Tactics of Mistake (22 page)

“I promised a battle,” Cletus corrected, gently. “And I was hoping we wouldn't have much in the way of casualties. Besides, they deserve a good deal of credit themselves for the way they executed their battle orders.”

“Nonsense!” said Eachan brusquely. He cleared his throat. “They all know you're emigrating to the Dorsai. All very happy about it. Incidentally, seems you started a small rash of emigrations. That young lieutenant of yours is coming over as soon as his shoulder heals up.”

“You accepted him, didn't you?” Cletus asked.

“Oh, of course,” Eachan said. “The Dorsai'll accept any military man with a good record. He'll have to pass through our officers school, of course, if he wants to keep his commission with us, though. Marc Dodds told him there was no guarantee he'd make it.”

“He will,” said Cletus. “Incidentally, I'd like your opinion on something—now that I'm a Dorsai myself. If I supply the funds for subsistence, training facilities and equipment, do you suppose you could get together a regiment-sized body of officers and men who would be willing to invest six months in a complete retraining program—if I could guarantee them that at the end of that time they'd be able to find employment at half again their present pay?”

Eachan stared. “Six months is a long time for a professional soldier to live on subsistence,” he said, after a moment. “But after Two Rivers, I think it just might be done. It's not just the hope of better pay, much as that means to a lot of these people who've got families back on the Dorsai. It's the better chance of staying alive to get back to the families that you might be able to give them. Want me to see about it?”

“I'd appreciate it,” said Cletus. “All right,” said Eachan. “But where's the money to come from for all this?”

Cletus smiled. “I've got some people in mind,” he said. “I'll let you know about that later. You can tell the officers and the men you contact that it's all conditional on my having the funds, of course.”

“Of course.” Eachan fingered his mustache. “Melly's outside.”

“Is she?” asked Cletus.

“Yes. I asked her to wait while I had a word with you on some private matters first, before she came in…” Eachan hesitated. Cletus waited.

Eachan's back was as stiffly upright as a surveyor's rod. His jaw was clamped and the akin of his face was like stamped metal.

“Why don't you marry her?” he said, gruffly.

“Eachan…“ Cletus checked himself and paused. “What makes you think Melissa would want to marry me, anyway?”

“She likes you,” said Eachan. “You like her. You'd make a good team. She's mostly heart and you're nearly all head. I know you both better than you know each other.”

Cletus shook his head slowly, for once finding no words ready to his tongue.

“Oh, I know she acts as if she knows all the answers when she doesn't, and acts like she wants to run my life, and yours, and everybody else's for them,” went on Eachan. “But she can't help it. She does feel for people, you know—I mean, feel for what they're actually like, at core. Like her mother in that. And she's young. She feels something's so about someone and can't see why they don't do exactly what she thinks they ought to do, being who they really are. But she'll learn.”

Cletus shook his head again. “And me?” he said. “What makes you think I'd learn?”

“Try it. Find out,” retorted Eachan.

“And what if I made a mess of it?” Cletus looked up at him with more than a touch of grimness.

“Then at least you'll have saved her from deCastries,” said Eachan, bluntly. “She'll go to him to make me follow her—to Earth. I will, too, to pick up the pieces. Because that's all that'll be left of her afterward—pieces. With some women it wouldn't matter, but I know my Melly. Do you want deCastries to have her?”

“No,” said Cletus, suddenly quiet. “And he won't. I can promise you that, anyway.”

“Maybe,” said Eachan, getting to his feet. He swung about on his heel. “I'll send her in now,” he said, and went out.

A moment or two later, Melissa appeared in the doorway. She smiled wholeheartedly at Cletus and came in to seat herself in the same chair Eachan had just vacated.

“They're going to fix your knee,” she said. “I'm glad.”

He watched her smile. And for a second there was an actual physical sensation in his chest, as though his heart had actually moved at the sight of her. For a second what Eachan had said trembled in his ears, and the guarded distance that life and people had taught him to keep about him threatened to dissolve.

“So am I,” he heard himself saying.

“I was talking to Arvid today…” Her voice ran down. He saw her blue eyes locked with his, as if hypnotized and he became aware that he had captured her with his own relentless stare.

“Melissa,” he said slowly, “what would you say if I asked you to marry me?”

“Please…“ It was barely a whisper. He shifted his gaze, releasing her; she turned her head away.

“You know I've got Dad to think about, Cletus,” she said, in a low voice.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

She looked back, suddenly, flashing her smile at him, and put a hand on one of his hands, where it lay on the sheet.

“But I wanted to talk to you about all sorts of other things,” she said. “You really are a remarkable man, you know.”

“I am, am I?” he said, and summoned up a smile.

“You know you are,” she said. “You've done everything just the way you said you would. You've won the war for Bakhalla, and done it all in just a few weeks with no one's help but the Dorsai troops. And now you're going to be a Dorsai yourself. There's nothing to stop you from writing your books now. It's all over.” Pain touched his inner self—and the guarded distance closed back around him. He was once more alone among people who did not understand.

“I'm afraid not,” he said. “It's not over. Only the first act's finished. Actually, now it really begins.”

She stared at him. “Begins?” she echoed. “But Dow's going back to Earth tonight. He won't be coming out here again.”

“I'm afraid he will,” said Cletus.

“He will? Why should he?”

“Because he's an ambitious man,” said Cletus, “and because I'm going to show him how to further that ambition.”

“Ambition!” Her voice rang with disbelief. “He's already one of the five Prime Secretaries of the Coalition Supreme Council. It's only a year or two, inevitably, until he'll get a seat on the Council itself. What else could he want? Look at what he's got already!”

“You don't quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way,” said Cletus. “To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It's what he doesn't have that counts.”

“But what doesn't he have?” She was genuinely perplexed.

“Everything,” said Cletus. “A united Earth, under him, controlling all the Outworlds, again under him.”

She stared at him. “The Alliance and the Coalition combine?” she said. “But that's impossible. No one knows that better than Dow.”

“I'm planning to prove to him it is possible,” said Cletus.

A little flush of anger colored her cheeks. “You're planning—” She broke off. “You must think I'm some kind of a fool, to sit and listen to this!”

“No,” he said, a little sadly, “no more than anyone else. I'd just hoped that for once you'd take me on faith.”

“Take you on faith!” Suddenly, almost to her own surprise, she was blindingly furious. “I was right when I first met you and I said you're just like Dad. Everybody thinks he's all leather and guns and nothing else, and the truth of the matter is, those things don't matter to him at all. Nearly everybody thinks you're all cold metal and calculation and no nerves. Well, let me tell you something—you don't fool everybody. You don't fool Dad, and you don't fool Arvid. Most of all, you don't fool me! It's people you care about, just like it's tradition Dad cares about—the tradition of honor and courage and truth and all those things nobody thinks we have any more. That's what they took away from him, back on Earth, and that's what I'm going to get back for him, when I get him back there, if I have to do it by main force—because he's just like you. He has to be made to take care of himself and get what he really wants.”

“Did you ever stop to think,” said Cletus, quietly, when she finished, “that perhaps he's found tradition all over again on the Dorsai?”

“Tradition? The Dorsai?” Scorn put a jagged edge on her voice. “A world full of a collection of ex-soldiers gambling their lives in other people's little wars for hardly more pay than a tool programmer gets! You can find tradition in that?”

“Tradition to come,” said Cletus. “I think Eachan sees into the future further than you do, Melissa.”

“What do I care about the future?” She was on her feet now, looking down at him where he lay in the bed. “I want him happy. He can take care of anyone but himself.
I
have to take care of him. When I was a little girl and my mother died she asked me—
me
—to be sure and take care of him. And I will.”

She whirled about and went toward the door. “And he's all I'm going to take care of,” she cried, stopping and turning again at the door. “If you think I'm going to take care of you, too, you've got another think coming! So go ahead, gamble yourself twice over on some high principle or another, when you could be settling down and doing some real good, writing and working, person to person, the way you're built to do!”

She went out. The door was too well engineered to slam behind her, but that was all that saved it from slamming.

Cletus lay back against his pillows and gazed at the empty, white and unresponsive wall opposite. The hospital room felt emptier than it had ever felt before.

He had still one more visitor, however, before the day was out. This was Dow deCastries, preceded into Cletus's hospital room by Wefer Linet.

“Look who I've got with me, Cletus!” said Wefer, cheerfully. “I ran into the secretary here at the Officers' Club, where he was having lunch with some of the Exotics, and he told me to bring you his congratulations for abstract military excellence—as opposed to anything affecting the Neuland-Bakhalla situation. I asked him why he didn't come along and give you the congratulations himself. And here he is!”

He stepped aside and back, letting Dow come forward. Behind the taller man's back Wefer winked broadly at Cletus. “Got to run an errand here in the hospital,” said Wefer. “Back in a minute.”

He ducked out of the room, closing the door behind him. Dow looked at Cletus.

“Did you have to use Wefer as an excuse?” Cletus asked.

“He was convenient.” Dow shrugged, dismissing the matter. “My congratulations, of course.”

“Of course,” said Cletus. “Thank you. Sit down, why don't you?”

“I prefer standing,” said Dow. “They tell me you're going off to bury yourself on the Dorsai now. You'll be getting down to the writing of your books then?”

“Not just yet,” said Cletus.

Dow raised his eyebrows. “There's something else for you to do?”

“There're half a dozen worlds and a few billion people to be freed first,” said Cletus.

“Free them?” Dow smiled. “From the Coalition?”

“From Earth.”

Dow shook his head. His smile became ironic. “I wish you luck,” he said. “All this, in order to write a few volumes?”

Cletus said nothing. He sat upright in his bed, as if waiting. Dow's smile went away.

“You're quite right,” Dow said, in a different tone, though Cletus still had not spoken. “Time is growing short, and I'm headed back to Earth this afternoon. Perhaps I'll see you there—say in six months?”

“I'm afraid not,” said Cletus. “But I expect I'll see you out here—among the new worlds. Say, inside two years?”

Dow's black eyes grew cold. “You badly misunderstand me, Cletus,” he said. “I was never built to be a follower.”

“Neither was I,” said Cletus.

“Yes,” said Dow, slowly, “I see. We probably will meet after all then”—his smile returned, suddenly and thinly—“at Phillippi.”

“There never was any other place we could meet,” said Cletus.

“I believe you're right. Fair enough,” said Dow. He stepped backward and opened the door. “I'll wish you a good recovery with that leg of yours.”

“And you, a safe trip to Earth,” said Cletus.

Dow turned and went out. Several minutes later the door opened again and Wefer's head appeared in the opening.

“DeCastries gone?” Wefer asked. “He didn't talk long at all then.”

“We said what we had to say,” answered Cletus. “There wasn't much point in his staying, once we'd done that.”

Three days later, Mondar made his reappearance at Cletus's bedside. “Well, Cletus,” he said, sitting down in the chair by the bed, “I've spent most of my time since I saw you last going into your situation with other members of our group who've had more experience with certain aspects of what you suggested than I have. All together we worked out a pattern of behavior that looks as if it might give the greatest possible encouragement to the miracle you're after. The main question seemed to be whether it would be better for you to be ultimately acquainted with the physiology of your knees, and the process of tissue growth and regrowth, or whether it would be better for you to have as little knowledge of it as possible.”

“What was the decision?” Cletus asked.

“We decided it would be best if you knew as little as possible,” Mondar said. “The point is, the stimulus for what's going to be essentially an abnormal body reaction has to come from a very primitive level of the organism—you being the organism.”