Tactics of Mistake (3 page)

“Of course,” said Cletus. “But I'll see you the rest of the way to your cabin, at least.”

“No thanks. I can get there by myself.”

“What if someone sees you doing just that and the word gets back to the Secretary that your dizziness cleared up this quickly, once you were out of the lounge?”

She glared at him, turned and stalked off down the corridor. Cletus caught up with her in two long strides and fell into step.

“About professional soldiers,” he said, mildly. “One isn't just like another…"

She stopped and faced him abruptly, forcing him to stop also. “I suppose,” she said, grimly, “you think my father never was anything but a mercenary.”

“Of course not,” Cletus said. “A lieutenant-general in the Royal Army of Afghanistan, wasn't he, up until ten years or so ago?”

She stared at him. “How did you know?” Her tone was accusing.

“Military history—even recent military history—is part of my field,” he said. “The University Revolution at Kabul twelve years ago, which ended up by taking over the government at Kabul, is part of it. The Afghanistani Army wouldn't have had more than one General Eachan Khan. He must have emigrated from Earth not more than a couple of years after the takeover.”

“He didn't have to leave!” she said. “They still wanted him in the Army, even after Afghanistan gave up its independence to become a sector area of the Coalition. But there were other things … ” She broke off.

“Other things?” asked Cletus.

“You wouldn't understand!” She turned and began walking once more down the corridor. But, after a few steps, the words came from her as if she could not keep them in. “My mother had died… and…
Salaam Badshahi Daulat Afghanistan
—when they began enforcing the death penalty for anyone singing the old Afghanistani anthem, he resigned. So he emigrated—to the Dorsai.”

“It's a new world full of soldiers there, I understand,” said Cletus. “It shouldn't have been too—”

“They found him work as a captain—a
captain
in a mercenary battalion!” she flashed at him. “And since then, in ten years, he's managed to work his way just back up to colonel—and there he'll stay. Because the Dorsai mercenaries can't find employment for anything larger than a short regiment—and after his expenses are paid we don't have enough left over from what he makes to visit Earth, let alone live there again, unless the Exotics or someone pay our way there on official business.”

Cletus nodded. “I see,” he said. “But it's a mistake for you to try to mend things through deCastries. He's not capable of being influenced the way you hope.”

“Mend things… ” She turned her head and stared at him, meeting his eyes this time in unthinking shock, her face suddenly pale.

“Of course,” said Cletus. “I'd been wondering what you were doing at his table. You'd have been underage at the time your father emigrated to the Dorsai, so you must have dual Coalition-Dorsai citizenship. You have the right to go back and live on Earth any time you want to take up your Coalition citizenship. But your father can't be repatriated except by special political dispensation, which is almost impossible to get. Either you or he must think you can get deCastries to help you with that—”

“Dad's got nothing to do with it!” Her voice was fierce. “What kind of a man do you think he is?”

He looked at her. “No. You're right of course,” he said. “It must have been your idea. He's not the type. I grew up in a military family back on Earth, and he reminds me of some of the generals I'm related to. In fact, if I hadn't wanted to be a painter—”

“A painter?” She blinked at the sudden change of topic.

“Yes,” said Cletus, smiling a little wryly. “I was just starting to make a living at it when my draft number came up, and I decided to go into the Alliance Military Academy after all, the way my family had wanted me to from the beginning. Then I got wounded, of course, and discovered I liked the theory of military art. So painting got left behind.”

While he was talking she had come to a halt automatically before one of the stateroom doors lining the long, narrow corridor. But she made no attempt to open it. Instead she stood, staring at him.

“Why did you ever leave teaching at the Academy, then?” she asked.

“Someone,” he said, humorously, “has to make the worlds safe for scholars like myself.”

“By making a personal enemy out of Dow deCastries?” she said, incredulously. “Didn't it teach you anything when he saw through your game with the teacups and the sugar cubes?”

“But he didn't,” said Cletus. “Oh, I ought to admit he did a very good job of covering up the fact he hadn't.”

“
He
covered up?”

“Certainly,” Cletus answered. “He lifted the first cup out of overconfidence, feeling sure he could handle whatever came of my shell game. When he turned up the first cube he thought I had blundered, not he. With the second cube, he revised his ideas, but was still overconfident enough to try again. When he turned up the third cube he finally woke to the fact that the game was completely under my control. So he had to find an excuse for stopping it and refusing to choose a fourth time.”

She shook her head. “This is all the wrong way around,” she said, unbelievingly. “You're twisting what happened to make it look the way you want it.”

“No,” said Cletus. “DeCastries was the one who twisted it, with his actually very clever explanation of why he wouldn't lift a cup a fourth time. The only trouble was, it was a false explanation. He knew he'd find a sugar cube under any cup he lifted.”

“How could he?”

“Because I had cubes under all three cups, of course,” said Cletus. “When I lifted one cube from the bowl, I palmed two others. By the time he got around to the fourth choice, deCastries had probably figured that out. The fact that the game turned out to be the avoiding of finding a cube, instead of trying to find one, misled him at first. But pointing it out by then would have been too late to keep him from looking foolish at having played the game three times already. People like deCastries can't afford to look foolish.”

“But why did you do it?” Melissa almost cried. “Why do you want to make an enemy like that?”

“I need to get him involved with me,” said Cletus, “so I can make use of him. Unless I can make him annoyed enough to thrust, I can't parry. And only by successfully continuing to parry every attempt he makes can I finally get his whole attention… Now you see,” he went on, a little more gently, “why you ought to be worrying about your own involvement with Dow deCastries instead of mine. I can handle him. On the other hand, you—”

“
You… “
Suddenly blazing with anger, she turned and jerked open the door. “You absolute—go mix yourself up with Dow. Get yourself chewed up to mincemeat. I hope you do. But stay away from me… And from Dad! Do you hear me?”

He looked at her, and a slight shadow of something like pain passed through him. “Of course,” he said, stepping back. “If that's what you want.”

She went in, slamming the door behind her. He stood for a second, looking at its blank surface. For a moment with her there, the self-imposed barrier of isolation he had set up around himself many years ago, when he found others did not understand him, had almost melted. But it was back now.

He drew a short, deep breath that was almost a sigh. Turning, he went off down the corridor in the direction of his own stateroom.

For the next four days Cletus punctually avoided Melissa and her father—and was ignored in turn by deCastries and Pater Ten. Mondar, on the other hand, grew to be almost a close acquaintance, a circumstance Cletus found not only pleasant, but interesting.

The fifth day out from Earth, the spaceliner went into parking orbit around Kultis. Like its sister planet Mara, Kultis was a green, warm world with transient icecaps and only two major continental masses, north and south, as it had been true with Earth during the Gondwandaland period of the home planet's geological past. The shuttleboats from the chief cities of the various Kultan colonies began to come up to take off passengers.

On a hunch, Cletus tried to phone down to Alliance Headquarters in Bakhalla for reporting and billeting information. But the space-to-surface circuits were all tied up by the party for Neuland, in the forward evacuation lounge. Which meant, Cletus discovered with a little quiet inquiry, Pater Ten speaking for Dow deCastries. This, of course, was blatant favoritism on the part of a vessel of supposedly neutral registry. Cletus's hunch flowered into suspicion. One of those calls could well be concerned with him.

Glancing around as he turned from the phone, Cletus caught sight of the blue robe of Mondar, who was standing by the closed hatch of the midship lounge, only a few steps from Melissa and Eachan Khan. Cletus limped briskly over to the Exotic.

“Phones tied up,” Cletus said. “Thought I'd ask Alliance Forces HQ for instructions. Tell me, is there much activity in close to Bakhalla by Neuland guerrillas these days?”

“Right up to our front doors,” answered Mondar. He looked at Cletus shrewdly. “What's the matter? Just now remembering how you impressed Dow at dinner, that first day on board here?”

“That?” Cletus lifted an eyebrow. “You mean deCastries goes to the trouble of making special guerrilla targets out of every light colonel he meets?”

“Not every one, of course,” said Mondar, and smiled. “But in any case there's no cause for alarm. You'll be riding into Bakhalla with Melissa, Eachan and myself in a command car.”

“That's reassuring,” said Cletus. But his thoughts were already halfway elsewhere. Clearly, whatever effect he had achieved with Dow deCastries had been at least partly transparent to Mondar. Which was all right, he thought. The trail he had laid out toward his announced goal was baited along its length for just the sort of subtle mind that could envision purposes at work invisible to less perceptive men. It was that sort of mind deCastries possessed, and Mondar's was complex and deep enough in its own way to prove a useful control subject.

A gong rang through the lounge, cutting through the sounds of conversation.

“
Shuttleboat for Bakhalla, now docking
,” droned the first officer's voice from a wall speaker. “
Now docking, midships lounge hatch, the shuttleboat for Bakhalla. All passengers for Bakhalla should be ready to board… “

Cletus found himself swept forward as the hatch opened, revealing the bright metal connecting tunnel to the shuttleboat. He and Mondar were separated by the crowd.

The shuttleboat was little more than a cramped, uncomfortable, space-and atmosphere-going bus. It roared, dropped, plunged, jerked and finally skidded them all to a halt on a circle of scarred brown concrete surrounded by broad-leaved jungle—a green backdrop laced with what seemed to be threads of scarlet and bright yellow.

Shuffling out of the shuttleboat door into the bright sunlight, Cletus stepped a little aside from the throng to get his bearings. Other than a small terminal building some fifty yards off, there was no obvious sign of man except the shuttleboat and the concrete pad. The jungle growth towered over a hundred feet high in its surrounding circle. An ordinary, rather pleasant tropical day, Cletus thought. He looked about for Mondar—and was abruptly jolted by a something like a soundless, emotional thunderclap.

Even as it jarred him, he recognized it from its reputation. It was “reorientation shock”—the abrupt impact of a whole spectrum of differences from the familiar experienced all at once. His absent-mindedness as he had stepped out into this almost Earth-like scene had heightened its effect upon him.

Now, as the shock passed, he recognized all at once that the sky was not blue so much as bluish-green. The sun was larger and a deeper golden yellow than the sun of Earth. The red and yellow threads in the foliage were not produced by flowers or vines, but by actual veins of color running through the leaves. And the air was heavily humid, filled with odors that intermingled to produce a scent something like that of a mixture of grated nutmeg and crushed grass stems. Also, it was vibrant with a low-level but steady chorus of insect or animal cries ranging from the sounds like the high tones of a toy tin flute to the mellow booming of an empty wooden barrel being thumped—but all with a creakiness foreign to the voices of Earth.

Altogether the total impact of light, color, odor and sound, even now that the first shock was passed, caught Cletus up in a momentary immobility, out of which he recovered to find Mondar's hand on his elbow.

“Here comes the command car,” Mondar was saying, leading him forward. The vehicle he mentioned was just emerging from behind the terminal building with the wide shape of a passenger float-bus behind it. “Unless you'd rather ride the bus with the luggage, the wives and the ordinary civilians?”

“Thanks, no. I'll join you,” said Cletus.

“This way, then,” said Mondar.

Cletus went with him as the two vehicles came up and halted. The command car was a military, plasma-powered, air-cushion transport, with half-treads it could lower for unusually rough cross-country going. Over all, it was like an armored version of the sports cars used for big game hunting. Eachan Khan and Melissa were already inside, occupying one of the facing pair of passenger seats. Up front on the open seat sat a round-faced young Army Spec 9 at the controls, with a dally gun beside him.

Cletus glanced at the clumsy hand weapon with interest as he climbed aboard the car over the right-side treads. It was the first dally gun he had seen in use in the field—although he had handled and even fired one back at the Academy. It was crossbreed—no, it was an out-and-out mongrel of a weapon—designed originally as a riot-control gun and all but useless in the field, where a speck of dirt could paralyze some necessary part of its complex mechanism inside the first half hour of combat.