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. Who's our antagonist? The Beast? The Galactic
Overlord? Boskone? Or is it direct action by another history-changing group,
treaty or no treaty? Or-don't laugh-are we up against an Author this time? Our
timing must depend on our tactics, and our tactics must fit our antagonist. So
we must wait until those big brains next door tell us whom we are fighting."
"No," said Libby Long.
"What's wrong. Mama?" the lad asked.
"We will set up all the possible combinations, dear, and solve them
simultaneously, then plug the appropriate numerical answer into the scenario the
fabulists give us."
"No, Lib, you would still be betting a couple hundred lives that the big
brains are right," Lazarus objected. "They may not be. We'll stay right here and
find a safe answer if it takes ten years. Ladies and gentlemen, these are our
colleagues we are talking about. They are not expendable. Damn it, find that
right answer!"
I sat there feeling silly, slowly getting it through my head mat they were
seriously discussing how to rescue all the people- and records and
instruments-in a habitat I had seen vaporized an hour ago. And that they could
just as easily rescue the habitat itself-move it out of that space before it was
bombed. I heard them discuss how to do that, how to time it. But they rejected
that solution. That habitat must have cost countless billions of crowns
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