The appointment was for the hour-and would have been scheduled days earlier but physics permitted no hypershunt travel this close to a sun. A glance at his chronometer showed ten seconds to the hour. “Send him down. Better not take the usual route; the grunts are moving machinery”
Clandeboye was a find-even though the search to uncover suitable candidates for this mission placed him a distant last in a field of twelve. General Fry reordered the list to place him as first choice. Clandeboye alone was the cousin of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine. He must have known her well because it was his recommendation that had taken Nora off clerical duties on Earth and sent her out to the asteroids for combat training with Intelligence.
The old note, resurrected from the archives, had been ambivalent-a reluctance to recommend her for dangerous duty was in it, but also an intense admiration. (Nora had probably done some of her blatant arm- twisting on that one. Fry could almost hear her voice speaking to Yankee: “I want that assignment! You’re going to do this for me.” Then coyly, while she fiddled with her ringlet, “I’ll be good at it! You’ll be proud that you recommended me!”)
The machine expert that had done the personnel search had placed Major Clandeboye dead last for good reasons. His record was uneven. It was clear he would never make it above major in spite of his talents. But none of these faults appeared to be fatal. Lucas Fry was a master Machiavellian who never assumed that he was dealing with perfect people. Strengths were essential but weaknesses provided the pressure points from which to manipulate a man.
His record:
The measurements of Major Clandeboye’s administrative accomplishments gave him high marks but the officers he worked for were hostile in their appraisal.
There was a peculiar mutiny charge against Major Clandeboye two years before the end of the war, in September 2431. It had never gone to court. The evidence in his ship’s automatic log was damning-clearly he had refused to carry out direct orders-but none of his superior officers remained alive to testify against him and the survivors of the Virgo Volunteers he brought back with him had flatly refused to do so.
Even though Major Clandeboye had mutinied, his automatic log suggested that he had fought brilliantly after Commander Shimmel’s fleet had been destroyed and it was too late for him to carry out his support role.
Major Clandeboye was under probation for a recent fistfight unbecoming of an officer.
For footnotes to the official file, General Fry always tapped the gossip mills. The major was rumored to be a stiff-necked moralist. No, he would not approve of a curmudgeon general having an infatuated dalliance with a young lieutenant half his age while he abused his power to give her what she wanted. (She had wanted danger.) The trouble with moralists, who were always right, was that they weren’t always good at taking orders that disagreed with their consciences. Moralists were hotbeds of mutiny. They took their orders from a higher authority.
The number one rule for manipulating a moralist was to use him as a channel to interview his “higher authority,” then to speak to him in the language of that authority.
Why did this misfit even stay m the UNSN? That was the key to working with him.
The man had written articles for the extremely conservative Belter Factnet and one ranting article for the datarag of the Isolationist Party of Wunderland. Fry could understand why his views had annoyed his fellow officers. With his temperament he might have become a flatlander media firebrand and gone far with the unpopularity of his opinions, but as a military man it was suicide to be so outspoken. However sympathetic Fry was to those who feared a kzinti resurgence, he had no use for the young major’s bluntness in deriding the patrols and the peacekeeping.
Clandeboye all minority officers who believed that the kzinti had not been trounced in the recent war and would return with a terrible ferocity-a preposterous belief while mankind’s hypershunt ships patrolled kzin space with impunity The UN’S Amalgamated Regional Militia had imposed a three-hundred-year peace on a fractiously warring mankind, until mass-man hardly understood war, and the navy in alliance with ARM had no reason to believe that they couldn’t do the same with the kzinti. Everyone, except maybe Clandeboye and the Wunderlanders, assumed that this was exactly what would happen.
The major’s viewpoint was preposterous, certainly, but his speculation about the strength and determination of a humbled Patriarchy was an alternate scenario that should be taken seriously. No harm in that. Hannibal’s march through Europe’s Alps had also been preposterous from a Roman point of view. The generals at Pearl Harbor had rejected the preposterous notion that the blips on their radar could be Japanese warcraft from a disappeared fleet.
Fry was coming to the conclusion that the way to this miscreant’s heart was to give him help with his eccentric ideas. (With friendly guidance, of course.) Wasn’t this pariah a man in desperate need of allies? Fry would, of course, stay in the shadows of the bunker while he played his multiple games. It was prudent to cultivate officers inclined to plan for a resurgent Patriarchy. A card up the old sleeve. Cover all bets. A Clandeboye with power might even be useful in the Belter effort to take out General Buford Early, a flatlander who needed a little cement in his jets.
What about mutiny? At first sight this disgraceful mutiny thing seemed to disqualify, Clandeboye completely from a sensitive mission. But the more Fry investigated the inquest, the more fascinated he became. Men are loyal to an officer for a reason. The inquest had not found out why. Clandeboye might carry the psychological nature of a mutineer-a man who always thought he was being put upon-but none of the men who sided with him even remotely fitted that profile. There were other aberrations. It was highly irregular that the inquest had come to the conclusion of mutiny, had placed that in the major’s record-and then refused to prosecute him. Here was a rich arsenal of weapons available to Fry, stacked both against Clandeboye and his enemies. It was a situation that could be worked both ways.
What particularly attracted Fry was his candidate’s brilliance under fire. The man could improvise against the kzinti faster than a computer. That was rare. There was no record at all of Shimmel’s brilliance.
When all items in the major’s record were weighed against Lucas Fry’s purpose, the fisticuff fight was the blackest mark against Clandeboye. These fights had become too common of late, as if young soldiers had taken out-of-control kzinti kits as their role models. Why admire the ferocity of the enemy you had just defeated? Modern youth was becoming incomprehensible. Human males of Fry’s generation, even as children, had not settled their differences by physical combat. In space, with a vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead, such behavior was deadly. It seemed that war had been short-circuiting the morals of the young; fist makes right, it told them. So Clandeboye liked to fight, did he? Well, he could, and would, be nailed to the rack and stretched for that one.
To Lucas Fry it was self-evident that the ability to clobber someone did not make one right. If men had destroyed the kzinti war machine, that was a matter of survival, not of rightness. Fry had gone into the war as an adult, already knowing that. But the younger men and women had seen the war won by force and not by philosophy. They did not have the long view of history Force seemed dominant to them; they had been born into it.
How does one pass one’s wisdom on to the children? (To men as mature as Fry, 66, men as young as Clandeboye, 47, were still children.)
His parents, he reflected, had been horrified when he left the goldskins for the military. They had tried to teach him that the kzin could be handled nonviolently. They had implored him to study man’s history to understand where violence led. He had ignored them. Now he had his own wisdom to teach-force must be balanced with compassion. But he had no children of his own to listen.
They had been killed in the war. He had only his cadre of young officers.
He wasn’t going to let Clandeboye’s temper disqualify him. A man’s weaknesses could be turned to advantage. Weakness was non-Medusan-if a man could look at weakness directly, he became strong; if he dared look at his failings only obliquely through a mirror, he became ossified. Fry was sure enough of his role as a martinet to believe that he could teach the sons of Zeus and Danae to face their Medusas without a mirror.
The heavy bulkhead door swung in, enough to let the sergeant’s head through. “We found away down past the kitchens. I didn’t let your boy get lost”
In person, Major Yankee Clandeboye turned out to be a rumpled flatlander who had a flatlander’s unbalanced way of giving a snappy salute in freefall. He was slightly awkward and ill-at-ease. He did not have the charisma of a commanding officer. He had too much hair; it even covered his ears. No matter-one did not judge flatlanders by their size, color of skin, grace, or cleanliness. They had other virtues.
