The tactics of mistake

2

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.