"But time is something I have plenty of," he said aloud, stretching out comfortably in the chair. For several hours he puzzled over the thing, taking time out to digest the taped analysis of his mistakes, and then attacked the problem afresh. Eventually, out of sheer exhaustion, he slipped off into a deep, restful sleep, quite confident that the next time he tried the seven-ship problem, or at most the time following that....
Lan Sur awoke to quietness. He stretched his lean, lithe legs, slowly, returning to normal awareness as he did so. Once he was completely awake, he sat down in front of the control panel again. A single amber light beamed from the board. While he had been asleep, the scout ship had come out of its C2 drive and had slowed to a stop. They had reached their immediate destination, and since he was asleep, the computer had simply turned on the protective screens around the ship and had begun a survey of the sun system they had arrived at.
He pressed a button on the computer and then leaned back to digest the information that the machine began feeding him at once. The sun was of the A/34.79Lu type, just as had been forecast before his voyage. It had three large inner planets and a tiny fourth much too far away from the solar furnace and much too small to be of any practical value. Lan Sur read the report carefully, noting with pleasure certain of the facts presented him. He was in the midst of an interesting section concerning the chemical composition of the atmosphere on the second of the planets when a small bell on the computer rang and the machine became silent for just a second or two, then began pouring out material at a furious rate.
Lan Sur, who had been yards of tape behind in his reading, dropped the atmosphere discussion and began to read the new information being spewed forth. A frown crossed his face as he read the first few words, "Alien contact established...." He hoped this new development would not take him away from his games for too long a time.
The computer had detected the emanation of modulated energy waves coming from the second planet. Immediately it had withdrawn its wide-flung detector beams and had concentrated fully upon the source of the waves. Lan Sur reset the computer so that only a very small part of the huge machine would carry on the routine work of new investigation, while the greater part would be put to work in an attempt to decode what was obviously a language being broadcast in some obsolete manner. He noted with pride that the aliens, whoever they might be, had not at the moment reached the point of development where C2 communication was available to them, but were still limited to the raw speed of light for the transmission of messages, and hence, he felt sure, for the transmission of space ships too. This meant, he knew, that he had probably stumbled onto a race of beings still new to the reaches of space who would be helpless in the face of even his own lightly armed scout ship. However, according to patrol instructions, he activated a switch that relayed all pertinent information by means of a sealed C2 beam back to the nearest Dakn Patrol base, and put in a formal call for the presence of Patrol battleships. One way or another, they would be needed....
It took the computer less than a day and a half, as Lan Sur figured time, to break the language of the aliens discovered on the second planet. The Surveyor spent this time working feverishly on a new idea he had for the solution of the seven-ship problem, and was quite upset when the computer finished its problem of decoding the new tongue before Lan Sur had worked out all the details of his latest attack on the mock war games. Reluctantly he put himself into a light trance, during which the machine taught him the new language. He did not actually learn to think in the new tongue, for that would have imposed limiting strictures on his mental processes. Rather, his mind was turned into a kind of translating factory. He had the freedom to think in the terms and in the concepts that he was accustomed to, and his mind simply expressed these thoughts as best it could in the newly-learned way of speaking. The computer had also arrived at an incredibly clear knowledge of the socio-politico-psychological structure of the new civilization, but aside from a brief glance at some of the more intriguing points, Lan Sur ignored this information and simply relayed it along to the Galactic base where social scientists could pore over it in their own bemused leisure. For his tasks Lan Sur hardly felt that he needed it.
Once Lan Sur had memorized the language, he put his scout ship under a screen of complete invisibility and landed it some few miles away from the space ship the aliens were using as their permanent base. He let the computer drink up what additional information it required to make sure both that the planetary conditions were suitable to his own particular chemical make-up, and that the aliens were indeed as impotent as his previous estimates had seemed to indicate. Once the computer gave him its blessing, he walked out into the bright planetary sunlight.