The Mammoth Book of SF Wars by Ian Watson [Ed], Ian Whates [Ed] Page B

field, we could build to her size, too.”
    “Is there that much metal in the world?”
    Compton looked sideward at Runner. “A damned sight more. But if we had her, we wouldn’t need it.”
    Yes, Runner thought, keeping himself from looking at the screen now as faithfully as he had prevented himself from looking at Compton earlier. Yes, if we had the ship we wouldn’t need this, and we wouldn’t need that, or the other thing. We could even engineer such wonderful cabinets like the one in which Compton dwells that none of us would have to fear a stop to our ambitions, and we could roll along in glory on the wonderfully smooth corridor floors we could carve, away from the places where storms and lightning strike.
    For how could you live, Compton, out there where I have to go tomorrow?
    Compton, looking up at him, shrewdly said: “Do you know I approve of the Special Division? I think you people serve a very necessary function. I need the pressure of rivals.”
    Runner thought: You are ugly.
    “I have to go to sleep,” he had said and left Compton to his screens and schedules. But he did not take the lift down to the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters where had been given an accommodation – a two-man cubicle for himself alone; the aide, never having experienced solitude, as Runner had, had been envious. Instead, he puzzled his way through another of the branching temporary passageways that were crudely chopped out for living space near the advancing bore.
    He searched until he found the proper door. The letter Norma had sent him did not contain the most exact directions. It had spoken in local terms: “Follow the first parallel until you reach the fourth gallery,” and so forth.
    He knocked, and the gas-tight door opened.
    “I heard you would be here today,” Norma said in a choked voice, and there was much for him to read in the waxiness of her skin and the deep wrinkles that ran from the corners of her nose to the corners of her bloodless mouth.
    He took the hands she offered, and stepped inside.
    There was one large room; that is, a room large enough for a free-standing single cot, rather than a bunk, and a cleared area, faintly marked by black rubber wheelmarks, large enough for a cabinet to turn around in.
    “How are you, Norma?” he said as if he could not guess, and she did not trouble to answer him. She shut the door and leaned against it as if they had both just fled in here.
    “Are you going out in the morning?”
    Runner nodded. It seemed to him he had time at least to say a few conventional things to the girl who had been his fiancée, and then Compton’s wife. But she apparently thought otherwise.
    “Are you going to make it?”
    “I don’t know. It’s a gamble.”
    “Do you think you’ll make it?”
    “No.”
    It had never seemed reasonable that he would. In the Technical Section of the Special Division there were men – fully his equals – who were convinced he could succeed. They said they had calculated the ship’s weaknesses, and he believed they had figures and evaluations, right enough. He in his own turn believed there were things a man had to be willing to do whether they seemed reasonable or not, simply because they seemed necessary. So neither fact nor opinion could modify his taking the weapons carrier out against the ship tomorrow. “But I hope I’ll make it,” he said.
    “You hope you’ll make it,” Norma said tonelessly. She reached quickly and took his hands again. “What a forlorn thing to tell me! You know I won’t be able to stand it down here much longer. How do we know the ship doesn’t have seismic detectors? How do we know it isn’t just letting us concentrate ourselves here so it can smash us before we become dangerous?”
    “Well, we don’t know, but it seems unlikely. They have geological probes, of course. The gamble is that they’re only probes and not detectors.”
    “If they don’t smash us, there’s only one reason – they know they’ll be