The Lieutenant turned his eyes from the incandescent glare of the thick steel conduit glowing red under the finger of the acetylene torch. "General, its extremely resistant to cutting. I doubt if we can cut through it before they finally get the door and frame cut away up in the control room."
"Keep at it, boy. We've got to get through at the saboteur one way or another. Do the best you can. The boys in the fleet are counting on you. They're going down to certain death while we delay."
With the last terms of the new equations of strategy played into the computer, Ruy sat back, gave a sigh, opened his eyes, and slipped the electrodes from his wrist. His job was almost done. If he could keep the others from this control panel for another half hour, the computer could operate on his equations fully, and the battle would be won.
The first ships from Earth had already gone down in flames, expendable sacrifices to his purpose. But they were not dying in vain. The end result would be—must be—victory.
Wars are fought by strategy, but also by sacrifice. Every general must send troops into battle, must expect to sacrifice to make the enemy commit himself in the desired way, and so make victory possible.
This was what Ruy believed. He believed it deeply, deeply enough to throw aside his career as a rising young theoretical mathematics officer of the fleet and to go over the heads of his unconvinced superiors, with all their unread reports and unanswered recommendations from subordinates, in the only way a man of action could—by taking things into his own hands, and staking his life on the gamble.
The General, eyes riveted to the board, winced with pain as ship after ship roiled the heavens with flaming death. And as he watched, a gradual subtle design became apparent. For every ship he had lost, his ships had taken a similar tally—for each sacrifice, a trap was sprung and a similar toll taken. Computers did not sacrifice, did not send men out to certain death. Therefore a sacrifice was greedily snapped up as a mistake of the enemy. And such greed snapped the trap. One move forced the next, once the bait was taken.
As the theme of the theory formed in the General's mind, he suddenly muttered: "Even exchange will balance a computer's potential—but a series of forced, even-exchanges can distort a fleet's position from optimum.... I never realized it before—an optimum move is not an optimum move—if it's a forced move."
He turned from the board and spoke quietly to the men who stood in hushed groups watching the flaming battle.