Cletus, too, he became aware, had his images in line with him. He could see those before and he was somehow conscious of those behind him. Before him was a Cletus with two good knees, but beyond this and two more Cletuses were different men, bigger men. But a common thread ran through them, tying the pulses of their lives to his, and continuing back through him to a man with no left arm, on and on, through the lives of all those others behind him until it ended, at last, with a powerful old man in half-armor sitting on a white horse with a baton in hand.
Nor was this all. The room was full of forces and currents of living pressures coming from vast distances to this focal point, like threads of golden light they wove back and forth, tying each other together, connecting some of Cletus’s images with Mondar’s, and even Cletus, himself, with Mondar, himself. They two, their forerunners and their followers, hung webbed in a tapestry of this interconnecting pattern of light during that single moment in which Cletus’s vision registered the double scene.
Then, abruptly, Mondar turned his gaze on Cletus, and both tapestry and images were gone. Only the normal room remained.
But Mondar’s eyes glowed at Cletus like twin sapphires illuminated from within by a light identical in color and texture to the threads that had seemed to fill the air of the room between both men.
“Yes,” said Mondar. “I knew… almost from the moment I first saw you in the spaceship dining lounge. I knew you had potential. If it’d only been part of our philosophy to proselytize or recruit in the ordinary way, I’d have tried to recruit you from that minute on. Did you talk to Dow?”
Cletus considered the unlined face, the blue eyes, of the other, and slowly nodded.
“With your help,” he said. “Was it actually necessary to get Melissa away, too? DeCastries and I could have talked over her head.”
“I wanted him to have every advantage,” Mondar said, his eyes glowing. “I wanted no doubt left in your mind that he’d been able to bid as high for you as he wanted to go… He did offer you a job with him, didn’t he?”
“He told me,” said Cletus, “that he couldn’t—to an interesting madman. From which I gathered he was extremely eager to hire one.”
“Of course he is,” said Mondar. “But he wants you only for what you can do for him. He’s not interested in what you could make of yourself… Cletus, do you know how we Exotics came about?”
“Yes,” said Cletus. “I looked you up before I put in my request for transfer to here. The Association for the Investigation and Development of Exotic Sciences—my sources say you developed out of a black-magic cult of the early twenty-first century called the Chantry Guild.”
“That’s right,” Mondar said. “The Chantry Guild was the brainchild of a man named Walter Blunt. He was a brilliant man, Cletus, but like most of the people of his tune, he was reacting against the fact that his environment had suddenly been enlarged from the surface of one world to the surfaces of any number of worlds spread out through light-years of interstellar space. You probably know the history of that period as well as I do—how that first, instinctive, racial fear of space beyond the solar system built up and erupted in a series of bloody social eruptions. It spawned any number of societies and cults for people attempting to adjust psychologically to feelings of vulnerability and insignificance, deep down on the unconscious level. Blunt was a fighter, an anarchist. His answer was revolution—”
“Revolution?” asked Cletus.
“Yes. Literally—revolution,” Mondar answered. “Blunt wanted to destroy part of actual, objective physical reality as well—by using primitive psychic leverage. He called what he wanted to do ‘creative destruction.’ He called on people to ‘Destruct!‘ But he couldn’t quite push even the intense neurotics of his time all the way over the emotional brink. And then he was deposed as head of the Guild by a young mining engineer who’d lost an arm in a mine accident—”
“Lost an arm?” said Cletus sharply. “Which arm?”
“The left—yes, I think it was the left that was gone,” said Mondar.
“Why?”
“Nothing,” said Cletus. “Go on.”
“His name was Paul Formain—”
“Fort-Mayne?” Cletus interrupted a second time.
“No t,” answered Mondar, “F-o-r-m-a-i-n.” He spelled it out, looking curiously at Cletus. “Something about this interests you particularly, Cletus?”
“Only the coincidences,” said Cletus. “You said he had only one arm, so the right arm he had left would have been overmuscled from compensation development. And his name sounds almost like jort-mayne, which are the words used by the Norman French to describe their policy to the conquered English after they took over England in the eleventh century. Fort-mayne—literally, ‘strong-hand.’ It described a policy of using whatever force was necessary to keep the native English under control. And you say he took over the Chantry Guild, deposing this Blunt?”
“Yes.” Mondar frowned. “I see the coincidences, Cletus, but I don’t see why they’re important.”
“Maybe they aren’t,” said Cletus. “Go on. Formain took over the Chantry Guild and started your Exotic Association?”
“He almost had to wreck the Chantry Guild to do it,” said Mondar. “But he did. He changed its aim from revolution to evolution. The evolution of man, Cletus.”
“Evolution.” Cletus repeated the word thoughtfully. “So, you don’t think the human race is through evolving? What comes next, then?”
“We don’t know, of course,” said Mondar, folding his hands in his lap. “Can an ape imagine a man? But we’re convinced the seeds of further evolution are alive in man, still—even if they aren’t already germinating. We Exotics are dedicated to searching for those seeds, and protecting them once we’ve found them, so that they can flourish and grow until evolved man is part of our community.”
“Sorry.” Cletus shook his head. “I’d make a poor Exotic, Mondar. I’ve got my own job to do.”
“But this is part of your job—and your job is part of it!” Mondar leaned forward, and his hands slid apart. “There’s no compulsion on our members. Each one searches and works for the future the way he thinks best. All we ask is that when the skills of anyone are needed by the community, he makes them available to it. In return the community offers him its skills to improve him, physically and mentally, so he can be that much more effective in his own work. You know what you can do now, Cletus. Think what you might be able to do if you could make use of all we can teach you!”
Cletus shook his head again.
“If you turn us down,” said Mondar, “it signals a danger to you, Cletus. It signals an unconscious desire on your part to go the deCastries way—to let yourself be caught up by the excitement of directly manipulating people and situations instead of dealing with what’s much more valuable, but less emotionally stimulating—the struggle with ideas to find principles that’ll lift people eventually above and beyond manipulation.”
Cletus laughed, a little grimly. “Tell me,” he said, “isn’t it true that you Exotics won’t carry or use weapons yourself, even in self-defense? And that’s why you hire mercenaries like the Dorsai, or make agreements with political groups like the Alliance to defend yourselves?”
“Yes—but not for the reason most people think, Cletus,” said Mondar, swiftly. “We haven’t any moral objection to fighting. It’s just that the emotions involved interfere with clear thinking, so people like myself prefer not to touch weapons. But there’s no compulsion on our people on this. If you want to write your work on military tactics, or even keep and carry guns—”
“I don’t think you follow me,” said Cletus. “Eachan Khan told me something. You remember when you were in the command car after it overturned, earlier today, and he suggested you not let yourself be taken alive by the Neulander guerrillas—for obvious reasons? You answered that you could always die. ‘No man,’ you said, ‘commands this body but myself.’ “
“And you think suicide is a
form of violence—”
“No,” said Cletus. “I’m trying to explain to you why I’d never make an Exotic. In your calmness in the face of possible torture and the need to kill yourself, you were showing a particular form of ruthlessness. It was ruthlessness toward yourself—but that’s only the back side of the coin. You Exotics are essentially ruthless toward all men, because you’re philosophers, and by and large, philosophers are ruthless people.”
“Cletus!” Mondar shook his head. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”
“Of course,” said Cletus, quietly. “And you realize it as well as I do. The immediate teaching of philosophers may be gentle, but the theory behind their teaching is without compunction—and that’s why so much bloodshed and misery has always attended the paths of their followers, who claim to live by those teachings. More blood’s been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man.”
“No Exotic spills blood,” said Mondar, softly.
“Not directly, no,” said Cletus. “But to achieve the future you dream of means the obliteration of the present as we know it now. You may say your aim’s changed from revolution to evolution, but your goal is still the destruction of what we have now to make room for something different. You work to destroy what presently is—and that takes a ruthlessness that’s not my way—that I don’t agree with.” He stopped speaking.
Mondar met his eyes for a long moment. “Cletus,” said Mondar at last, “can you be that sure of yourself?”
“Yes,” said Cletus. “I’m afraid I can.” He turned toward the door. As he reached the door and put his hand on its button, he turned back.
“Thanks all the same, Mondar,” he said. “You and your Exotics may end up going my way. But I won’t go yours. Good night.” He opened the door.
“Cletus,” said Mondar, behind him, “if you refuse us now, you do it at your own risk. There are larger forces at work in what you want to do than I think you understand.”
Cletus shook his head. “Good night,” he said again, and went out. Back in the room where he had left Arvid, he found the young lieutenant and told him they were leaving. As they reached the parking area together and Cletus opened the door of their aircar, the sky split open above them in a wild explosion of lightning and thunder, with raindrops coming down like hailstones.
They bolted for the interior of the car. The rain was icy and the few seconds of being exposed to it had left their jackets soaked and clinging to their shoulders. Arvid put power on the vehicle and lifted it out of the lot.
“All hell’s broke loose tonight,” he murmured, as they swung back across the city. Then, startled, he looked at Cletus, sitting beside him.
“Now, why did I say that?” he asked. Cletus did not answer and after a second Arvid answered himself.
“All the same,” he said, half to himself, “it has.”
7.
Cletus woke to the sensation that his left knee was being slowly crushed in a heavy vise. The dull, unyielding pain of it had roused him from his sleep, and for a moment he was its captive—the sensation of pain filling the whole universe of his consciousness. Then, practically, he took action to control the crippling sensation. Rolling over on his back, he stared up at the white ceiling seven feet above him. One by one, starting with his thigh muscles, he commanded the large muscles of his arms and legs to lose their tensions and relax. He moved on to the neck and face muscles, the belly muscles, and finally into a feeling of relaxation pervading him completely.
His body was heavy and limp now. His eyes were drooping, half-closed. He lay, indifferent to the faint noises that filtered to him from other parts of the BOQ. He drifted, sliding gently away, like a man lax upon the surface of some warm ocean.
The state of relaxation he had induced had already muffled the dull-jawed, relentless grip of the pain upon his knee. Slowly, so as not to reawaken an alertness that would allow tension to form in him once more, he propped the pillow behind and pulled himself up in the bed. Half-sitting, he folded the covers back from his left leg and looked at it.
The knee was puffed and swollen to stiffness. There was no darkness or bruise-shade of discoloration about it, but it was swollen to the point of immobility. He fastened his gaze steadily on the swollen knee, and set about the larger job of bringing it back down to normal size and movement.
Still drifting, still in that more primitive state of mind known as regression, he connected the pain response in his knee with the pain message in his mind, and began to convert the message to a mental equivalent of that same physical relaxation and peace which held his body. Drifting with it, he felt the pain message lose its color. It faded, like an instruction written in evaporating ink, until it was finally invisible.
He felt what he had earlier recognized as pain, still present in his knee. It was a sensation only, however, neither pain nor pressure, but co-equal with both. Now that he had identified this former pain as a separate sensation-entity, he began to concentrate upon the actual physical feeling of pressure within the blood and limb, the vessels now swollen to the point of immobilizing his leg.
He formed a mental image of the vessels as they were. Then, slowly, he began to visualize them as relaxing, shrinking, returning their fluid contents to those pipe systems of the leg to which they were severally connected.
For perhaps as much as ten minutes there was no visible response from the knee area. Then gradually he began to be aware of a yielding of the pressure and a sensation of faint warmth within the knee itself. Within another five minutes it was possible to see that the swelling was actually going down. Ten minutes later, he had a knee that was still swollen, but which he could bend at a good sixty-degree angle. It was good enough. He swung good leg and bad out of bed together, got up and began to dress.
He was just buckling on a weapons belt over his jungle suit, when there was a knock at his door, Cletus glanced over at the clock beside his bed. It showed eight minutes before 5 A.M.
“Come on in,” he said.
Arvid stepped into the room.
“You’re up early, Arv,” Cletus said, snapping the weapons belt shut and reaching for his sidearm on top of the chest of drawers beside him. He slid the weapon into its holster, hanging from the belt. “Did you get the things I wanted?”
“Yes, sir,” said Arvid, “the loudspeaker horn and the singleton mines are tucked away out of sight in duffle packs. I couldn’t get the rifle into a pack, but it’s with the packs, clipped onto the electric horse you asked for.”
“And the horse, itself?”
“I’ve got it in the back of a courier car, outside…" Arvid hesitated. “I asked to go with you, sir, but the orders just called for you and the field officer in charge of the company. I want to tell you about him. They’ve given you a first lieutenant named Bill Athyer.”
“And this Bill Athyer is no good, is that it?” asked Cletus, cheerfully, picking up his communications helmet and leading the way out of the room.
“How did you know?” Arvid stared down at Cletus, following him as they went out down the long center aisle of the BOQ.
Cletus smiled back at him, limping along, but delayed his answer until they had stepped out the front door into the misty, predawn darkness where the courier car waited for Cletus. They got in, Arvid behind the controls. As the big young lieutenant sent the vehicle sliding off on its air cushion, Cletus went on:
“I rather thought the general’d be giving me someone like that. Don’t worry about it, Arv. You’re going to have your hands full enough today, as it is. I want you to find office space for me and line me up a staff—a warrant officer, if you can get one for office manager, a couple of clerical tech fives and a file clerk tech two with a research specialty. Can you get right to work on that?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Arvid. “But I didn’t know we had authority for something like that—”
“We don’t, yet,” said Cletus. “But I’ll g
et it for you. You just find the premises and the people, so we know where to lay hands on them as soon as we have authorization.”
“Yes, sir,” said Arvid.
Having arrived at the transport area, Cletus found his company under the command of First Lieutenant William Athyer, standing at east in ranks, equipped, armed and apparently ready to take off. Cletus assumed that the men had had breakfast—not being the field officer in command of them, it was not up to him to see that they had; and asking Athyer about it would be impolitic, not to say insulting. Cletus descended a little stiffly from the courier car and watched as Arvid unloaded the electric horse, with its equipment.
“Colonel Grahame?” a voice said behind him. “I’m Lieutenant Athyer, in command of this company. We’re ready to take off…"
Cletus turned. Athyer was a short, dark, fairly slim man, in his mid-thirties, with a beak-like nose. A vaguely sour expression sat on his features, as if habit had made it permanent there. His speech was abrupt, even aggressive, but the words at the end of each speech tended to thin out into a whine.
“Now that you’re finally here, sir,” he added.
The extra, unnecessary statement verged on impertinence. But Cletus ignored it, looking past Athyer’s shoulder at the men behind the lieutenant. Their tanned skin and the mixture of old and new equipment and clothing about them suggested experience. But they were more silent than they should be; and Cletus had little doubt about the reason for this. To be put back under weapons and flown off into combat in the middle of Rest and Retraining was not likely to make soldiers happy. He looked back at Athyer.
“I imagine we’ll start loading right away, then. Won’t we, Lieutenant?” he said pleasantly. “Let me know where you want me.”
“We’re taking two atmosphere support ships for transport,” growled Athyer. “I’ve got my top sergeant in the second. You’d better ride with me in the first, Colonel—”
He broke off to stare at the electric horse, as its overhead vanes whined into movement. Arvid had just switched its satchel turbine on, and the single-person vehicle had lifted into the air so that it could be moved easily under its own power to the support ship. Evidently, Athyer had not connected the horse with Cletus until this moment. In truth, it was an unlikely little contraption for such an outing—designed for spaceport inspection work, mainly, and looking like a wheel-less bicycle frame suspended fore and aft from metal rods leading down from a side-by-side pair of counter-rotating ducted vanes driven by a nuclear-pack, satchel turbine just below them. Cletus’s cone rifle and duffle bags were hung before its saddle on the crossbar.