He pushed a button and a red light showed on the lead dreadnought of the enemy column.

"This is the initial target." The designation was relayed to the flights.

The second hand of the clock was making its final sweep. All voices quieted. The Commander raised his fist. As the clock's hand came to the top, his fist slashed down.

"Execute!" The battle was on.

Flight Commander Dennis, Flight One, heard the final word as he sat in the small bubble on top of the dense package of machinery that was a P-ship. Swiftly, his hands closed switches. The course had already been chosen and fed into the automatic computers under him. He merely gave the signal to execute. In response, the ship seemed to pick itself up and hurl itself down the radius of the circle to the waiting enemy fleet.

Flight Commander Dennis

He could not see them, but he knew that, behind him, lay the other nine ships of the flight, in column, spaced so close that an error in calculation of but a few millionths of a second would have caused disaster. But the automatic and inconceivably fast and accurate calculators in the ships, tied together by tight communication beams, held them there in safety.

As he came within range of possible enemy action, Dennis pressed another button, and the Random Computer took command. Operated by the noise a vacuum tube generates because electrons are discrete particles, it gave random orders, weighted only by a preference to bring the ship's course back to the remembered target.

The column behind obeyed these same orders. The whole flight seemed to jitter across space, moving at random but coming back to a reasonably good course towards the target, utterly confusing any enemy fire-control computers.

To the men in the ships, one to each, it seemed as if their very nerve cells must jar apart. They felt themselves incapable of coherent action, or, even, thought. But they did not need coherency. Their function was done until the ship was out of danger, when a new formation would be made, a new target designated, and a new order to execute given.

Because the electronic computers took care of the attack. They had to. No human could react as fast as was needed. Out from the enemy ships reached fingers of pure delta-field, reaching for gamma-matter. The touch of a finger meant death in a 

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