battle if it was given the proper strategy, but it couldn't devise anything new. 

 Colonel MacMaine had tried to get himself transferred to space duty, but without success. The Commanding Staff didn't want him out there. 

 The trouble was that they didn't believe MacMaine actually devised his strategy before he read the complete report. How could anyone out-think a computer? 

 He'd offered to prove it. "Give me a problem," he'd told his immediate superior, General Matsukuo. "Give me the Initial Contact information of a battle I haven't seen before, and I'll show you." 

 And Matsukuo had said, testily: "Colonel, I will not permit a member of my staff to make a fool of himself in front of the Commanding Staff. Setting yourself up as someone superior to the Strategy Board is the most antisocial type of egocentrism imaginable. You were given the same education at the Academy as every other officer; what makes you think you are better than they? As time goes on, your automatic promotions will put you in a position to vote on such matters—provided you don't prejudice the Promotion Board against you by antisocial behavior. I hold you in the highest regard, colonel, and I will say nothing to the Promotion Board about this, but if you persist I will have to do my duty. Now, I don't want to hear any more about it. Is that clear?" 

 It was. 

 All MacMaine had to do was wait, and he'd automatically be promoted to the Commanding Staff, where he would have an equal vote with the others of his rank. One unit vote to begin with and an additional unit for every year thereafter. 

  It's a great system for running a peacetime social club, maybe, MacMaine thought, but it's no way to run a fighting force. 

 Maybe the Kerothi general was right. Maybe homo sapiens just wasn't a race of fighters. 

 They had been once. Mankind had fought its way to domination of Earth by battling every other form of life on the planet, from the smallest virus to the biggest carnivore. The fight against disease was still going on, as a matter of fact, and Man was still fighting the elemental fury of Earth's climate. 

 But Man no longer fought with Man. Was that a bad thing? The discovery of atomic energy, two centuries before, had literally made war impossible, if the race was to survive. Small struggles bred bigger 

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