"Understand they're going to try to do something to fix that knee of yours," Eachan said.
"I twisted some arms," answered Cletus, smiling.
"Yes. Well, good luck." Eachan looked away, out the window of the room for a moment, and then back at Cletus. "Thought I'd bring you the good wishes of our men and officers," he said. "You promised them a victory almost without a casualty - and then you delivered it."
"I promised a battle," Cletus corrected, gently. "And I was hoping we wouldn't have much in the way of casualties. Besides, they deserve a good deal of credit themselves for the way they executed their battle orders."
"Nonsense!" said Eachan brusquely. He cleared his throat. "They all know you're emigrating to the Dorsai. All very happy about it. Incidentally, seems you started a small rash of emigrations. That young lieutenant of yours is coming over as soon as his shoulder heals up."
"You accepted him, didn't you?" Cletus asked.
"Oh, of course," Eachan said. "The Dorsai'll accept any military man with a good record. He'll have to pass through our officers school, of course, if he wants to keep his commission with us, though. Marc Dodds told him there was no guarantee he'd make it."
"He will," said Cletus. "Incidentally, I'd like your opinion on something - now that I'm a Dorsai myself. If I supply the funds for subsistence, training facilities and equipment, do you suppose you could get together a regiment-sized body of officers and men who would be willing to invest six months in a complete retraining program - if I could guarantee them that at the end of that time they'd be able to find employment at half again their present pay?"
Eachan stared. "Six months is a long time for a professional soldier to live on subsistence," he said, after a moment. "But after Two Rivers, I think it just might be done. It's not just the hope of better pay, much as that means to a lot of these people who've got families back on the Dorsai. It's the better chance of staying alive to get back to the families that you might be able to give them. Want me to see about it?"
"I'd appreciate it," said Cletus. "All right," said Eachan. "But where's the money to come from for all this?"
Cletus smiled. "I've got some people in mind," he said. "I'll let you know about that later. You can tell the officers and the men you contact that it's all conditional on my having the funds, of course."
"Of course." Eachan fingered his mustache. "Melly's outside."
"Is she?" asked Cletus.
"Yes. I asked her to wait while I had a word with you on some private matters first, before she came in... " Eachan hesitated. Cletus waited.
Eachan's back was as stiffly upright as a surveyor's rod. His jaw was clamped and the akin of his face was like stamped metal.
"Why don't you marry her?" he said, gruffly.
"Eachan... " Cletus checked himself and paused. "What makes you think Melissa would want to marry me, anyway?"
"She likes you," said Eachan. "You like her. You'd make a good team. She's mostly heart and you're nearly all head. I know you both better than you know each other."
Cletus shook his head slowly, for once finding no words ready to his tongue.
"Oh, I know she acts as if she knows all the answers when she doesn't, and acts like she wants to run my life, and yours, and everybody else's for them," went on Eachan. "But she can't help it. She does feel for people, you know - I mean, feel for what they're actually like, at core. Like her mother in that. And she's young. She feels something's so about someone and can't see why they don't do exactly what she thinks they ought to do, being who they really are. But she'll learn."
Cletus shook his head again. "And me?" he said. "What makes you think I'd learn?"
"Try it. Find out," retorted Eachan.
"And what if I made a mess of it?" Cletus looked up at him with more than a touch of grimness.
"Then at least you'll have saved her from deCastries," said Eachan, bluntly. "She'll go to him to make me follow her - to Earth. I will, too, to pick up the pieces. Because that's all that'll be left of her afterward - pieces. With some women it wouldn't matter, but I know my Melly. Do you want deCastries to have her?"
"No," said Cletus, suddenly quiet. "And he won't. I can promise you that, anyway."
"Maybe," said Eachan, getting to his feet. He swung about on his heel. "I'll send her in now," he said, and went out.
A moment or two later, Melissa appeared in the doorway. She smiled wholeheartedly at Cletus and came in to seat herself in the same chair Eachan had just vacated.
"They're going to fix your knee," she said. "I'm glad."
He watched her smile. And for a second there was an actual physical sensation in his chest, as though his heart had actually moved at the sight of her. For a second what Eachan had said trembled in his ears, and the guarded distance that life and people had taught him to keep about him threatened to dissolve.
"So am I," he heard himself saying.
"I was talking to Arvid today... " Her voice ran down. He saw her blue eyes locked with his, as if hypnotized and he became aware that he had captured her with his own relentless stare.
"Melissa," he said slowly, "what would you say if I asked you to marry me?"
"Please... " It was barely a whisper. He shifted his gaze, releasing her; she turned her head away.
"You know I've got Dad to think about, Cletus," she said, in a low voice.
"Yes," he said. "Of course."
She looked back, suddenly, flashing her smile at him, and put a hand on one of his hands, where it lay on the sheet.
"But I wanted to talk to you about all sorts of other things," she said. "You really are a remarkable man, you know."
"I am, am I?" he said, and summoned up a smile.
"You know you are," she said. "You've done everything just the way you said you would. You've won the war for Bakhalla, and done it all in just a few weeks with no one's help but the Dorsai troops. And now you're going to be a Dorsai yourself. There's nothing to stop you from writing your books now. It's all over." Pain touched his inner self - and the guarded distance closed back around him. He was once more alone among people who did not understand.
"I'm afraid not," he said. "It's not over. Only the first act's finished. Actually, now it really begins."
She stared at him. "Begins?" she echoed. "But Dow's going back to Earth tonight. He won't be coming out here again."
"I'm afraid he will," said Cletus.
"He will? Why should he?"
"Because he's an ambitious man," said Cletus, "and because I'm going to show him how to further that ambition."
"Ambition!" Her voice rang with disbelief. "He's already one of the five Prime Secretaries of the Coalition Supreme Council. It's only a year or two, inevitably, until he'll get a seat on the Council itself. What else could he want? Look at what he's got already!"
"You don't quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way," said Cletus. "To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It's what he doesn't have that counts."
"But what doesn't he have?" She was genuinely perplexed.
"Everything," said Cletus. "A united Earth, under him, controlling all the Outworlds, again under him."
She stared at him. "The Alliance and the Coalition combine?" she said. "But that's impossible. No one knows that better than Dow."
"I'm planning to prove to him it is possible," said Cletus.
A little flush of anger colored her cheeks. "You're planning - " She broke off. "You must think I'm some kind of a fool, to sit and listen to this!"
"No," he said, a little sadly, "no more than anyone else. I'd just hoped that for once you'd take me on faith."
"Take you on faith!" Suddenly, almost to her own surprise, she was blindingly furious. "I was right when I first met you and I said you're just like Dad. Everybody thinks he's all leather and guns and nothing else, and the truth of the matter is, those things don't matter to him at all. Nearly everybody thinks you're all cold metal and calculation and no nerves. Well, let me tell you something - you don't fool everybody. You don't fool Dad, and you don't fool Arvid. Most of all, you don't fool me! It's people you care about, just like it's tradition Dad cares about - the tradition of honor and courage and truth and all those things nobody thinks we have any more. That's what they took away from him, back on Earth, and that's what I'm going to get back for him, when I get him back there, if I have to do it by main force - because he's just like you. He has to be made to take care of himself and get what he really wants."