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The data was being fed automatically to the "capture" computer. This would analyze the correct flight path for the recovery missile, which would magnetically seize the returning traveler from Jupiter and bring it safely home. Tom quickly read off the results from the computer's dials, then busied himself again with the retarding-rocket controls. "Everything going okay, skipper?" Bud asked.
Then he proceeded to ignore both weak points and concentrate on what he would do if he were the enemy commander. The weak points were traps; the computer could see them and avoid them. Which was just exactly what was wrong with the computer's logic. In avoiding the traps, it also avoided the best way to hit the enemy. A weak point is weak, no matter how well it may be booby-trapped.
By waiting, I insure at least relative peace afterward." Kranath felt the computer's amusement at his next thoughts. "No, given Traiti psychology, you will have fighters and n'Cor'naya for quite a few more millennia. Probably as long as the race exists. And, given my own programming, that pleases me." Kranath smiled.
On the panel before Bessie the computer's projection of expected events showed the wave-front of protons approaching the orbit of Venus, and on the numerical panel directly below this display the negative count of minutes continued to march before her as the wave-front approached at half the speed of light. The expected diminishment of X rays had not yet occurred.
Without interrupting the others, Mike seated himself at the subsidiary post at the computer's console on Bessie's right, and got her to brief him while he examined the close-up display of Hot Rod.
He'd gotten an index-of-refraction reading on crystals too small to be seen except through a microscope. That information, plus specific gravity, plus crystalline form, plus rate of diffusion in a fractionator, went to the stores of information in the computer's memory banks somewhere between the ship's living quarters and its outer skin.
Spaced equally around its thirty-two-foot ring-shaped floor were the computer's console where Bessie presided; the com center in charge of Communications Officer Clark; and the command console where Captain Naylor Andersen, commanding officer of Space Lab One had his formal, though seldom-occupied post.
Nor was it in the manuals that he should have access to the computer's huge memory banks and abilities other than through "channels" i.e., Bessie.
Not a single one of the view panels, either those at the computer's console or the ones at the captain's console, were presenting a readable picture. Hodgepodges and flickerings, yes. Scraps of star-lit sky perhaps. Or vaguely wavy electronic patterns that would have been familiar to anyone who ever looked at a broken TV set. The Cow was really wild.
You know that a computer is only to feed you data and estimate probabilities on the courses of attacking ships; you're not supposed to think they can predict!" "I know, sir; I just " "You just near came getting us all killed!" snapped The Guesser. "You claim that you actually guessed where that ship was going to be, but you followed the computer's extrapolation instead?"
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