Robert Heinlein - Sixth Column

"Maybe it would help if I started in again at the beginning," suggested Thomas.

"No need to. I'll play the recording back piece by piece sometime tomorrow, if I don't think of it in the meantime. "

They were interrupted by peremptory knocking at the door. Ardmore called out, "Come in!" Colonel Calhoun entered.

"Major Ardmore, what's this about a PanAsiatic prisoner?"

"Not quite that, Colonel, but we do have an Asiatic here now. He's American-born."

Calhoun brushed aside the distinction. "Why wasn't I informed? I have notified you that I urgently require a man of Mongolian blood for test experimentation."

"Doctor, with the skeleton staff we have, it is difficult to comply with all the formalities of military etiquette. You were bound to learn of it in the ordinary course of events -- in fact, it seems that you were informed in some fashion."

Calhoun snorted. "Through the casual gossip of subordinates!"

"I'm sorry, Colonel, but it couldn't be helped. Just at the moment I am trying to receive Thomas' reconnaissance report."

"Very well, sir." Calhoun was icily formal. "Will you be good enough to have the Asiatic report to me at once?"

"I can't do that. He is asleep, drugged, and there is no way to produce him for you before tomorrow. Besides, while I am quite sure that he will be entirely cooperative in any useful experimentation, he is an American citizen and a civilian under our protection -- not a prisoner. We'll have to take it up with him."

Calhoun left as abruptly as he had come. "Jeff," mused Ardmore, glancing after him, "speaking strictly off the record -- oh, strictly! -- if there ever comes a time when we are no longer bound down by military necessity, I'm going to paste that old beezer right in the puss!"

"Why don't you clamp down on him?"

"I can't, and he knows it. He's invaluable, indispensable. We've absolutely got to have his brains for research, and you can't conscript brains just by handing out orders. Y'know, though, in spite of his brilliance, I sometimes think he's just a little bit cracked."

"Shouldn't be surprised. What does he want Frank Mitsui so bad for?"

"Well, that's somewhat involved. They've proved that the original Ledbetter effect depends on a characteristic of the life form involved -- you might call it a natural frequency. It seems that everybody has his own wavelength, or wavelengths. The notion seemed like so much astrology to me, but Dr. Brooks says that it is not only the straight dope; it isn't even new. He showed me a paper by a chap named Fox, at the University of London, 'way back in 1945 -- Fox showed that each individual rabbit had hemoglobin with its own individual wavelength; it absorbed that wavelength in spectroscopic analysis, that one wavelength and no other. You could tell two rabbits apart with it, or you could tell a rabbit from a dog, simply by the spectra of their hemoglobins.

"This Dr. Fox tried to do the same thing with humans, but it didn't work -- no distinguishable difference in wavelengths. But Calhoun and Wilkie have rigged a spectroscope for the spectrum Ledbetter was playing with, and it shows clearly separate wavelengths for each sample of human blood. Conversely, if they set up a tuned Ledbetter projector and start running down or up the scale, when they come to your individual, unique frequency, your red blood cells start absorbing energy, the hemoglobins protein breaks down and -- Spung! -- you're dead. I'm standing right beside you and I'm not even hurt; they haven't come to my frequency. Now Brooks has an idea that these frequencies come by groups according to races. He thinks they can tune it to discriminate by races, to knock over all the Asiatics in a group and not touch the white men, and vice versa."

Thomas shivered. "Whew! That would be a weapon. "

"Yes, it would. It's just on paper so far, but they want to test it on Mitsui. As I gather what they intended to do, they don't intend to kill him, but it's bound to be dangerous as all hell to Mitsui."

"Frank won't mind chancing it," Thomas commented.

"No, I don't suppose he would." It seemed to Ardmore that it would probably be a favor to Mitsui to give him a clean, painless death in the laboratory. "Now about another matter. It seems to me we ought to be able to work up a sort of permanent secret service, using your hobo pals and their sources of information. Let's talk about it."

Ardmore gained a few days' respite in which to consider further the problem of military use of the weapons at his disposal while the research staff tested their theories concerning the interrelation between racial types and the improved Ledbetter effect. The respite did him no good. He had a powerful weapon, yes; in fact, many powerful weapons, for it seemed that the new principles they had tapped had fully as protean possibilities as electricity. It seemed extremely likely that if the United States defense forces had had, one year earlier, the tools now available in the Citadel, the United States would never have fallen.

But six men cannot whip an empire -- not by brute force. The emperor could, if necessary, expend six million men to defeat six. The hordes of the empire could come at them barehanded and win, move over them as an avalanche moves, until they were buried under a mountain of dead flesh. Ardmore had to have an army to fight with his wonderful new weapons.

The question was: how to recruit and train such an army?

Certain it was that the PanAsians would not hold still while he went into the highways and byways and got his forces together. The thoroughness with which they had organized police surveillance of the entire population made it evident that they were acutely aware of the danger of revolution and would stamp out any such activity before it could possibly reach proportions dangerous to them.

There remained one clandestine group, the hobos.

He consulted with Thomas as to the possibility of organizing them for military purposes. Thomas shook his head at the idea.

"You can't understand the hobo temperament, Chief. There is not one in a hundred who could be depended on to observe the strict self-discipline necessary for such an enterprise. Suppose you were able to arm all of them with projectors -- I don't say that is possible, but suppose you could -- you still would not have an army; you would simply have an undisciplined rabble."

"Wouldn't they fight?"

"Oh, sure, they'd fight. They'd fight as individuals, and they would do quite a bit of slaughter until some flatface caught them off guard and winged them. "

"I wonder if we can depend on them as sources of information. "

"That's another matter. Most of the road kids won't have any idea that they are being used to obtain military information. I'll handpick not over a dozen to act as reporters to me, and I won't tell them anything they don't have to know."

Any way he looked at it, simple, straightforward military use of the new weapons was not expedient. Brutal frontal attack was for the commander who had men to expend. General U. S. Grant could afford to say, "I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," because he could lose three men to the enemy's one and still win. Those tactics were not for the commander who could not afford to lose any men. For him it must be deception, misdirection -- feint and slash and run away --"and live to fight another day." The nursery rhyme finished itself in his mind. That was it. It had to be something totally unexpected, something that the PanAsians would not realize was warfare until they were overwhelmed by it.

It would have to be something like the "fifth columns" that destroyed the European democracies from within in the tragic days that led to the final blackout of European civilization. But this would not be a fifth column of traitors, bent on paralyzing a free country; but the antithesis of that, a sixth column of patriots whose privilege it would be to destroy the morale of invaders, make them afraid, unsure of themselves.