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

balance. For a second his mind recoiled.
    Then it cleared. For one fleeting but timeless moment he saw that which was in the room—and that which was not.
    What his eyes registered were like two versions of the same scene, superimposed on each other, but at the same time distinct and separate. One was the ordinary room, with Mondar seated on his chair, and all things ordinary.
    The other was the same room, but filled with a difference. Here, Mondar did not sit on his chair but floated, in lotus position, a few inches above its seat cushion. Stretching out before and behind him was a succession of duplicating images, semitransparent, but each clearly identifiable—and while those closest to him, before and behind him, were duplicates of himself, those farther from him wore different faces—faces still Exotic, but of different men, different Outbonds. Before and behind him, these stretched away until they were lost to sight.
    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.
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œWith your help,” he said. “Was it actually necessary to get Melissa away, too? DeCastries and I could have talked over her head.”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œHe told me,” said Cletus, “that he couldn’t—to an interesting madman. From which I gathered he was extremely eager to hire one.”
    â€œOf 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?”
    â€œYes,” 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.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Mondar said. “The Chantry Guild was the brainchild of a man named Walter Blunt. He was a brilliant man, Cletus,