Sixth Column

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “If there are such, they would presumably have properties quite as remarkable as the electromagnetic spectrum and quite different. But we have no instruments with which to detect such spectra, nor do we even know that such spectra exist.”

  “You know,” commented Ardmore, frowning a little, “I’m just a layman in these matters and don’t wish to set my opinion up against yours, but this seems like a search for the little man who wasn’t there. I had supposed that this laboratory was engaged in the single purpose of finding a military weapon to combat the vortex beams and A-bomb rockets of the PanAsians. I am a bit surprised to find the man whom you seem to regard as having been your ace researcher engaged in an attempt to discover things that he was not sure existed and whose properties were totally unknown. It doesn’t seem reasonable.”

  Calhoun did not answer; he simply looked supercilious and smiled irritatingly. Ardmore felt put in the wrong and was conscious of a warm flush spreading up toward his face. “Yes, yes,” he said hastily, “I know I’m wrong—whatever it was that Ledbetter found, it killed a couple of hundred men. Therefore it is a potential military weapon—but wasn’t he just mugging around in the dark?”

  “Not entirely,” Calhoun replied, with a words-of-one-syllable air. “The very theoretical considerations that predict additional spectra allow of some reasonable probability as to the general nature of their properties. I know that Ledbetter had originally been engaged in a search for a means of setting up tractor and pressor beams—that would be in the magnetogravitic spectrum—but the last couple of weeks he appeared to be in a condition of intense excitement and radically changed the direction of his experimentation. He was close-mouthed; I got no more than a few hints from the transformations and developments which he had me perform for him. However”—Calhoun drew a bulky loose-leaf notebook from an inner pocket—“he kept complete notes of his experiments. We should be able to follow his work and perhaps infer his hypotheses.”

  Young Wilkie, who was seated beside Calhoun, bent toward him. “Where did you find these, doctor?” he asked excitedly.

  “On a bench in his laboratory. If you had looked you would have seen them.”

  Wilkie ignored the thrust; he was already eating up the symbols set down in the opened book. “But that is a radiation formula—”

  “Of course it is—d’you think I’m a fool?”

  “But it’s all wrong!”

  “It may be from your standpoint; you may be sure that it was not to Dr. Ledbetter.”

  They branched off into argument that was totally meaningless to Ardmore; after some minutes he took advantage of a pause to say, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! just a moment. I can see that I am simply keeping you from your work; I’ve learned all that I can just now. As I understand it, your immediate task is to catch up with Dr. Ledbetter and to discover what it is that his apparatus does—without killing yourselves in the process. Is that right?”

  “I would say that is a fair statement,” Calhoun agreed cautiously.

  “Very well, then—carry on, and keep me advised at your convenience.” He got up; the others followed his example. “Oh—just one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I happened to think of something else. I don’t know whether it is important or not, but it came to mind because of the importance that Dr. Brooks attached to the matter of the rats and mice.” He ticked points off on his fingers. “Many men were killed; Dr. Wilkie was knocked out and very nearly died; Dr. Calhoun experienced only a momentary discomfort; the rest of those who lived apparently didn’t suffer any effects of any sort—weren’t aware that anything had happened except that their companions mysteriously died. Now, isn’t that data of some sort?” He awaited a reply anxiously, being subconsciously afraid that the scientists would consider his remarks silly, or obvious.

  Calhoun started to reply, but Dr. Brooks cut in ahead of him. “Of course, it is! Now why didn’t I think of that? Dear me, I must be confused today. That establishes a gradient, an ordered relationship in the effect of the unknown action.” He stopped and thought, then went on almost at once. “I really must have your permission, Major, to examine the cadavers of our late colleagues, then by examining for differences between them and those alive, especially those hard hit by the unknown action—” He broke off short and eyed Wilkie speculatively.

  “No, you don’t!” protested Wilkie. “You won’t make a guinea pig out of me. Not while I know it!” Ardmore was unable to tell whether the man’s apprehension was real or facetious. He cut it short.

  “The details will have to be up to you gentlemen. But remember—no chances to your lives without notifying me.”

  “You hear that, Brooksie?” Wilkie persisted.

  Ardmore went to bed that night from sheer sense of duty, not because he felt ready to sleep. His immediate job was accomplished; he had picked up the pieces of the organization known as the Citadel and had thrown it together into some sort of a going concern—whether or not it was going any place he was too tired to judge, but at least it was going. He had given them a pattern to live by, and, by assuming leadership and responsibility, had enabled them to unload their basic worries on him and thereby acquire some measure of emotional security. That should keep them from going crazy in a world which had gone crazy.

  What would it be like, this crazy new world—a world in which the superiority of western culture was not a casually accepted “Of course,” a world in which the Stars and Stripes did not fly, along with the pigeons, over every public building?

  Which brought to mind a new worry: if he was to maintain any pretense of military purpose, he would have to have some sort of a service of information. He had been too busy in getting them all back to work to think about it, but he would have to think about it—tomorrow, he told himself, then continued to worry about it.

  An intelligence service was as important as a new secret weapon—more important; no matter how fantastic and powerful a weapon might be developed from Dr. Ledbetter’s researches, it would be no help until they knew just where and how to use it against the enemy’s weak points. A ridiculously inadequate military intelligence had been the prime characteristic of the United States as a power all through its history. The most powerful nation the globe had ever seen—but it had stumbled into wars like a blind giant. Take this present mess: the atom bombs of PanAsia weren’t any more powerful than our own but we had been caught flat-footed and had never gotten to use a one.

  We had had how many stock-piled? A thousand, he had heard. Ardmore didn’t know, but certainly the PanAsians had known, just how many, just where they were. Military intelligence had won the war for them, not secret weapons. Not that the secret weapons of the PanAsians were anything to sneer at—particularly when it was all too evident that they really were “secret.” Our own so-called intelligence services had fallen down on the job.

  O.K., Whitey Ardmore, it’s all yours now! You can build any sort of an intelligence service your heart desires—using three near-sighted laboratory scientists, an elderly master sergeant, two kitchen privates, and the bright boy in person. So you are good at criticizing—“If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”

  He got up, wished passionately for just one dose of barbiturate to give him a night’s sleep, drank a glass of hot water instead, and went back to bed.

  Suppose they did dig up a really powerful and new weapon? That gadget of Ledbetter’s certainly looked good, if they could learn to handle it—but what then? One man couldn’t run a battle cruiser—he couldn’t even get it off the ground—and six men couldn’t whip an empire, not even with seven-league boots and a death ray. What was that old crack of Archimedes? “If I had a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to rest it, I could move the Earth.” How about the fulcrum? No weapon was a weapon without an army to use it.

  He dropped into a light sleep and dreamed that he was flopping around on the end of the longest lever conceivable, a useless lever, for it rested on nothing. Part of the time he was
Archimedes, and part of the time Archimedes stood beside him, jeering and leering at him with a strongly Asiatic countenance.

  Chapter Two

  Ardmore was too busy for the next couple of weeks to worry much about anything but the job at hand. The underlying postulate of their existence pattern—that they were, in fact, a military organization which must some day render an accounting to civil authority—required that he should comply with, or closely simulate compliance with, the regulations concerning paperwork, reports, records, pay accounts, inventories, and the like. In his heart he felt it to be waste motion, senseless, yet as a publicity man, he was enough of a jackleg psychologist to realize intuitively that man is a creature that lives by symbols. At the moment these symbols of government were all important.

  So he dug into the regulation manual of the deceased paymaster and carefully closed out the accounts of the dead, noting in each case the amounts due each man’s dependents “in lawful money of the United States,” even while wondering despondently if that neat phrase would ever mean anything again. But he did it, and he assigned minor administrative jobs to each of the others in order that they might realize indirectly that the customs were being maintained.

  It was too much clerical work for one man to keep up. He discovered that Jeff Thomas, the cook’s helper, could use a typewriter with facility and had a fair head for figures. He impressed him into the job. It threw more work on Graham, who complained, but that was good for him, he thought—a dog needs fleas. He wanted every member of his command to go to bed tired every night.

  Thomas served another purpose. Ardmore’s high-strung disposition required someone to talk to. Thomas turned out to be intelligent and passively sympathetic, and he found himself speaking with more and more freedom to the man. It was not in character for the commanding officer to confide in a private, but he felt instinctively that Thomas would not abuse his trust—and he needed nervous release.

  Calhoun brought up the matter which forced Ardmore to drop his preoccupation with routine and turn his attention to more difficult matters. Calhoun had called to ask permission to activate Ledbetter’s apparatus, as modified to suit their current hypotheses, but he added another and embarrassing question.

  “Major Ardmore, can you give me some idea as to how you intend to make use of the ‘Ledbetter effect’?”

  Ardmore did not know; he answered with another question. “Are you near enough to results to make that question urgent? If so, can you give me some idea of what you have discovered so far?”

  “That will be difficult,” Calhoun replied in an academic and faintly patronizing manner, “since I am constrained not to speak in the mathematical language which, of necessity, is the only way of expressing such things—”

  “Now, Colonel, please,” Ardmore broke in, irritated more than he would admit to himself and inhibited by the presence of Private Thomas, “you can kill a man with it or you can’t and you can control whom you kill or you can’t.”

  “That’s an oversimplification,” Calhoun argued. “However, we think that the new set-up will be directional in its effect. Dr. Brook’s investigations caused him to hypothecate an asymmetrical relationship between the action and organic life it is applied to, such that an inherent characteristic of the life form determines the effect of the action as well as the inherent characteristics of the action itself. That is to say, the effect is a function of the total factors of the process, including the life form involved, as well as the original action—”

  “Easy, easy, Colonel. What does that mean as a weapon?”

  “It means that you could turn it on two men and decide which one it is to kill—with proper controls,” Calhoun answered testily. “At least, we think so. Wilkie has volunteered to act as a control on it, with mice as the object.”

  Ardmore granted permission for the experiment to take place, subject to precautions and restrictions. When Calhoun had gone, his mind returned at once to the problem of what he was going to do with the weapon—if any. And that required data that he did not have. Damn it!—he had to have a service of information; he had to know what was going on outside.

  The scientists were out, of course. And Scheer, for the scientific staff needed his skill. Graham? No, Graham was a good cook, but nervous and irritable, emotionally not stable, the very last man to pick for a piece of dangerous espionage. It left only himself. He was trained for such things; he would have to go.

  “But you can’t do that, sir,” Thomas reminded him.

  “Huh? What’s that?” He had been unconsciously expressing his thoughts aloud, a habit he had gotten into when he was alone, or with Thomas only. The man’s manner encouraged using him for a sounding board.

  “You can’t leave your command, sir. Not only is it against regulations, but, if you will let me express an opinion, everything you have done so far will fall to pieces.”

  “Why should it? I’ll be back in a few days.”

  “Well, sir, maybe it would hold together for a few days—though I’m not sure of that. Who would be in charge in your absence?”

  “Colonel Calhoun—of course.”

  “Of course.” Thomas expressed by raised eyebrows and ready agreement an opinion which military courtesy did not permit him to say aloud. Ardmore knew that Thomas was right. Outside of his specialty, Calhoun was a bad-tempered, supercilious, conceited old fool, in Ardmore’s opinion. Ardmore had had to intercede already to patch up trouble which Calhoun’s arrogance had caused. Scheer worked for Calhoun only because Ardmore had talked with him, calmed him down, and worked on his strong sense of duty.

  The situation reminded him of the time when he had worked as press agent for a famous and successful female evangelist. He had signed on as director of public relations, but he had spent two-thirds of his time straightening out the messes caused by the vicious temper of the holy harridan.

  “But you have no way of being sure that you will be back in a few days,” Thomas persisted. “This is a very dangerous assignment; if you get killed on it, there is no one here who can take over your job.”

  “Oh, now, that’s not true, Thomas. No man is irreplaceable.”

  “This is no time for false modesty, sir. That may be true in general, but you know that it is not true in this case. There is a strictly limited number to draw from, and you are the only one from whom all of us will take direction. In particular, you are the only one from whom Dr. Calhoun will take direction. That is because you know how to handle him. None of the others would be able to, nor would he be able to handle them.”

  “That’s a pretty strong statement, Thomas.”

  Thomas said nothing. At length Ardmore went on. “All right, all right—suppose you are right. I’ve got to have military information. How am I going to get it if I don’t go myself?”

  Thomas was a little slow in replying. Finally, he said quietly, “I could try it.”

  “You?” Ardmore looked him over and wondered why he had not considered Thomas. Perhaps because there was nothing about the man to suggest his potential ability to handle such a job—that, combined with the fact that he was a private, and one did not assign privates to jobs requiring dangerous independent action. Yet perhaps—

  “Have you ever done any work of that sort?”

  “No, but my experience may be specially adapted in a way to such work.”

  “Oh, yes! Scheer told me something about you. You were a tramp, weren’t you, before the army caught up with you?”

  “Not a tramp,” Thomas corrected gently, “a hobo.”

  “Sorry—what’s the distinction?”

  “A tramp is a bum, a parasite, a man that won’t work. A hobo is an itinerant laborer who prefers casual freedom to security. He works for his living, but he won’t be tied down to one environment.”

  “Oh, I see. Hm-m-m—yes, and I begin to see why you might be especially well adapted to an intelligence job. I suppose it must require a good deal of adaptability and resourcefulness to stay alive as a hobo. But w
ait a minute, Thomas—I guess I’ve more or less taken you for granted; I need to know a great deal more about you, if you are to be entrusted with this job. You know, you don’t act like a hobo.”

  “How does a hobo act?”

  “Eh? Oh, well, skip it. But tell me something about your background. How did you happen to take up hoboing?”

  Ardmore realized that he had, for the first time, pierced the man’s natural reticence. Thomas fumbled for an answer, finally replying, “I suppose it was that I did not like being a lawyer.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. You see, it was like this: I went from the law into social administration. In the course of my work I got an idea that I wanted to write a thesis on migratory labor and decided that in order to understand the subject I would have to experience the conditions under which such people lived.”

  “I see. And it was while you were doing your laboratory work, as it were, that the army snagged you.”

  “Oh, no,” Thomas corrected him. “I’ve been on the road more than ten years. I never went back. You see, I found I liked being a hobo.”

  The details were rapidly arranged. Thomas wanted nothing in the way of equipment but the clothes he had been wearing when he had stumbled into the Citadel. Ardmore had suggested a bedding roll, but Thomas would have none of it. “It would not be in character,” he explained. “I was never a bindlestiff. Bindlestiffs are dirty, and a self-respecting hobo doesn’t associate with them. All I want is a good meal in my belly and a small amount of money on my person.”

  Ardmore’s instructions to him were very general. “Almost anything you hear or see will be data for me,” he told him. “Cover as much territory as you can, and try to be back here within a week. If you are gone much longer than that, I will assume that you are dead or imprisoned, and will have to try some other plan.