Rostock’s not lying. Why should he? What could he gain? He may be a nut, of course. But he doesn’t act like a nut either. He wants me to study his statistics and equations, satisfy myself that he’s right. And he must be damn sure I will be convinced, to tell me what he has.

How many are there like him? Few, I’m sure. The man-machine symbiosis is obviously new, or we’d’ve had some inkling ourselves. This is the first field trial of the system. I wonder if the others have reached the same conclusions as Rostock. No, he said he doubts that; their minds impressed him as being more deeply channeled than his. He’s a lucky accident.

Lucky? Now how can I tell? I’m only a man. I’ve never experienced an I.Q. of a thousand, or whatever the figure may be. A god’s purposes aren’t necessarily what a man would elect.

An eventual end to war? Well, other institutions had been ended, at least in the Western countries: judicial torture, chattel slavery, human sacrifice—no, wait, according to Rostock human sacrifice had been revived.

“But is our casualty rate high enough to fit your equations?” Diaz had argued. “Space forces aren’t as big as old-time armies. No country could afford that.”

“Other elements than death must be taken into account,” Rostock answered. “The enormous expense is one factor. Taxpaying is a form of symbolic self-mutilation. It also tends to direct civilian resentments and aggressions against their own governments, thus taking some pressure off international relations.

“Chiefly, though, there is the matter of emotional intensity. A spaceman does not simply die, he usually dies horribly; and that moment is the culmination of a long period under grisly conditions. His groundling brothers, administrative and service personnel, suffer vicariously: ‘sweat it out,’ as your idiom so well expresses the feeling. His kinfolk, friends, women, are likewise racked. When Adonis dies—or Osiris, Tammuz, Baldur, Christ, Tlaloc, whichever of his hundred names you choose—the people must in some degree share his agony. That is part of the sacrifice.”

Diaz had never thought about it in quite that way. Like most Corpsmen, he had held the average civilian in thinly disguised contempt. But…from time to time, he remembered, he’d been glad his mother died before he enlisted. And why did his sister hit the bottle so hard? Then there had been Lois, she of the fire-colored hair and violet eyes, who wept as if she would never stop weeping when he left for duty. He’d promised to get in touch with her on his return, but of course he knew better.

Which did not erase memories of men whose breath and blood came exploding from burst helmets; who shuddered and vomited and defecated in the last stages of radiation sickness; who stared without immediate apprehension at a red spurt which a second ago had been an arm or a leg; who went insane and must be gassed because psychoneurosis is catching on a six months’ orbit beyond Saturn; who—Yeah, Carl had been lucky.