded. It was sufficient just to be alive in the present. As he scanned the incredible scene one of the torpedoes which was still aloft flew blindly into a ridge two kilometres away. The resultant explosion drenched the plateau with radiance.
Targett flinched away from it. “There goes another one, Aesop.”
“Your meaning is not clear to me, Michael,” Aesop replied.
“Another torpedo, of course. Didn’t you see the flash?”
“No. The televisions camera is not functioning.”
“Oh?” Targett glanced towards his former hiding place, where the camera had fallen. “Perhaps the light from all those explosions burned something out.”
“No.” Aesop paused. “Transmissions ceased when you dropped the camera. There is a good probability that the switch got jarred to the off position.”
“Very likely. I was moving at a good…’ Targett stopped speaking as a disturbing thought occurred to him. “Then you lied to me. You weren’t able to track the torpedoes.”
“Your mental condition made it necessary for me to lie to you.”
“But you were telling me when to fire, for God’s sake! How did you know I would hit one of the torpedoes twice?”
“I did not know.” Aesop’s voice was precise, unruffled. “This is something you in particular should understand, Michael. I simply took a chance.”
“This is lovely material for my book, Mike.” Clifford Pollen’s reedy voice was pitched with excitement as he leaned across the mess table. “I’m going to call the chapter ‘The Day The Targett Started Shooting Back’. Good isn’t it?”
Mike Targett, who had learned to endure every possible joke about his surname, nodded his head. “Very original, that.”
Pollen frowned down at his notes. “I’ll have to be careful about how I put the story over, though. There were three-sixty-two torpedoes skimming around and you had only twenty-six shots. That means Aesop staked your life on odds of about one in thirteen—and the gamble came off!”
“Wrong! It wasn’t that way, at all.” Targett smiled pityingly as he cut up a medium-rare steak. “Take my tip and stay away from poker games, Clifford—you’ve no idea how to calculate odds.”
Pollen looked offended. “I can perform a simple calculation. Twenty-six into three-sixty-two…’
“Has nothing to do with the actual mathematics of the situation, my friend. It was necessary for me to hit one of the torpedoes twice. Right?”
“Right,” Pollen said grudgingly.
“Well, in a situation like that you can’t just take simple odds by dividing the smaller number into the larger one the way you did. The reason is that the odds change with every shot. Every time I hit a torpedo shifted the odds slightly in favour of the following shot, and the only way you can calculate the overall probability is to multiply out twenty-five sets of gradually improving odds. That’s pretty hard to do—unless you happen to be a computer—but if you do it you’ll get final odds of around two to one that I would hit a torpedo twice. It wasn’t much of a gamble really.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Work it out for yourself with a calculator.” Targett put a square of steak into his mouth and chewed appreciatively. “It’s a good example of the difficulty of judging complex possibilities by common sense.”
Pollen scribbled out some figures. “It’s too complicated for me.”
“That’s why you’d never make a successful gambler.”
Targett smiled again as he worked on his steak. He did not mention the fact that his own common sense had been outraged by the mathematics of probability, or that it had taken a long and tedious conversation on a private link with Aesop, after all danger was past, to convince him of the truth. And he would never mention to anyone the feeling of bleak isolation which had stolen over him when he genuinely understood that Aesop—the entity who safeguarded his life, arranged his meals, and replied patiently to all his questions—was nothing more than a logic machine. It was better to play the same game that all the other crewmen played, to address Aesop as “Captain’ now and then, and to think of him as a superhuman being who never came down from his lonely command post somewhere on the Sarafand’s upper decks.
“We’ll be putting down on Pandor at the end of this survey,” Dave Surgenor said from the opposite side of the table. “You’ll be able to give us a practical demonstration of successful gambling.”