Robert Heinlein - Sixth Column

"Then you haven't told him?"

"Didn't I just say that I had written him a letter? God has seen that letter; it won't harm the bishop to wait to read it."

It was nearly two months later that David Wood was sworn into the Secret Service of the United States Army. He was only mildly surprised when he found that his old friend, Father Doyle, was able to exchange recognition signals with him.

It grew and it grew. Organization -- and communication -- underneath each gaudy temple, shielded from any possible detection by orthodox science, operators stood watch and watch, heel and toe, at the pararadio equipment operating in one band of additional spectra-operators who never saw the light of day, who never saw anyone but the priest of their own temple; men marked as missing in the fields of the Asiatic warlords; men who accepted their arduous routine philosophically as the necessary exigency of war. Their morale was high, they were free men again, free and fighting, and they looked forward to the day when their efforts would free all men, from coast to coast.

Back in the Citadel women in headphones neatly typed everything that the pararadio operators had to report; typed it, classified it, condensed it, cross-indexed it. Twice a day the communication watch officer laid a brief of the preceding twelve hours on Major Ardmore's desk. Constantly throughout the day dispatches directed to Ardmore himself poured in from a dozen and a half dioceses and piled up on his desk. In addition to these myriad sheets of flimsy paper, each requiring his personal attention, reports piled up from the laboratories, for Calhoun now had enough assistants to fill every one of those ghost crowded rooms and he worked them sixteen hours a day.

The personnel office crowded more reports on him, temperament classifications, requests for authorization, notifications that this department or that required such and such additional personnel; would the recruiting service kindly locate them? Personnel there was a headache! How many men can keep a secret? There were three major divisions of personnel, inferiors in routine jobs such as the female secretaries and clerks who were kept completely insulated from any contact with the outside world; local temple personnel in contact with the public who were told only what they needed to know and were never told that they were serving in the army, and the "priests" themselves who of necessity had to be in the know.

These latter were sworn to secrecy, commissioned in the United States army, and allowed to know the real significance of the entire set-up. But even they were not trusted with the underlying secret, the scientific principles behind the miracles they performed. They were drilled in the use of the apparatus entrusted to them, drilled with care, with meticulous care, in order that they might handle their deadly symbols of office without error. But, save for the rare sorties of the original seven, no person having knowledge of the Ledbetter effect and its corollaries ever left the Citadel.

Candidates for priesthood were sent in as pilgrims from temples everywhere to the Mother Temple near Denver. There they sojourned in the monastery, located underground on a level between the temple building and the Citadel. There they were subjected to every test of temperament that could be devised. Those who failed were sent back to their local temples to serve as lay brothers, no wiser than when they had left home.

Those who passed, those who survived tests intended to make them angry, to make them loquacious, to strain their loyalty, to crack their nerve, were interviewed by Ardmore in his persona as High Priest of Mota, Lord of All. Over half of them he turned down for no reason at all, hunch alone, some vague uneasiness that. this was not the man.

In spite of these precautions he never once commissioned a new officer and sent him forth to preach without a deep misgiving that here perhaps was the weak link that would bring ruin to them all.

The strain was getting him. It was too much responsibility for one man, too many details, too many decisions. He found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the matter at hand, hard to make even simple decisions. He became uncertain of himself and correspondingly irritable. His mood infected those in contact with him and spread throughout the organization.

Something had to be done.

Ardmore was sufficiently honest with himself to recognize, if not to diagnose, his own weakness. He called Thomas into his office, and unburdened his soul. Concluding, he asked, "What do you think I should do about it, Jeff? Has the job got too big for me? Should I try to pick out somebody else to take over?"

Thomas shook his head slowly. "I don't think you ought to do that, Chief. Nobody could work any harder than you do -- there are just twenty-four hours in a day. Besides, whoever relieved you would have the same problems without your intimate knowledge of the background and your imaginative grasp of what we are trying to accomplish."

"Well, I've got to do something. We're about to move into the second phase of this show, when we start in systematically trying to break the nerve of the PanAsians. When that reaches a crisis, we've got to have the congregation of every temple ready to act as a military unit. That means more work, not less. And I'm not ready to handle it! Good grief, man you'd think that somebody somewhere would have worked out a science of executive organization so that a big organization could be handled without driving the man at the top crazy! For the past two hundred years the damned scientists have kept hauling gadget after gadget out of their laboratories, gadgets that simply demand big organizations to use them -- but never a word about how to make those organizations run." He struck a match savagely. "It's not rational!"

"Wait a minute, Chief, wait a minute." Thomas wrinkled his brow in an intense effort to remember. "Maybe there has been such work done -- I seem to recall something I read once, something about Napoleon being the last of the generals."

"Huh?"

"It's pertinent. This chap's idea was that Napoleon was the last of the great generals to exercise direct command, because the job got too big. A few years later the Germans invented the principle of staff command, and, according to this guy, generals were through: as generals. He thought that Napoleon wouldn't have stood a chance against an army headed by a general staff. Probably what you need is a staff:"

"For Pete's sake, I've got a staff! A dozen secretaries and twice that many messengers and clerks -- I fall over 'em."

"I don't think it was that kind of a staff he was talking about. Napoleon must have had that kind of a staff."

"Well, what did he mean?"

"I don't know exactly, but apparently it was a standard notion in modern military organization. You're not a graduate of the War College?"

"You know damn well I'm not." It was true. Thomas had guessed from very early in their association that Ardmore was a layman, improvising as he went along, and Ardmore knew that he knew; yet each had kept his mouth closed.

"Well, it seems to me that a graduate of the War College might be able to give us some hints about organization."

"Fat chance. They either died in battle, or were liquidated after the collapse. If any escaped, they are lying very low and doing their best to conceal their identity -- for which you can't blame them."

"No, you can't. Well, forget it -- I guess it wasn't such a good idea after all."

"Don't be hasty. It was a good idea. Look -- armies aren't the only big organizations. Take the big corporations, like Standard Oil and U. S. Steel and General Motors -- they must have worked out the same principles."

"Maybe. Some of them, anyhow -- although some of them burn their executives out pretty young. Generals have to be killed with an ax, it seems to me."