"If they cripple our planes like they've done before, we'll make it to the island again."
"I had to leave a hot cup of coffee back at the hangar, Major. I wish it was light so we could see what we were doing."
"Stop bitching."
"Hey, Major."
"What?"
"I've invented a new kind of dice."
"You would."
"What you do is take fifteen centiunit pieces and arrange them in a four-by-four square with one corner missing. Then you take a sixteenth one and shoot it within forty-five degrees either way of the diagonal into the missing corner. It works out that no matter how you do it, if all the coins in the square are touching, two coins will fly off of the far edge. Each of those has a number and the two numbers that fly off are like the two numbers that come up on the dice. It's better than regular dice because the chances are up on some combinations. And there's a certain amount of skill involved too. The guys call it Randomax. That's for random numbers and matrix."
"I'll play you a game someday," Tomar said. "You know, if you used a smaller coin than a centiunit for the one you fire into the missing corner, say a deciunit, the chances that it would hit both corner coins would go up, that is your randomness."
"Really?"