Kinnison rode toward the flagship in a mood which even he could not have described. He had expected to see her, as a matter of course—he wanted to see her—confound it, he had to see her! Why did she have to do a flit now, of all the times on the calendar? She knew that the fleet was shoving off, and that he'd have to go along—and nobody knew where she was. When he got back he'd find her if he had to chase her all over the Galaxy. He'd put an end to this. Duty was duty, of course—but Chris was CHRIS—and half a loaf was better than no bread!
He jerked back to reality as he entered the gigantic teardrop which was technically the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, and ordinarily GFHQ. She had been designed and built specifically to be Grand Fleet Headquarters, and nothing else. She bore no offensive armament; but since she had to protect the presiding geniuses of combat, she had every possible defense.
Port Admiral Haynes had learned a bitter lesson during the expedition to Helmuth's base. Long before that relatively small Grand Fleet got there he was sick to the core, realizing that fifty thousand vessels simply could not be controlled or maneuvered as a group. If that base had been capable of an offensive, or even of a real defensive, or if Boskone could have put their fleets into that star cluster in time, the Patrol would have been defeated ignominiously; and Haynes, wise old tactician that he was, knew it only too well.
Therefore, immediately after the return from that "triumphant" venture, he gave orders to design and to build, at whatever cost, a flagship capable of directing efficiently a million combat units.
The "tank"—the three-dimensional galactic chart which is a necessary part of every pilot room—had grown and grown as it became evident that it must be the prime agency in Grand Fleet Operations. Finally, in this last rebuilding, the tank was seven hundred feet in diameter and eighty feet thick in the middle—over seventeen million cubic feet of space in which more than two million tiny lights crawled hither and thither in hopeless confusion. For, after the technicians and designers had put that tank into actual service, they had discovered that it was useless. No available mind had been able either to perceive any situation as a whole, or to identify with certainty any light or group of lights needing correction. And as for linking up any particular light with its individual, blanket-proof communicator in time to issue orders in space combat—
Kinnison looked at the tank, then around the full circle of the million-plug board encircling it. He observed the horde of operators, each one trying frantically to do something. Next he shut his eyes, the better to perceive everything at once, and studied the problem for an hour.
"Attention, everybody!" he thought then. "Open all circuits—do nothing at all for a while." He then called Haynes.
"I think that we can clean up this mess if you'll send over some Simplex analyzers and the crew of technicians. Helmuth had a sweet set-up on multiplex controls, and Jalte had some ideas that we can adapt to fit this tank. If we add them all together, we may have something."