"Excellent," said The Guesser. "Excellent."
Fifteen minutes later, the Trobwell lifted from the planet exactly on schedule. The Guesser, in his assigned room, breathed a deep sigh of relief. He was on his way to D'Graski's Planet at last!
"Tell me, great sir," said the captain, "what do you think the final decision on this case should be?" He shoved the sheaf of papers across the desk to The Guesser.
The Guesser looked at them unseeingly, his mind in a whirl. For five days now, the captain of the Trobwell had been handing him papers and asking him questions of that sort. And, since he was the ranking Exec, he was expected to give some sort of answer.
This one seemed even more complex than the others, and none of them had been simple. He forced his eyes to read the print, forced his mind to absorb the facts.
These were not clear-cut problems of the kind he had been dealing with all his life. Computing an orbit mentally was utterly simple compared with these fantastic problems.
It was a question of a choice of three different types of cargoes, to be carried to three different destinations. Which would be the best choice? The most profitable from an energy standpoint, as far as the ship was concerned, considering the relative values of the cargoes? What about relative spoilage rates as compared with fluctuating markets?
The figures were all there, right before him in plain type. But they meant nothing. Often, he had been unable to see how there was any difference between one alternative and another.
Once, he had been handed the transcripts of a trial on ship, during which two conflicting stories of an incident had been told by witnesses, and a third by the defendant. How could one judge on something like that? And yet he had been asked to.