the only one
with enough wisdom to seek your intellectual equals rather than remain
loyal to a mass of stupid animals who are fit only to be slaves."

"It was because I foresaw their eventual enslavement that I acted as I
did," MacMaine admitted. "As I saw it, I had only two choices--to
remain as I was and become a slave to the Kerothi or to put myself in
your hands willingly and hope for the best. As you----"

He was interrupted by a harsh voice from a nearby speaker.

"_Battle stations! Battle stations! Enemy fleet in detector range!
Contact in twelve minutes!_"

* * * * *

Tallis and MacMaine headed for the Command Room at a fast trot. The
three other Kerothi who made up the Strategy Staff came in at almost
the same time. There was a flurry of activity as the computers and
viewers were readied for action, then the Kerothi looked expectantly at
the Earthman.

MacMaine looked at the detector screens. The deployment of the
approaching Earth fleet was almost as he had expected it would be.
There were slight differences, but they would require only minor
changes in the strategy he had mapped out from the information brought
in by the Kerothi scout ships.

Undoubtedly, the Kerothi position had been relayed to the Earth
commander by their own advance scouts buzzing about in tiny, one-man
shells just small enough to be undetectable at normal range.

Watching the positions on the screens carefully, MacMaine called out a
series of numbers in an unhurried voice and watched as the orders,
relayed by the Kerothi staff, changed the position of parts of the
Kerothi fleet. Then, as the computer-led Earth fleet jockeyed to
compensate for the change in the Kerothi deployment, MacMaine called
out more orders.

The High Commander of Keroth had called MacMaine a "computing animal,"
but the term was far from accurate. MacMaine couldn't possibly have
computed all the variables in that battle, and he didn't try. It was a
matter of human intuition against mechanical logic. The advantage lay
with MacMaine, for, while the computer could not logically fathom the
intuitive processes of its human opponent, MacMaine could and did have
an intuitive grasp of the machine's logic. MacMaine didn't need to know
every variable in the pattern; he only needed to know the pattern as a
whole.

The _Shudos_ was well in the rear of the main body of the Kerothi
fleet. There was every necessity for keeping M