most. He was harsh, he was relentless and inflexible; but he was absolutely fair. He did
not punish a given breach of discipline with twenty lashes one time and with a mere
reprimand the next; fifteen honest, scarring strokes it became for each and every time,
whoever the offender. Whatever punishment a man deserved by the book he got,
promptly and mercilessly; whatever reward was earned was bestowed with equal
celerity, accompanied by a crisply accurate statement of the facts in each case, at the
daily parade-review.
His men hated him, of course. His non-coms and lieutenants, besides hating him,
kept on trying to cut him down. All, however, respected him and obeyed him without
delay and without question, which was all that any Boskonian officer could expect and
which was far more than most of them ever got.
Having thus consolidated his position, Kinnison went blithely to work to
undermine and to supplant the major. Since Alcon, like all dictators everywhere, was in
constant fear of treachery and of revolution, war-games were an almost constant form
of drill. The general himself planned and various officers executed the mock attacks, by
space, air, and land; the Royal Guards and Alcon’s personal troops, heavily
outnumbered, always constituted the defense. An elaborate system of scoring had been
worked out long since, by means of which the staff officers could study in detail every
weak point that could be demonstrated.
“Captain Gannel, you will have to hold passes 25, 26, and 27,” the obviously
worried major told Kinnison, the evening before a particularly important sham battle was
to take place. The Lensman was not surprised. He himself had insinuated the idea into
his superior’s mind. Moreover, he already knew, from an intensive job of spying, that his
major was to be in charge of the defense, and that the colonel, who was to direct the
attacking forces, had decided to route his main column through Pass 27.
“Very well, sir,” Kinnison acknowledged. “I wish to protest formally, however,
against those orders. It is manifestly impossible, sir, to hold all three of those passes
with two platoons of infantry and one squadron of speedsters. May I offer a suggestion .
. .”
“You may not,” the major snapped. “We have deduced that the real attack is
coming from the north, and that any activity in your sector will be merely a feint. Orders
are orders, captain!”
“Yes, sir,” Kinnison replied, meekly, and signed for the thick sheaf of orders
which stated in detail exactly what he was to do.
The next evening, after Kinnison had won the battle by disregarding every order
he had been given, he was summoned to the meeting of the staff. He had expected
that, too, but he was not at all certain of how it was coming out. It was in some
trepidation, therefore, that he entered the lair of the Big Brass Hats.
“Har-rumph!” he was greeted by the adjutant. “You have been called . . .”
“I know why I was called,” Kinnison interrupted, brusquely. “Before we go into
that, however, I wish to prefer charges before the general against Major Delios of
stupidity, incompetence, and inefficiency.”
Astonishment resounded throughout the room in a ringing silence, broken finally
by the general, ‘Those are serious charges indeed, Captain Gannel; but you may state
your case.”
“Thank you, sir. First, stupidity: He did not perceive, at even as late a time as
noon, when he took all my air away from me to meet the feint from the north, that the
attack was not to follow any orthodox pattern. Second, incompetence: The orders he
gave me could not possibly have stopped any serious attack through any one of the
passes I was supposed to defend. Third, inefficiency: No efficient commander refuses to
listen to suggestions from his officers, as he refused to listen to me last night.”
“Your side, Major?” and the staff officers listened to a defense based upon blind,
dumb obedience to orders.
“We will take this matter under advisement,” the general announced then. “Now,
Captain, what made you suspect that the colonel was coming through Pass 27?”
“I didn’t,” Kinnison replied, mendaciously. “To reach any one of those passes,
however, he would have to come down this valley,” tracing it with his forefinger upon the
map. “Therefore I held my whole force back here at Hill 562, knowing that, warned by
my air of his approach, I could reach any one of the passes before he could.”
“Ah. Then, when your air was sent elsewhere?”
“I commandeered a flitter—my own, by the way—and sent it up so high as to be
indetectable. I then ordered motorcycle scouts out, for the enemy to capture; to make
the commander of any possible attacking or reconnaissance force think that I was still
blind.”
“Ah . . . smart work. And then?”
“As soon as my scout reported troop movements in the valley, I got my men
ready to roll. When it became certain that Pass 27 was the objective, I rushed
everything I had into preselected positions commanding every foot of that pass. Then,
when the colonel walked into the trap, I wiped out most of his main column. However, I
had a theoretical loss of three-quarters of my men in doing it,” bitterly. “If I had been
directing the defense I would have wiped out the colonel’s entire force, ground and air
both, with a loss of less than two percent.”
This was strong talk. “Do you realize, Captain Gannel, that this is sheer
insubordination?” the general demanded. “That you are in effect accusing me also of
stupidity in planning and in ordering such an attack?”
“Not at all, sir,” Kinnison replied instantly. “It was quite evident, sir, that you did it
deliberately, to show all of us junior officers the importance of thought. To show us that,
while unorthodox attacks may possibly be made by unskilled tacticians, any such attack
is of necessity fatally weak if it be opposed by good tactics. In other words, that
orthodox strategy is the only really good strategy. Was not that it, sir?”
Whether it was or not, that viewpoint gave the general an out, and he was not
slow in taking advantage of it. He decided then and there, and the always subservient
staff agreed with him, that Major Delios had indeed been stupid, incompetent, and
inefficient; and Captain Gannel forthwith became Major Gannel.
Then the Lensman took it easy. He wangled and finagled various and sundry
promotions and replacements, until he was once more surrounded by a thoroughly
subsidized personal staff and in good position to go to work upon the colonel. Then,
however, instead of doing so, he violated another Boskonian precedent by having a
frank talk with the man whom normally he should have been trying to displace.
“You have found out that you can’t kill me, colonel,” he told his superior, after
making sure that the room was really shielded. “Also that I can quite possibly kill you.
You know that I know more than you do—that all my life, while you other fellows were
helling around, I have been working and learning—and that I can, in a fairly short time,
take your job away from you without killing you. However, I don’t want it.”
“You don’t want it!” The colonel stared, narrow-eyed. “What do you want, then?”
He knew, of course, that Gannel wanted something.
“Your help,” Kinnison admitted, candidly. “I want to get onto Alcon’s personal
staff, as adviser. With my experience and training, I figure that there’s more in it for me
there than here in the Guards. Here’s my proposition—if I help you, by showing you how
to work out your field problems and in general building you up however I can instead of
tearing you down, will you use your great influence with the general and Prime Minister
Fossten to have me transferred to the Household?”
“Will I? I’ll say I will!” the colonel agreed, with fervor. He did not add “If I can’t kill
you first”—that was understood.
And Kinnison did build the colonel up. He taught him things about the military
business which that staff officer had never even suspected; he sounded depths of
strategy theretofore completely unknown to the zwilnik. And the more Kinnison taught
him, the more eager the colonel became to get rid of him. He had been suspicious and
only reluctantly cooperative at first; but as soon as he realized that he could not kill his
tutor and that if the latter stayed in the Guards it would be only a matter of days—at
most of weeks—until Gannel would force himself into the colonelcy by sheer force of
merit, he pulled in earnest every wire he could reach.
Before the actual transfer could be effected, however, Kinnison received a call
from Nadreck.
“Excuse me, please, for troubling you,” the Palainian apologized, “but there has
been a development hi which you may perhaps be interested. This Kandron has been