Tactics of Mistake (8 page)

Cletus shook his head again.

“If you turn us down,” said Mondar, “it signals a danger to you, Cletus. It signals an unconscious desire on your part to go the deCastries way—to let yourself be caught up by the excitement of directly manipulating people and situations instead of dealing with what's much more valuable, but less emotionally stimulating—the struggle with ideas to find principles that'll lift people eventually above and beyond manipulation.”

Cletus laughed, a little grimly. “Tell me,” he said, “isn't it true that you Exotics won't carry or use weapons yourself, even in self-defense? And that's why you hire mercenaries like the Dorsai, or make agreements with political groups like the Alliance to defend yourselves?”

“Yes—but not for the reason most people think, Cletus,” said Mondar, swiftly. “We haven't any moral objection to fighting. It's just that the emotions involved interfere with clear thinking, so people like myself prefer not to touch weapons. But there's no compulsion on our people on this. If you want to write your work on military tactics, or even keep and carry guns—”

“I don't think you follow me,” said Cletus. “Eachan Khan told me something. You remember when you were in the command car after it overturned, earlier today, and he suggested you not let yourself be taken alive by the Neulander guerrillas—for obvious reasons? You answered that you could always die. ‘
No man
,' you said, ‘
commands this body but myself
.' “

“And you think suicide is a form of violence—”

“No,” said Cletus. “I'm trying to explain to you why I'd never make an Exotic. In your calmness in the face of possible torture and the need to kill yourself, you were showing a particular form of ruthlessness. It was ruthlessness toward yourself—but that's only the back side of the coin. You Exotics are essentially ruthless toward all men, because you're philosophers, and by and large, philosophers are ruthless people.”

“Cletus!” Mondar shook his head. “Do you realize what you're saying?”

“Of course,” said Cletus, quietly. “And you realize it as well as I do. The immediate teaching of philosophers may be gentle, but the theory behind their teaching is without compunction—and that's why so much bloodshed and misery has always attended the paths of their followers, who claim to live by those teachings. More blood's been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man.”

“No Exotic spills blood,” said Mondar, softly.

“Not directly, no,” said Cletus. “But to achieve the future you dream of means the obliteration of the present as we know it now. You may say your aim's changed from revolution to evolution, but your goal is still the destruction of what we have now to make room for something different. You work to destroy what presently is—and that takes a ruthlessness that's not my way—that I don't agree with.” He stopped speaking.

Mondar met his eyes for a long moment. “Cletus,” said Mondar at last, “can you be that sure of yourself?”

“Yes,” said Cletus. “I'm afraid I can.” He turned toward the door. As he reached the door and put his hand on its button, he turned back.

“Thanks all the same, Mondar,” he said. “You and your Exotics may end up going my way. But I won't go yours. Good night.” He opened the door.

“Cletus,” said Mondar, behind him, “if you refuse us now, you do it at your own risk. There are larger forces at work in what you want to do than I think you understand.”

Cletus shook his head. “Good night,” he said again, and went out. Back in the room where he had left Arvid, he found the young lieutenant and told him they were leaving. As they reached the parking area together and Cletus opened the door of their aircar, the sky split open above them in a wild explosion of lightning and thunder, with raindrops coming down like hailstones.

They bolted for the interior of the car. The rain was icy and the few seconds of being exposed to it had left their jackets soaked and clinging to their shoulders. Arvid put power on the vehicle and lifted it out of the lot.

“All hell's broke loose tonight,” he murmured, as they swung back across the city. Then, startled, he looked at Cletus, sitting beside him.

“Now, why did I say that?” he asked. Cletus did not answer and after a second Arvid answered himself.

“All the same,” he said, half to himself, “it has.”

Cletus woke to the sensation that his left knee was being slowly crushed in a heavy vise. The dull, unyielding pain of it had roused him from his sleep, and for a moment he was its captive—the sensation of pain filling the whole universe of his consciousness. Then, practically, he took action to control the crippling sensation. Rolling over on his back, he stared up at the white ceiling seven feet above him. One by one, starting with his thigh muscles, he commanded the large muscles of his arms and legs to lose their tensions and relax. He moved on to the neck and face muscles, the belly muscles, and finally into a feeling of relaxation pervading him completely.

His body was heavy and limp now. His eyes were drooping, half-closed. He lay, indifferent to the faint noises that filtered to him from other parts of the BOQ. He drifted, sliding gently away, like a man lax upon the surface of some warm ocean.

The state of relaxation he had induced had already muffled the dull-jawed, relentless grip of the pain upon his knee. Slowly, so as not to reawaken an alertness that would allow tension to form in him once more, he propped the pillow behind and pulled himself up in the bed. Half-sitting, he folded the covers back from his left leg and looked at it.

The knee was puffed and swollen to stiffness. There was no darkness or bruise-shade of discoloration about it, but it was swollen to the point of immobility. He fastened his gaze steadily on the swollen knee, and set about the larger job of bringing it back down to normal size and movement.

Still drifting, still in that more primitive state of mind known as regression, he connected the pain response in his knee with the pain message in his mind, and began to convert the message to a mental equivalent of that same physical relaxation and peace which held his body. Drifting with it, he felt the pain message lose its color. It faded, like an instruction written in evaporating ink, until it was finally invisible.

He felt what he had earlier recognized as pain, still present in his knee. It was a sensation only, however, neither pain nor pressure, but co-equal with both. Now that he had identified this former pain as a separate sensation-entity, he began to concentrate upon the actual physical feeling of pressure within the blood and limb, the vessels now swollen to the point of immobilizing his leg.

He formed a mental image of the vessels as they were. Then, slowly, he began to visualize them as relaxing, shrinking, returning their fluid contents to those pipe systems of the leg to which they were severally connected.

For perhaps as much as ten minutes there was no visible response from the knee area. Then gradually he began to be aware of a yielding of the pressure and a sensation of faint warmth within the knee itself. Within another five minutes it was possible to see that the swelling was actually going down. Ten minutes later, he had a knee that was still swollen, but which he could bend at a good sixty-degree angle. It was good enough. He swung good leg and bad out of bed together, got up and began to dress.

He was just buckling on a weapons belt over his jungle suit, when there was a knock at his door, Cletus glanced over at the clock beside his bed. It showed eight minutes before 5 A.M.

“Come on in,” he said.

Arvid stepped into the room.

“You're up early, Arv,” Cletus said, snapping the weapons belt shut and reaching for his sidearm on top of the chest of drawers beside him. He slid the weapon into its holster, hanging from the belt. “Did you get the things I wanted?”

“Yes, sir,” said Arvid, “the loudspeaker horn and the singleton mines are tucked away out of sight in duffle packs. I couldn't get the rifle into a pack, but it's with the packs, clipped onto the electric horse you asked for.”

“And the horse, itself?”

“I've got it in the back of a courier car, outside…" Arvid hesitated. “I asked to go with you, sir, but the orders just called for you and the field officer in charge of the company. I want to tell you about him. They've given you a first lieutenant named Bill Athyer.”

“And this Bill Athyer is no good, is that it?” asked Cletus, cheerfully, picking up his communications helmet and leading the way out of the room.

“How did you know?” Arvid stared down at Cletus, following him as they went out down the long center aisle of the BOQ.

Cletus smiled back at him, limping along, but delayed his answer until they had stepped out the front door into the misty, predawn darkness where the courier car waited for Cletus. They got in, Arvid behind the controls. As the big young lieutenant sent the vehicle sliding off on its air cushion, Cletus went on:

“I rather thought the general'd be giving me someone like that. Don't worry about it, Arv. You're going to have your hands full enough today, as it is. I want you to find office space for me and line me up a staff—a warrant officer, if you can get one for office manager, a couple of clerical tech fives and a file clerk tech two with a research specialty. Can you get right to work on that?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Arvid. “But I didn't know we had authority for something like that—”

“We don't, yet,” said Cletus. “But I'll get it for you. You just find the premises and the people, so we know where to lay hands on them as soon as we have authorization.”

“Yes, sir,” said Arvid.

Having arrived at the transport area, Cletus found his company under the command of First Lieutenant William Athyer, standing at east in ranks, equipped, armed and apparently ready to take off. Cletus assumed that the men had had breakfast—not being the field officer in command of them, it was not up to him to see that they had; and asking Athyer about it would be impolitic, not to say insulting. Cletus descended a little stiffly from the courier car and watched as Arvid unloaded the electric horse, with its equipment.

“Colonel Grahame?” a voice said behind him. “I'm Lieutenant Athyer, in command of this company. We're ready to take off…"

Cletus turned. Athyer was a short, dark, fairly slim man, in his mid-thirties, with a beak-like nose. A vaguely sour expression sat on his features, as if habit had made it permanent there. His speech was abrupt, even aggressive, but the words at the end of each speech tended to thin out into a whine.

“Now that you're finally here, sir,” he added.

The extra, unnecessary statement verged on impertinence. But Cletus ignored it, looking past Athyer's shoulder at the men behind the lieutenant. Their tanned skin and the mixture of old and new equipment and clothing about them suggested experience. But they were more silent than they should be; and Cletus had little doubt about the reason for this. To be put back under weapons and flown off into combat in the middle of Rest and Retraining was not likely to make soldiers happy. He looked back at Athyer.

“I imagine we'll start loading right away, then. Won't we, Lieutenant?” he said pleasantly. “Let me know where you want me.”

“We're taking two atmosphere support ships for transport,” growled Athyer. “I've got my top sergeant in the second. You'd better ride with me in the first, Colonel—”

He broke off to stare at the electric horse, as its overhead vanes whined into movement. Arvid had just switched its satchel turbine on, and the single-person vehicle had lifted into the air so that it could be moved easily under its own power to the support ship. Evidently, Athyer had not connected the horse with Cletus until this moment. In truth, it was an unlikely little contraption for such an outing—designed for spaceport inspection work, mainly, and looking like a wheel-less bicycle frame suspended fore and aft from metal rods leading down from a side-by-side pair of counter-rotating ducted vanes driven by a nuclear-pack, satchel turbine just below them. Cletus's cone rifle and duffle bags were hung before its saddle on the crossbar.

It was not pretty, but that was no reason for Athyer to scowl at it as he was doing.

“What's this?” he demanded.

“It's for me, Lieutenant,” said Cletus, cheerfully. “My left knee's half-prosthetic, you know. I didn't want to hold you and your men up if it came to moving someplace along the ground in a hurry.”

“Oh? Well…" Athyer went on scowling. But the fact that the sentence he had begun trailed off was evidence enough that his imagination was failing him in its search for a valid excuse to forbid taking the electric horse. Cletus was, after all, a lieutenant-colonel. Athyer turned, snapping at Arvid. “Get it on board, then! Quick, Lieutenant!”

He turned away to the business of getting the company of perhaps eighty men into the two atmosphere support ships waiting on the transport area pad some fifty feet distant.

The boarding of the ships went smoothly and easily. Within twenty minutes they were skimming northward over the tops of the jungle trees toward Etter's Pass—and the sky beyond the distant mountain range was beginning to grow pale with the dawn.

“What're your plans, Lieutenant?” began Cletus, as he and Athyer sat facing each other in the small, forward passengers' compartment of the ship.

“I'll get the map,” said Athyer, ducking away resentfully from Cletus's gaze. He dug into the metal command case on the floor between his boots and came up with a terrain map of the Exotic side of the mountains around Etter's Pass. He spread the map out on the combined knees of himself and Cletus.

“I'll set up a picket line like this,” Athyer said, his finger tracing an arc through the jungle on the mountain slopes below the pass, “about three hundred yards down. Also, place a couple of reserve groups high up, behind the picket line on either side of the pass mouth. When the Neulanders get through the pass and far enough down the trail to hit the lower curve of the picket line, the reserve groups can move in behind them and we'll have them surrounded… That is, if any guerrillas do come through the pass.”