Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 04 - Tactics Of Mistake

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 374.49KB 133 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

eVersion 1.0 - click for scan notes

THE TACTICS OF MISTAKE

Gordon R. Dickson

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you

Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but

toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger …

LESSONS: Anonymous

The young lieutenant-colonel was drunk, apparently, and determined to rush upon disaster.

He came limping into the spaceship's dining lounge the first night out from Denver on the flight to

Kultis, a row of bright service ribbons on the jacket of his green dress uniform, and looked about. He

was a tall, lean officer, youthful to hold the rank he wore in the Expeditionary Forces of Earth's Western

Alliance; and at first glance his open-featured face looked cheerful to the point of harmlessness.

He gazed around the room for a few seconds, while the steward tried unsuccessfully to steer him off

to a booth nearby, set for a single diner. Then, ignoring the steward, he turned and headed directly for the

table of Dow deCastries.

The white-faced, waspish little man called Pater Ten, who was always at deCastries' elbow, slipped

away from his chair as the officer approached, and went toward the steward, still staring blank-faced

with dismay after the lieutenant-colonel. As Pater Ten approached, the steward frowned and bent

forward to talk. The two of them spoke for a moment in low voices, glancing back at the

lieutenant-colonel, and then went quickly out of the lounge together.

The lieutenant-colonel reached the table, pulled up an empty float seat from the adjoining table

without waiting for an invitation and seated himself across from the tawny-haired, beautiful young girl at

deCastries left.

"Privilege of first night out, they tell me," he said pleasantly to all of them at the table. "We sit where

we like at dinner and meet our fellow passengers. How do you do?"

For a second no one spoke. DeCastries only smiled, the thin edge of a smile that barely curved the

lips in his handsome face, framed by the touches of gray in the black hair at his temples. For five years,

now, Secretary of Outworlds Affairs for Earth's Coalition of Eastern Nations, he was known for success

with women; and his dark eyes had concentrated on the tawny-haired girl ever since he had invited

her—with her mercenary soldier father and the Exotic Outbond who made up the third in their party—to

join his table, earlier. There was no obvious threat in that smile of his; but reflexively at the sight of it, the

girl frowned slightly and put a hand on the arm of her father, who had leaned forward to speak.

"Colonel … " The mercenary wore the pocket patch of an officer from the Dorsai World, under

contract to the Bakhallan Exotics, and he was a full colonel. His darkly tanned face with its stiffly waxed

mustache might have looked ridiculous if it had not been as expressionlessly hard as the butt-plate of a

cone rifle. He broke off, feeling the hand on his sleeve, and turned to look at his daughter; but her

attention was all on the interloper.

"Colonel," she said to him in her turn—and her young voice sounded annoyed and concerned at once,

after the flat, clipped tones of her father, "don't you think you ought to lie down for a while?"

"No," said the lieutenant-colonel, looking at her. She caught her breath, finding herself seized,

suddenly like a bird on the hand of a giant, by the strange and powerful attention of his gray

eyes—entirely at odds with the harmless appearance he had given on entering the room. Those eyes held

her momentarily helpless, so that without warning she was conscious of being at the exact focus of his

vision, naked under the spotlight of his judgment. " … I don't," she heard him say.

She sat back, shrugging her tanned shoulders above her green dinner gown, and managed to pull her

gaze from its direct link with his. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him look about the table, from the

blue-robed Exotic at its far end, back past her father and herself to the dark, faintly smiling deCastries.

"I know you, of course, Mr. Secretary," he went on to deCastries. "In fact, I picked this particular

flight to Kultis just so I could meet you. I'm Cletus Grahame—head of the Tactics Department at the

Western Alliance Military Academy until last month. Then I put in for transfer to Kultis—to Bakhalla, on

Kultis."

He looked over at the Exotic. "The purser tells me you're Mondar, Outbound from Kultis to the

Enclave in St. Louis," he said. "Bakhalla's your home town, then."

"The capital of Bakhalla Colony," said the Exotic, "not just a town, nowdays, Colonel. You know, I'm

sure we're all pleased to meet you, Cletus. But do you think it's good judgment for an officer in the armed

forces of the Alliance to try to mix with Coalition people?"

"Why not—on shipboard?" said Cletus Grahame, smiling unconcernedly at him. "You're mixing with

the secretary, and it's the Coalition who's supplying Neuland with arms and material. Besides, as I say,

it's the first night out."

Mondar shook his head. "Bakhalla and the Coalition aren't at war," he said. "The fact the Coalition's

given some aid to Neuland Colony is beside the point."

"The Alliance and the Coalition aren't at war," said Cletus, "and the fact that they're backing different

sides in the brush war between you and Neuland's beside the point."

"It's hardly beside the point—" began Mondar. But then he was interrupted.

There was a sudden hush in the buzz of conversation about the lounge. While they had been talking,

the steward and Pater Ten had returned, behind an impressively large, uniformed man wearing the stripes

of a spaceliner's first officer, who now reached the table and dropped a big hand heavily on Cletus'

shoulder.

"Colonel," said the shipman, loudly, "this is a Swiss ship of neutral registry. We carry Alliance and

Coalition people, both, but we don't like political incidents on shipboard. This table belongs to the

Coalition Secretary of Outworlds Affairs, Dow deCastries. Your place is back there across the

room … "

But from the first word, Cletus paid him no attention. Instead, he looked back to the girl—at her

alone—and smiled and raised his eyebrows as if leaving it up to her. He made no move to rise from the

table.

The girl glared back at him but still he did not move. For a long second her glare held; then it wavered

and broke. She turned to deCastries.

"Dow … " she said, interrupting the ship's officer, who had begun to repeat his words.

DeCastries' thin smile widened slightly. He, too, raised his eyebrows, but with a different expression

than Cletus. He let her gaze appealingly at him for a long second before he turned to the shipman.

"It's all right," he said, his deep, musical voice stilling the voice of the other, instantly. "The colonel's

just making use of his first-night privileges to sit where he wants."

The shipman's face reddened. His hand dropped slowly from Cletus' shoulder. Suddenly his size

made him seem no longer large and impressive, but clumsy and conspicuous.

"Yes, Mr. Secretary," he said stiffly, "I see. Sorry to have bothered you all … "

He darted a glance of pure hatred at Pater Ten, which affected the little man no more than the

shadow of a rain cloud affects the glowing radiance of a white-hot iron ingot; and, carefully avoiding the

eyes of the other passengers, he turned and walked from the lounge. The steward had already

evaporated, at deCastries' first words. Pater Ten slid into the seat he had vacated earlier, scowling at

Cletus.

"About the Exotic Enclave at St. Louis," Cletus said to Mondar—he did not seem to be disturbed by

what had just happened—"they've been very good about lending me library materials for research."

"Oh?" Mondar's face was politely interested. "You're a writer, Colonel?"

"A scholar," said Cletus. His gray eyes fastened now on the Exotic. "I'm writing volume four right

now, of a twenty-volume work I started three years ago—on tactics and strategical considerations. But

never mind that now. May I meet the rest of the people here?"

Mondar nodded. "I'm Mondar, as you say."

"Colonel Eachan Khan," he said, turning to the Dorsai at his right, "may I introduce

Lieutenant-Colonel Cletus Grahame of the Alliance forces?"

"Honored, Colonel," said Eachan Khan, in a clipped, old-fashioned British accent.

"Honored to meet you, sir," said Cletus,

"And Colonel Khan's daughter, Melissa Khan," went on Mondar.

"Hello." Cletus smiled again at her.

"How do you do?" she said, coldly.

"Our host, Secretary Dow deCastries, you've already recognized," Mondar said. "Mr.

Secretary—Colonel Cletus Grahame."

"I'm afraid it's a little late to invite you to dinner, Colonel," said deCastries deeply. "The rest of us

have eaten." He beckoned the steward. "We can offer you some wine."

"And, finally, the gentleman on the secretary's right," said Mondar. "Mr. Pater Ten. Mr. Ten's got an

eidetic memory, Colonel. You'll find he's got an encyclopedic fund of knowledge on just about

everything."

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ten," said Cletus. "Maybe I ought to arrange to borrow you, instead of

library materials, for my next research."

"Don't bother!" said Pater Ten, unexpectedly. He had a creaky, high-pitched, but surprisingly

carrying, voice. "I looked at your first three volumes—wild theories, backed up by warmed-over military

history. They must've been going to kick you out of the Academy if you hadn't requested a transfer first.

Anyway, you're out. Now, who'll read you? You'll never finish a fourth book."

"I told you," said Mondar in the conversational pause that followed this small verbal explosion. Cletus

was gazing at the small man with a faint smile not unlike that of deCastries, earlier. "Mr. Ten has an

encyclopedic fund of knowledge."

"I see what you mean," said Cletus. "But knowledge and conclusions are two different things. That's

why I'll be finishing all sixteen of the other volumes in spite of Mr. Ten's doubts. In fact that's why I'm

headed for Kultis, now, to make sure I get them written."

"That's right—haul victory out of defeat there," creaked Pater Ten. "Win the war at Bakhalla in six

weeks and become an Alliance hero."

"Yes, not such a bad idea," said Cletus, as the lounge steward deftly slid a clean wineglass in front of

him and filled it from the bottle of canary-yellow liquid on the table. "Only it isn't either the Alliance or the

Coalition that's going to win in the long run."

"That's a strong statement, Colonel," said deCastries. "Also, a little close to treason, isn't it? That part

about the Alliance, spoken by an Alliance officer?"

"You think so?" Cletus said, and smiled. "Is someone here thinking of reporting me?"

"Possibly." There was abruptly a note of something chilling in deCastries' deep voice. "Meanwhile, it's

interesting to hear you talk. What makes you think it won't be either the Alliance or the Coali- tion that'll

end up having the strongest voice among the colonies on Kultis?"

"The laws of historical development," said Cletus, "are working to that end."

"Laws," said Melissa Khan, angrily. The tension she had been feeling beneath the calm talk had

become too much to bear. "Why does everybody think"—she glanced a moment, almost bitterly at her

father—"that there's some impractical set of principles or theories or codes that everybody ought to live

by? It's practical people who make things happen! You have to be practical, nowdays, or you might as

well be dead."

"Melissa," said deCastries, smiling at her, "honors the practical man. I'm afraid I have to agree with

her. Practical experience works."

"As opposed to theories, Colonel," flung in Pater Ten, gibingly, "as opposed to bookish theories.

Wait'll you get out among practical field officers in the Neuland-Bakhalla jungle in a practical fire-fight,

and discover what war's really like! Wait'll you hear your first energy weapon sending its sizzle overhead,

and you'll find out—"

"He's wearing the Alliance Medal of Honor, Mr. Ten."

The sudden, flat, clipped tones of Eachan Khan chopped across the small man's tirade like an ax. In

the new silence Eachan pointed a steady, brown forefinger at the red, white and gold bar at the far right

of the row of ribbons decorating Cletus' jacket.

The silence continued a moment at the table.

"Colonel," said Eachan, "what's the trouble with your leg?"

Cletus grinned wryly. "It's part prosthetic about the knee, now," he said. "Perfectly comfortable, but

you can notice it when I walk." He looked back at Pater Ten. "Actually, Mr. Ten's pretty close to being

right about my practical military experience. I only had three months of active duty after being

commissioned, during the last Alliance—Coalition brush war on Earth seven years ago."

"But you ended up those three months with the Medal of Honor," said Melissa. The expression with

which she had watched him before had now changed completely. She swung about to Pater Ten. "I

suppose that's one of the few things you don't know anything about, though?"

Pater Ten stared hatingly back at her.

"Do you, Pater?" murmured deCastries.

"There was a Lieutenant Grahame decorated seven years ago by the Alliance," spat out Pater Ten.

"His division had made an attack drop and landing on a Pacific island held by our garrisons. The division

was routed and cut up, but Lieutenant Grahame managed to put together a guerrilla force that was

successful in bottling our people up in their strong fortified areas until Alliance reinforcements came a

month later. He ran into a traveling mine the day before he would have been relieved. They stuck him in

their Academy because he couldn't qualify physically for field duty after that."

There was another, but shorter, moment of silence at the table.

"So," said deCastries, in an oddly thoughtful tone, turning in his fingers the half-filled wineglass on the

tablecloth before him, "it seems the scholar was a hero, Colonel."

"No, Lord no," said Cletus. "The lieutenant was a rash soldier, that's all. If I'd understood things then

as well as I do now, I'd never have run into that mine."

"But here you are—headed back to where the fighting is!" said Melissa.

"That's true," said Cletus, "but as I said, I'm a wiser man now. I don't want any more medals."

"What do you want, Cletus?" asked Mondar, from the end of the table. The Outbond had been

watching Cletus with an un-Exotic-like intensity for some few minutes now.

"He wants to write sixteen more volumes," sneered Pater Ten.

"As a matter of fact, Mr. Ten's right," said Cletus quietly to Mondar. "What I really want to do is

finish my work on tactics. Only I've found out first I'm going to have to create the conditions they'll apply

to."

"Win the war on Neuland in sixty days!" said Pater Ten. "Just as I said."

"Less time than that, I think," said Cletus, and he gazed calmly about at the sudden changes of

expression on the faces of all but Mondar and Pater Ten.

"You must believe in yourself as a military expert, Colonel," said deCastries. Like Mondar's, his gaze

upon Cletus had grown interested.

"But I'm not an expert," said Cletus. "I'm a scholar. There's a difference. An expert's a man who

knows a great deal about his subject. A scholar's someone who knows all there is that's available to be

known about it."

"It's still only theories," said Melissa. She looked at him puzzledly.

"Yes," he said to her, "but the effective theorist's got an advantage over the practician."

She shook her head, but said nothing—sinking back against the cushion of her seat, gazing at him with

her lower Up caught between her teeth.

"I'm afraid I'd have to agree with Melissa again," said deCastries. For a moment his gaze was

hooded, as if he looked inward rather than outward at them all. "I've seen too many men with nothing but

theory get trampled on when they ventured out into the real world."

"Men are real," said Cletus. "So are weapons … But strategies? Political consequences? They're no

more real than theories. And a sound theorist, used to dealing with unreal things, is a better manipulator

of them than the man used to dealing only with the real tools that are actually only end products … Do

you know anything about fencing?"

DeCastries shook his head.

"I do," said Eachan.

"Then maybe you'll recognize the tactic in fencing I use as an example for some I call the tactics of

mistake. It's in the volume I'm writing now." Cletus turned to him. "The fencing tactic is to launch a series

of attacks, each inviting ripostes, so that there's a pattern of engages and disengages of your blade with

your opponent's. Your purpose, however, isn't to strike home with any of these preliminary attacks, but

to carry your opponent's blade a little more out of line with each disengage so gradually he doesn't notice

you're doing it. Then, following the final engage, when his blade has been drawn completely out of line,

you thrust home against an essentially unguarded man."

"Take a damn good fencer," said Eachan, flatly.

"There's that, of course," said Cletus.

"Yes," said deCastries, slowly, and waited for Cletus to look back at him. "Also, it seems a tactic

pretty well restricted to the fencing floor, where everything's done according to set rules."

"Oh, but it can be applied to almost any situation," said Cletus. There were coffee cups, as yet

unfilled, spaced about the table. He reached out and captured three of these and lined them up, upside

down between himself and deCastries. Then he reached into a bowl of sugar cubes standing on the table

and brought his fist back to drop a cube onto the tablecloth by the central cup.

He covered the sugar cube with the central cup and moved all the cups about, interchanging their

positions rapidly. Then he stopped.

"You've heard of the old shell game," he said to deCastries. "Which one of those cups would you say

the sugar cube's under?"

DeCastries looked at the cups but made no attempt to reach out to them. "None of them," he said.

"Just for purposes of illustration—will you pick one, anyway?" asked Cletus.

DeCastries smiled. "Why not?" he said.

He reached out and lifted the middle cup. His smile vanished for a second and then returned again. In

plain view sat a sugar cube, white against white on the tablecloth.

"At least," said deCastries, "you're an honest shell-game operator."

Cletus took up the middle cup, which deCastries had set down, and covered the sugar cube. Once

again he rapidly switched around the positions of the overturned cups.

"Try it again?" he asked deCastries.

"If you want." This time deCastries chose to lift the cup at the right end of the row as it faced him.

Another sugar cube was exposed.

"Once more?" said Cletus. Again he covered the cube and mixed the cups. DeCastries picked up the

cup now in the center and put it down with some force when he saw the sugar cube he had exposed.

"What's this?" he said. His smile was definitely gone now. "What's the point of all this?"

"It seems you can't lose, Mr. Secretary, when I control the game," said Cletus.

DeCastries looked penetratingly at him for a second, then covered the cube and sat back, glancing at

Pater Ten.

"You move the cups this time, Pater," he said.

Smiling maliciously at Clems, Pater Ten rose and switched the cups about—but so slowly that

everyone at the table easily kept track of the cup deCastries had last handled. That particular cup ended

up once more in the middle. DeCastries looked at Cletus and reached for the cup to the right of the one

that plainly contained the cube. His hand hesitated, hovered over it for a moment, and then drew back.

His smile returned.

"Of course," he said, looking at Cletus, "I don't know how you do it, but I do know that if I lift that

cup there'll be a sugar cube under it." His hand moved to the cup at the opposite end of the line. "And if I

choose this one, it'll probably be there?"

Cletus said nothing. He only smiled back.

DeCastries nodded. The customary easiness of his manner had returned to him. "In fact," he said, "the

only cup I can be sure doesn't have a sugar cube under it is the one that we all know must have a

cube—the one in the middle. Am I right?"

Cletus still only smiled.

"I am right," said deCastries. He extended his hand out over the central cup for a second, watching

Cletus' eyes, then withdrew the hand. "And that was what you were after, in this demonstration with the

cups and sugar cubes, wasn't it, Colonel? Your aim was to make me figure out the situation just the way I

have—but also to make me so unsure of myself after being wrong three times in a row, that I'd still have

to turn the center cup over to prove to myself it really was empty. Your real purpose was to strike at my

confidence in my own judgment according to these Tactics of Mistake of yours, wasn't it?"

He reached out and snapped the central cup with his fingernail so that it rang with a sound like that of

a small, flat-toned bell.

"But I'm not going to turn it over," he went on, looking at Cletus. "You see, having reasoned it out,

I've gone one step further and worked out your purpose in trying to make me do it. You wanted to

impress me. Well, I am impressed—but only a little. And in token of just how little, suppose we leave the

cup sitting there, unturned? What do you say?"

"I say your reasoning's excellent, Mr. Secretary." Cletus reached out and gathered in the other two

cups upside down, covering the mouth of each briefly with his hand before turning them right-side-up to

expose their empty, open mouths to the lounge ceiling. "What else can I say?"

"Thank you, Colonel," said deCastries, softly. He had leaned back in his chair and his eyes had

narrowed down to slits. He reached out now with his right hand to take the stem of his wineglass and

rotate it once more between thumb and forefinger with precise quarter turns, as if screwing it delicately

down into the white tablecloth. "Now, you said something earlier about taking this flight to Kultis only

because you knew I'd be on it. Don't tell me you went to all that trouble just to show me your tactical

shell game?"

"Only partly," said Cletus. The tension in the atmosphere around the table had suddenly increased,

although the voices of both Cletus and deCastries remained pleasant and relaxed. "I wanted to meet you,

Mr. Secretary, because I'm going to need you to arrange things so I can finish my work on tactics."

"Oh?" said deCastries, "And just how did you expect me to help?"

"Opportunities ought to present themselves to both of us, Mr. Secretary"—Cletus pushed back his

chair and stood up—"now that you've met me and know what I'm after. With that much done it's

probably time for me to apologize for intruding on your dinner party and leave—"

"Just a moment, Colonel … " purred deCastries.

A small sound of breaking glass interrupted them. Melissa's wineglass lay spilled and shattered against

a saucer before her, and she was pushing herself unsteadily to her feet, one hand holding her forehead.

"No, no—it's all right!" she said to her father. "I'm just a little dizzy, suddenly, that's all. I'll go lie

down … No, Dad, you stay here! Colonel Grahame, you can help me to my cabin, can't you—as long

as you are leaving anyway."

"Of course," said Cletus.

He came quickly around the table and she took hold of his arm. She was tall, and she leaned the not

inconsiderable weight of her healthy young body heavily against him. Almost irritably, she waved her

father and deCastries back into their seats.

"Really!" she said. Her voice sharpened. "I'm all right. I just want to lie down for a bit. Will you please

not make a fuss about it? Colonel … "

"Right here," said Cletus. They moved off together slowly, she still leaning against him as they crossed

the lounge and went out into the corridor turning left.

She continued to lean on him until they had made a turn in the corridor that hid them from the lounge

entrance, then she stopped abruptly, straightened up and pulled away turning to face him.

"I'm all right," she said. "I just had to do something to get you out of there. You aren't drunk at all!"

"No," said Cletus, good-humoredly. "And not a very good actor either, evidently."

"You couldn't have fooled me, if you were! I can feel … " She half-raised her hand, fingers spread

out as if to touch him on the chest; and then dropped the hand abruptly as he looked curiously at it. "I can

see right through people like you. Never mind that. It would have been bad enough if you were drunk.

Trying to play games with a man like Dow deCastries!"

"I wasn't exactly playing games," said Cletus, soberly.

"Oh, don't tell me!" she said. "Don't you think I know what kind of idiots professional soldiers can

make of themselves when they try to deal with people outside their own special military world? But a

Medal of Honor means something to me, even if most civilians don't know what it is!" Her eyes had

slipped into line with his again. She almost wrenched her gaze away. "And that's why I helped get you

away from him just now. The only reason! … And I'm not going to do it again!"

"I see," said Cletus.

"So you get back to your cabin now, and stay there! Stay away from Dow deCastries from now on.

From Dad and me, too … Are you listening?"

"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 over-confidence, 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' 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

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

eVersion1.0-clickforscannotesTHETACTICSOFMISTAKEGordonR.DicksonTroubleratherthetigerinhislairthanthesageamongsthisbooks.FortoyouKingdomsandtheirarmiesarethingsmightyandenduring,buttohimtheyarebuttoysofthemoment,tobeoverturnedbytheflickingofafinger … LESSONS:Anonymous1Theyounglieutenant-colonelwasdru...

展开>> 收起<<

Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 04 - Tactics Of Mistake.pdf

共133页,预览27页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 04 - Tactics Of Mistake

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: