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?"