“But you changed his mind, right?” the reporter smiled. “Whitey had commented before on your powers of persuasion.”
“Not really,” Tambu sighed. “I still maintain Whitey was wrong in attributing superhuman persuasive powers to me, and this is just one example of my failures. I did get Egor to accept a command position, mostly by pointing out there was no one else available with the necessary qualifications whom I trusted.”
“What about Puck?”
“Even Egor admitted that Puck was too young for command. Not so much in years, but he lacked maturity. On that basis, Egor accepted command, but he never really agreed with me as to his qualifications.” “So in essence, you forced your will on him?” Tambu hesitated a moment before answering.
“I suppose you’re correct,” he said finally. “If that was an error, it’s one I paid for a hundredfold afterward. I was constantly receiving complaints, both from Egor and from the other captains as to his shortcomings as a commander. He was probably the least effective captain who ever served under me.”
“Why didn’t you relieve him of command, then?”
“That is one of those hindsight questions we were speaking of earlier,” Tambu admitted. “I’ve asked myself that a hundred times in the last few years and still haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer-mostly because I’m unsure of my own motives during that period. Mostly, I think, it was because of friendship. Egor was my friend, and I gave him command of a ship because I believed in him and his abilities. To take this command away would have been a sign that I no longer believed in him. Balanced against that was my own stubborn pride. I didn’t want to admit I had been wrong in my assessment of his abilities, and I sincerely felt that the problems he was encountering were manufactured by him in an effort to prove me wrong. I genuinely believed that once I made it clear that I wasn’t going to remove him from command, he would resign himself to the task and solve his own problems. I saw it more as a test of wills than as a sign of incompetence on his part.”
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