Read Online Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson - Free Book Online Page A

trying to fasten on me—in which case I’ll find out about you as soon as I can get word back from Earth—or you’re a sort of interesting madman. In which case, events will take care of you in not much more time than it takes to establish the fact you’re an agent.” He watched Cletus for a second. Cletus met his eye expressionlessly.
    â€œI’m sorry to say,” deCastries went on, “you’re beginning to sound more and more like a madman. It’s too bad. If you’d been an agent, I was going to offer you a better job than the one you have with the Alliance. But I don’t want to hire a madman—he’d be too unpredictable. I’m sorry.”
    â€œBut,” said Cletus, “if I turned out to be a successful madman…?”
    â€œThen, of course, it’d be different. But that’s too much to hope for. So all I can say is, I’m sorry. I’d hoped you wouldn’t disappoint me.”
    â€œI seem to have a habit of disappointing people,” said Cletus.
    â€œAs when you first decided to paint instead of going on to the Academy and then gave up painting for a military life, after all?” murmured deCastries. “I’ve been a little disappointing to people in my life that way. I’ve got a large number of uncles and cousins about the Coalition world—all very successful managers, business chiefs, just as my father was. But I picked politics—” He broke off, as Melissa rejoined them.
    â€œIt wasn’t anything… Oh, Cletus,” she said, “Mondar said if you wanted to find him he’d be in his study. It’s a separate building, out behind the house.”
    â€œWhich way do I go?” asked Cletus.
    She pointed through an arched entrance in a farther wall of the room. “Just go straight through there and turn left,” she said. “The corridor you’ll be in leads to a door that opens on the garden. His study building’s just beyond it.”
    â€œThank you,” said Cletus.
    He found the corridor, as Melissa had said, and followed it out into the garden, a small, terraced area with paths running to a line of trees, the tops of which tossed sharply in a hot, wet wind against a sky full of moonlight and torn cloud ends. There was no sign of any building.
    At that moment, however, just as Cletus hesitated, he caught sight of light glimmering through the trees ahead of him. He went out across the garden and through the trees. Past their narrow belt he came into the open before a low-roofed, garage-like structure so comfortably fitted in among the vegetation surrounding it that it gave the impression of being comfortably half-sunk in the earth. Low, heavily curtained windows let out the small amount of light he had seen just now. There was a door before him; and as he approached, it slid noiselessly open. He stepped inside and it closed behind him. He stopped, instinctively.
    He had walked into a softly but clearly lit room, more library than study in appearance, although it had something of both about it. Its air tasted strangely thin and dry and clean like air on some high mountain peak. Bookshelves inset in all four of the walls held a surprisingly large collection of old-fashioned, printed volumes. A study console and a library retrieval system each occupied a corner of the room. But Mondar, the only other person in the room besides Cletus, was seated apart from these devices on a sort of wide-surfaced and armless chair, his legs up and crossed before him, so that he sat like a buddha in the lotus position.
    There was nothing except this to mark the moment and place as anything out of the ordinary—but as Cletus stepped through the door, a deep, instinctive warning shouted loudly at him, checking him just inside the threshold. He sensed an impalpable living tension that held the very air of the room—a feeling as of a massive, invisible force in delicate, temporary