Mondar had come up while Wefer had been speaking.
"Good," said the Exotic, smiling. "He'll find that interesting." His gaze shifted to Cletus. "But I believe you wanted to talk to Dow deCastries, Cletus? His business with my people's over for the evening. You can see him, right across the room there, with Melissa."
"Yes... I see," said Cletus. He looked around at Wefer and Eachan. "I was just going over there. If you gentlemen will excuse me?"
He left Wefer with a promise to phone him at the earliest opportunity. As he turned away, he saw Mondar touch Eachan lightly on the arm and draw him off to one side in conversation.
Cletus limped over to where Dow and Melissa were still standing together. As Cletus came up they both turned to look at him, Melissa with a sudden, slight frown line between her darkened eyebrows. But Dow smiled genially.
"Well, Colonel," he said. "I hear all of you had a close call coming in from the spaceport earlier today."
"Only the sort of thing to be expected here on Bakhalla, I suppose," said Cletus.
They both laughed easily, and the slight frown line between Melissa's eyes faded.
"Excuse me," she said to Dow. "Dad's got something to say to me, I guess. He's beckoning me over. I'll be right back."
She left. The gazes of the two men met and locked.
"So," said Dow, "you came off with flying honors - defeating a guerrilla band single-handed."
"Not exactly. There was Eachan and his pistol." Cletus watched the other man. "Melissa might have been killed, though."
"So she might," said Dow, "and that would have been a pity."
"I think so," said Cletus. "She deserves better than that."
"People usually get what they deserve," said deCastries. "Even Melissas. But I didn't think scholars concerned themselves with individuals?"
"With everything," said Cletus.
"I see," said deCastries. "Certainly with sleight-of-hand. You know, I found a sugar cube under that middle cup after all? I mentioned it to Melissa and she said you'd told her you'd had cubes under all three cups."
"I'm afraid so," Cletus said.
They looked at each other.
"It's a good trick," said deCastries. "But not one that'd work a second time."
"No," said Cletus. "It always has to be different, a second time."
DeCastries smiled, an animal smile.
"You don't sound much like a man in an ivory tower, Colonel," he said. "I can't help thinking you like theory less, and action more, than you admit. Tell me" - his eyes hooded themselves amusedly under his straight brows - "if it comes down to a simple choice, aren't you tempted to practice rather than preach?"
"No doubt about it," said Cletus. "But one drawback to being a scholar is you're likely to be an idealist, too. And in the long run, when these new worlds are free to work out their own destinies without Earth's influence, one man's theories could have a longer and more useful effect than one man's practice."
"You mentioned that, back aboard ship," deCastries said. "You talked about Alliance and Coalition influence being removed from worlds like Kultis. Do you still feel as safe talking like that here, with your Alliance superiors all around the place?"
"Safe enough," said Cletus. "None of them would believe it - any more than you do."
"Yes. I'm afraid I don't." DeCastries picked up a wineglass from the small table beside which he was standing and held it briefly up to the light, twisting it slowly between thumb and forefinger. He lowered the glass and looked back at Cletus. "But I'd be interested in hearing how you think it's going to happen."
"I'm planning to help the change along a little," said Cletus.
"Are you?" said deCastries. "But you don't seem to have anything to speak of in the way of funds, armies or political influence to help with. Now, for example, I've got those things, myself, which puts me in a much stronger position. If I thought a major change could be accomplished - to my benefit, of course - I'd be interested in altering the shape of things to come."
"Well," said Cletus, "we can both try."
"Fair enough." DeCastries held the wineglass, looking over it at Cletus. "But you haven't told me how you'd do it. I told you what my tools are - money, armed troops, political power. What have you got? Only theories?"
"Theories are enough, sometimes," said Cletus. DeCastries slowly shook his head. He put the wineglass back down on the small table and lightly dusted against one another fingertips of the hand that had held the glass, as if to get rid of some stickiness.
"Colonel," he said, quietly, "you're either some new kind of agent the Alliance is 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.
"I'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."
"But," said Cletus, "if I turned out to be a successful madman... ?"
"Then, 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."
"I seem to have a habit of disappointing people," said Cletus.
"As 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.
"It 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."
"Which 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."
"Thank 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.