The Tactics Of Mistake

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "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' 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 st
ill 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."

  17

  Three days later, Mondar made his reappearance at Cletus' 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."

  "You don't want me visualizing what's going on then?" "Just the opposite," answered Mondar. "You should remove your concern with the regrowth process as completely as possible from any symbolic area. Your determination to achieve regrowth must be channeled downward into the instinctive level. To achieve that channeling you're going to need practice, and so we worked up a set of exercises that I'm going to teach you to do over the next two weeks. I'll come here and work with you daily until you can do the exercises by yourself. Then I'll observe until I think you've got complete control in the necessary areas. Then we'll recommend the symbolic operation, in which the genetic pattern of your right knee will be transferred in the form of a few cells of tissue of flesh and bone to the area of the left knee, where we want regrowth to take place."

  "Good," said Cletus. "When do you want to start the exercises?"

  "Right now, if you like," answered Mondar. "We start out by getting off the topic of your knees entirely and into some completely different area. Any suggestions for a topic?"

  "The best one in the universe," Cletus answered. "I was intending to talk to you about it anyway. I'd like to borrow two million IMU's."

  Mondar gazed at him for a second, then smiled. "I'm afraid I don't have that much with me," he said. "After all, out here away from Earth two million International Monetary Units are rather more scarce than they are back on Earth. Are you very urgent about your need for them?"

  "Urgent and absolutely serious," replied Cletus. "I'd like you to talk to your fellow Exotics here in Bakhalla—and anywhere else, if necessary. I'm not wrong, am I, in thinking your organization could lend me that kind of money if you thought it was worthwhile?"

  "Not wrong, no," said Mondar, slowly. "But you have to admit it's a rather unusual request from an essentially propertyless ex-colonel in the Alliance forces who's now an emigrant to the Dorsai. What do you plan doing with a sum of money like that?"

  "Build an entirely new type of military unit," Cletus answered. "New in organization, training, hardware and tactical abilities."

  "Using," said Mondar, "the Dorsai mercenaries, of course?"

  "That's right," answered Cletus. "I'm going to produce a fighting force at least five times as effective as any comparable military unit presently in existence. Such a force will be able to underbid not only the Alliance, but the Coalition, when it comes to supplying military force to an off-Earth colony such as yours. I can raise the pay of the men and officers in it and still market an effective force for less than even the Dorsai mercenaries were charging in the past—simply because we'll need less men to do the same job."

  "And you're suggesting," Mondar said, thoughtfully, "that such a mercenary force would soon pay back a two million loan?"

  "I don't think there's any doubt of it," said Cletus.

  "Possibly not," said Mondar, "provided these new mercenaries of yours will do what you say they'll do. But how could anyone know that in advance? I'm afraid, Cletus, that our organization would need some kind of security before lending out such a very large amount of money."

  "Security," said Cletus, "is often unnecessary where the borrower's reputation is good."

  "Don't tell me you've borrowed two million IMU's on occasions before this?" Mondar raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  "I was speaking of a military, not a financial, reputation," Cletus said calmly. "Your Exotics have just had the best possible proof of the military reputation in question. A small group of Dorsai mercenaries, single-handedly, have succeeded in doing what a very large and much better equipped Alliance force wasn't able to do—essentially destroy Neuland as a military power and win the local war for your colony. The conclusion to be drawn from that is that this colony of yours doesn't need the Alliance forces. It can protect itself perfectly adequately with its Dorsai mercenaries, alone. Am I right?"

  "You certainly present a good argument," said Mondar.

  "The security for the loan, therefore," said Cletus, "is the best sort of security in the world. It's the literal security of this colony, guaranteed by the Dorsai mercenaries until the loan is paid back."

  "But what if … ah … " Mondar said, delicately, "you Dorsais should default on your bargain? I don't mean to insult you, of course, but in matters like this all possibilities are going to have to be considered. If I don't bring up the question, someone else will. What if, after we'd lent you the money and you'd retrained your troops, you refused either to pay or to continue guaranteeing the security of this colony?"

  "In that case," said Cletus, spreading his hands on the sheet of the bed, "who else would hire us? Successful mercenaries, like traders in any other goods, build their business on the basis of satisfied customers. If we took your money and then welshed on our agreement, what other colony would be willing to take a chance on us?"

  Mondar nodded. "A very good point," he said. He sat for a moment, his gaze abstracted, as if he communed with himself in some secret corner of his brain. Then his eyes came back to Cletus.

  "Very well," he said, "I'll convey your request for a loan to my fellow Exotics. That's as much as I can do, you realize. It'll take some little time for the matter to be considered, and I can't promise you any great hopes of success. As I said, it's a very large amount of IMU's you're asking to borrow, and there is, after all, no great reason why we should lend it."

  "Oh, I think there is," said Cletus easily. "If my estimate of you Exotics is correct, one of your eventual aims is to be completely independent of outside obligations—so that you can be free to work out your vision of the future without interference. The Alliance's military aid has been helpful to you, but it's also kept you under the Alliance's thumb. If you can buy security from mercenary soldiers without obligation, you'll have achieved a freedom that I think you all want very badly. A two million unit loan on good security is a small risk to take for the chance of gaming that freedom."

  He loo
ked significantly at Mondar. Mondar shook his head slightly; there was a touch of admiration in his face.

  "Cletus, Cletus," said Mondar, "what a waste it is, your not being an Exotic!" He sighed, and sat back in the chair. "Well, I'll pass your request for a loan along. And now, I think it's time we got started with your exercises. Sit back and try to achieve that state of a floating sensation that you described to me. As you probably know, it's called a state of regression. I'm also putting myself now into such a state. Now, if you're ready, join me in concentration on that isolated pinpoint of life, that single sperm cell that was the first core and beginning of your consciousness. To that early and primitive consciousness, now, you must try to return."

  Three weeks later, healing well and with both legs stiffened by a walking cast about each knee, Cletus was swinging along on wrist-crutches with Arvid in the Bakhalla in-town terminal. They were headed toward the airbus that would lift them to that same shuttle-boat landing pad on which Cletus had first set down on Kultis a couple of months before—the airbus being made necessary by new construction on the road to the pad, now that guerrilla activity had been halted.

  As they passed the main lounge of the terminal, an Alliance officer stepped out in front of them. He was First Lieutenant Bill Athyer, and he was drunk—not drunk enough to stumble in his speech or his walk, but drunk enough to bar their way with an ugly light in his eye. Cletus halted. Arvid took half a step forward, opening his mouth, but Cletus stilled the young man with a hand on one massive arm.

  "Leaving for the Dorsai, are you, Colonel?" said Athyer, ignoring Arvid. "Now that everything's nice and prettied up here, you're on your way?"

  Cletus leaned on the crutches. Even bent over in this position, he had to look down to meet Athyer's bloodshot eyes.

  "Thought so." Athyer laughed. "Well, sir, I didn't want to let you get away, sir, without thanking you. I might have gone up before a review board, if it hadn't been for you, sir. Thank you, sir."

  "That's all right, Lieutenant," said Cletus.

  "Yes, isn't it? Quite all right," said Athyer. "And I'm safely tucked away in a library instead of facing a reprimand and maybe losing one turn at an advance in grade. No danger of my getting out in the field where I might foul up again—or, who knows, might even make up for not being quite as smart as you up at Etter's Pass, sir."