Tactics of Mistake (25 page)

He paused. “In short,” he said, “no one, right up through the battle operator or the commander of the total military unit, simply follows orders. Instead, they all—right down to the individual line soldier—react as a team member in a common effort. The result is that breaks in the chain of command, misunderstood or incorrect orders, and all the other things that go to mess up a battle plan by mischance, are bypassed. Not only that, but from the lowest ranks on up each subordinate is ready to step into the position of his superior with 90 per cent of the necessary knowledge that his superior had at the moment the superior was put out of action.”

Arvid gave a low whistle of admiration. The other officers in the room all looked at him. With the exception of Cletus, he was the only one among them who had never been a practicing Dorsai field officer. Arvid looked embarrassed.

“A revolutionary concept,” said Tosca Aras. “More than revolutionary if it works out in practice.”

“It's going to have to work,” said Cletus. “My whole scheme of strategy and tactics is based upon troops that can operate along those lines.”

“Well, we'll see.” Aras picked up the thick manual Cletus had issued to each of them just after dinner and which had been lying since then in his lap. He stood up. “An old dog learning new tricks is an understatement in my case. If the rest of you gentlemen don't mind I'll be getting to my homework.”

He said good night and went out, starting a general exodus. Eachan stayed behind, and Arvid—Arvid, to apologize for that whistle.

“You see, sir,” he said earnestly to Cletus, “it suddenly came clear to me, all of a sudden. I hadn't seen it before. But now I see how it all ties together.”

“Good,” said Cletus. “That's half the learning process done for you right there.”

Arvid followed the others out of the living room. Eachan alone was left. Cletus looked at him.

“Do
you
see how it all hangs together?” Cletus asked him.

“Think so,” said Eachan. “But remember, I've been living with you for the last half year—and I know most of the patterns in that manual of yours already.”

He reached for the decanter behind the glasses ranked on the small table beside his chair and thoughtfully poured himself a small amount of whiskey.

“Shouldn't expect too much too soon,” he said, sipping at it. “Any military man's bound to be a bit conservative. In the nature of us. But they'll come through, Cletus. It's beginning to be more than just a name with us here, this business of being Dorsais.”

He turned out to be correct. By the time the officers' training program got under way a week later, all of those who had sat in the living room with Cletus that night knew their manuals by heart—if not yet quite by instinct. Cletus divided the officers to be trained among the six of them, in groups of roughly ten each, and training began.

Cletus took the class that he had labeled simply “Relaxation,” the course that would train these officers to tap that extra source of energy he had demonstrated to them all at the Foralie stadium after running himself to the normal exhaustion point. His first class consisted of the six from the living room. Eachan was among them, although he already had more than a faint grasp of the technique involved. Cletus had been privately tutoring both him and Melissa in it for the past couple of months, and both had become noticeably capable with it. However, it was Eachan's suggestion—and Cletus found it a good one—that his inclusion in the class would be an example to the others that someone besides Cletus could achieve unusual physiological results.

Cletus began his class just before lunch, after they had completed the full day's physical training schedule, consisting of jungle gym, run and swim. They were physically unwound by the exercise, and more than a little empty because of the long hours since breakfast. In short, they were in a condition of maximum receptivity.

Cletus lined them up behind a long steel bar supported between two posts at about shoulder height off the ground.

“All right,” he said to them. “Now I want you all to stand on your right legs. You can reach out and touch the bar in front of you with your fingertips to help keep your balance, but take your left feet off the ground and keep them off until I tell you you can put them down again.”

They complied. Their pose was a little on the ridiculous side, and there were a few smiles at first, but these faded as the legs on which they stood began to tire. About the time when bearing all their weight upon the muscle of one leg was beginning to become actively painful, Cletus ordered them to switch legs and kept them standing with all their weight on their left legs until the muscles of calf and thigh began to tremble under their full body weight. Then he switched them back to the right leg, and then again to the left, shortening the intervals each time as the leg muscles became exhausted more quickly. Very shortly they stood before him on legs as uncertain as those of men who had been bedridden for a period of weeks.

“All right, now,” Cletus said then, cheerfully, “I want you all up in a handstand, the palms of your hands on the ground, your arms fully extended. You can balance yourselves this time by letting your legs rest against the bar.”

They obeyed. Once they were all up, Cletus gave them a further order.

“Now,” he said, “one hand off the ground. Do your handstand on one arm only.”

When they were upside down, he went through the same process he had when they had been right side up. Only it took their arms a fraction of the time it had taken their legs to tire. Very shortly he released them from their exercise, and they all tumbled to the ground, virtually incapacitated in all their limbs.

“On your backs,” ordered Cletus. “Legs straight out, arms at your sides—but you don't have to lie at attention. Just straighten out on your back comfortably. Eyes on the sky.”

They obeyed.

“Now,” said Cletus, pacing slowly up and down before them, “I want you just to lie there and relax while I talk to you. Watch the sky…” It was one of those high, bright blue skies with a few clouds drifting lazily across it. “Concentrate on the feeling in your arms and legs, now that they've been relieved from the load of supporting your bodies against the force of gravity. Be conscious of the fact that now it's the ground supporting you—and them—and be grateful for it. Feel how heavy and limp your arms and legs are, now that they've given up the work of bearing weight, and are themselves being borne by the surface of the ground. Tell yourself—not out loud—in your own words how limp and heavy they are. Keep telling yourself that and watching the sky. Feel how heavy and relaxed your body is, with its weight being supported by the ground beneath your back. Feel the relaxation in your neck, in the muscles of your jaw, in your face, even in your scalp. Tell yourself how relaxed and heavy all these parts of you are and keep watching the sky. I'll be going on talking, but pay no attention to me. Just give all your attention to what you're telling yourself and what you're feeling and how the sky looks…“

He continued to pace up and down talking. After a while, the arm- and leg-weary men, soothed by their relaxed position and the slow movement of the clouds, lulled by the steady, pleasant, monotonous sound of his voice, ceased in fact to pay any attention to the sense of his words. He was merely talking. To Arvid, at one end of the line, Cletus's voice seemed to have gone off and become as remote as everything else about him. Lying on his back, Arvid saw nothing but sky. It was as if the planet beneath him did not exist, except as a soft grassy pressure at his back, bearing him up. The clouds moved slowly in the endless blue, and he seemed to drift along with them.

A nudge at his feet brought him suddenly and sharply back to consciousness. Cletus was smiling down at him.

“All right,” Cletus said, in the same steady low tone, “on your feet and step over there.”

Arvid obeyed, getting heavily upright once more, and moving off, as Cletus had indicated, about a dozen feet. The rest were still on the ground, with Cletus talking to them. Then he saw Cletus, who was still pacing, pause at the feet of David Ap Morgan and nudge the sole of David's right foot with his toe.

“All right, David,” Cletus said, without breaking the pace or tone of his talking, “up you get and join Arvid over there.”

David's eyes, which had been closed, jerked open. He got to his feet and went over to stand by Arvid. As the two of them watched, one by one other members of the class went to sleep and were quietly wakened and weeded out until no one but Eachan still lay on the grass, his eyes wide open.

Cletus abruptly ended his talking with a chuckle. “All right, Eachan,” he said. “There's no point in my trying to put you to sleep. You get up and join the others.”

Eachan rose. On their feet and all together once more, the class looked at Cletus.

“The idea,” said Cletus, with a smile, “is
not
to fall asleep. But we won't worry about that for a while yet. How many of you remember feeling any kind of a floating sensation before you did drop off?”

Arvid and three others raised their hands. Eachan was one of them.

“Well, that's it for today,” Cletus said. “Tomorrow we'll try it without the muscle-tiring exercises first. But I want you all to go back to your quarters and try doing this again, by yourself, at least three times before tomorrow morning. If you like, you can try putting yourself to sleep tonight with it. We'll gather together here again tomorrow, at this same place at the same time.”

In the next few sessions Cletus worked with the class until all of them could achieve the floating sensation without drifting off into sleep. With this accomplished, he led them by easy stages into autocontrol of pain and deep bodily sensations. When they had become fairly adept at this, he began to move them gradually from a relaxed and motionless position into movement—first getting them to achieve the floating sensation while standing upright, then when walking slowly and rhythmically forward, and finally under any kind of activity up to the most violent. This achieved, there remained for them only the ability to make use of the trance state in various types of autocontrol under all conditions of activity, and he turned them loose to become teachers, in their turn to the other officers in training—who would, again, pass on the training to the enlisted men under their command.

By this time nearly three months had gone by, and the officers in training had advanced to the point where they could begin to pass on at least the physical end of their training to the troops that would be under their orders. Recruitment was started for Dorsais to fill the enlisted ranks—and for some few extra Dorsai officers to replace those who had dropped out of the training program.

Just at this time Cletus received a thick envelope of clippings sent him by a news-clipping service on Earth he had contacted before leaving Bakhalla. He opened the envelope, alone in Eachan's study, and spread the clippings out in order of their dates to examine them.

The story they told was simple enough. The Coalition, sparked by a few key speeches by Dow deCastries himself, was attempting to raise a storm of protest against mercenary troops on the new worlds in general, and the Dorsais in particular.

Cletus replaced the clippings in their envelope and filed them in the cabinet holding his own correspondence. He went out on the terrace to find Melissa there reading.

It was high summer in these Dorsai mountains, and the sun was in late afternoon position above the farther peaks. He paused for a moment, watching her as she sat unsuspecting that he watched. In the clear sunlight, her face was untroubled, and somehow more mature-looking than he remembered it back at Bakhalla.

He went out onto the terrace and she looked up from her reading spool at the sound of his feet. He caught her gaze with his own, and her eyes widened a little at the seriousness with which he stood looking down at her. After a minute he spoke.

“Will you marry me, then, Melissa?” he said.

The blueness of her eyes was as deep as the universe itself. Once again, as it had in the hospital in Bakhalla, her gaze seemed to evaporate the barrier of protective loneliness that his experience with life and people had led Mm to build about him. She looked up at him for a long moment before answering.

“If you really want me, Cletus,” she said.

“I do,” he replied.

And he did not lie. But, as the protective barrier flowed once more into position about his inner self, even as he continued to match her gaze with his, a cold interior part of his mind reminded him of the necessity that there would be now to lie, hereafter.

The wedding was set for a date two weeks away. Meanwhile, Cletus, seeing the formation of the force he had begun to raise on the Dorsai now beginning to operate under its own momentum, took time out for a trip back to Kultis and Bakhalla for a conversation with Mondar, and a farther trip to Newton seeking employment for the newly trained Dorsais of his command.

On Bakhalla, he and Mondar had an excellent dinner at Mondar's residence. Over the dinner table Cletus brought the Exotic up to date. Mondar listened with interest, which increased visibly when Cletus got into the matter of the special training in autocontrol he had initiated for the officers and men who would be under his command. After the dinner was over, they strolled out onto one of the many terraces of Mondar's home to continue their talk under the night sky.

“And there,” said Cletus, as they stood in the warm night breeze, looking upward. He pointed at a yellowish star low on the horizon. “That'll be your sister world, Mara. I understand you Exotics have got quite a colony there, too.”

“Oh yes,” answered Mondar thoughtfully, gazing at the star.

“A pity,” said Cletus, turning to him, “that they aren't as free there from Alliance and Coalition influence as you've been here on Kultis since the Neulanders were taken care of.”