Sixth Column (6 page)

"Stand where you are. Both of you."

"It's all right, Major. He's an American. I vouch for him."

"Maybe." The voice that reached Thomas over the announcing phone

was still grimly suspicious. "Just the same-peel off all of your clothes, both of

you." They did so, Thomas biting his lip in humiliation, Mitsui trembling in

agitation. He did not understand it and he felt trapped. "Now turn around

slowly and let me look you over," the voice commanded.

Having satisfied himself that they were unarmed, Ardmore told them to

stand still and wait, then called Graham on the intercommunication circuit.

"Graham!"

"Yes, sir."

"Report to me at once in the guard room."

"But, Major, I can't. Dinner will be-"

"Never mind dinner! Move!"

"Yes, sir!"

Ardmore pointed out the situation to him in the screen. "You go down

there and handcuff both of them from behind. Secure the Asiatic first. Make

him back up to you, and watch yourself. If he tries to jump you, I may have to

wing you, too."

"I don't like this, Major," Graham protested. "Thomas is all right. He

wouldn't be up to any hanky-panky."

"Sure, man, 1 know he's all right, too. But he may be drugged and under

control. This set-up could be a Trojan Horse gag. Now get down and do as

you are told. "

While Graham was gingerly carrying out his unwelcome assignment and

making himself, in fact, eligible for a Congressional Medal which he would

never receive, for his artist's imagination perceived too clearly the potential

danger and forced him to call up courage for the task-Ardmore phoned

Brooks.

"Doctor, can you drop what you are doing?"

"Why, perhaps I can. Yes, I may say so. What is it you wish?"

"Then come to my office. Thomas is back. I want to know whether or not

he is under the influence of drugs."

"But I am not a medical man-"

"I know that, but you are the nearest thing we've got to one."

"Very well, sir."

Dr. Brooks examined Thomas' pupils, tried his knee jerks, and checked

his pulse and respiration. "I should say that he was perfectly normal, though

exhausted and laboring under excitement. Naturally, this is not a positive

diagnosis. If I had more time-"

"It will do for now. Thomas, I trust you won't hold it against me if we leave

you locked up until we have examined your Asiatic pal."

"Certainly not, Major," Thomas told him with a wry grin, "since you're

going to, anyhow."

Frank Mitsui's flesh quivered and sweat dripped from his face when

Brooks stuck the hypodermic into him, but he did not draw away. Presently

he relaxed under the influence of the drug that releases inhibitions, and strips

from the speech centers the protection of cortical censorship. His face

became peaceful.

But it was not peaceful a few minutes later when they began to question

him, nor was there peace in any of their faces. This was truth, too raw and

too brutal for any man to stand. Deep lines carved themselves from nose to

jaw in Ardmore's face as he listened to the little man's pitiful story. No matter

what line they started him on, he always came back to the scene of his dead

children, his broken household. Finally Ardmore put a stop to it.

"Give him the antidote, doe. I can't stand any more of this. I've found out

all I need to know."

Ardmore shook hands with him solemnly after he had returned to full

awareness. "We are glad to have you with us, Mr. Mitsui. And we'll put you to

some work that will give you a chance to get some of your own back. Right

now I want Dr. Brooks to give you a soporific that will let you get about

sixteen hours' sleep; then we can think about swearing you in and what kind

of work you can be most useful doing."

"I don't need any sleep, Mister . . . Major."

"Just the same, you are going to get some. And so is Thomas, as soon

as he has reported. In fact-" He broke off and studied the apparently

impassive face. "In fact, I want you to take a sleeping pill every night. Those

are orders. You'll draw them from me and take them in my presence every

night before you go to bed." There are certain bonus advantages to military

absolutism. Ardmore could not tolerate the idea of the little yellow man lying

awake and staring at the ceiling.

Brooks and Graham would quite plainly have liked to stay and hear

Thomas' report, but Ardmore refused to notice the evident fact and dismissed

them. He wished first to evaluate the data himself.

"Well, Lieutenant, I'm damn glad you're back."

"I'm glad to be back. Did you say `lieutenant'? I assume that my rank

reverts."

"Why should it? As a matter of fact, I am trying to figure out a plausible

reason for commissioning Graham and Scheer. It would simplify things

around here to eliminate social differences. But that is a side issue. Let's hear

what you've done. I suppose you've come back with all our problems solved

and tied up with string?"

"Not likely." Thomas grinned and relaxed.

"I didn't expect it. But seriously, between ourselves, I've got to pull

something out of the hat, and it's got to be good. The scientific staff is

beginning to crowd me, particularly Colonel Calhoun. There's no damn sense

in their making miracles in the laboratory unless I can dope out some way to

apply those miracles in strategy and tactics."

"Have they really gone so far?"

"You'd be surprised. They've taken that so-called 'Ledbetter effect' and

shaken it the way a terrier shakes a rat. They can do anything with it but peel

the potatoes and put out the cat."

"Really?"

"Really. "

"What sort of things can they do?"

"Well-" Ardmore took a deep breath. "Honestly, I don't know where to

begin. Wilkie has tried to keep me posted with simplified explanations, but,

between ourselves, I didn't understand more than every other word. One way

of putting it is to say that they've discovered atomic control-oh, I don't mean

atom-splitting, or artificial radioactivity. Look-we speak of space, and time,

and matter, don't we?"

"Yes. There's Einstein's space-time concept, of course. "

"Of course. Space-time is standard stuff in high school these days. But

these men really mean it. They really mean that space and time and mass

and energy and radiation and gravity are all simply different ways of thinking

about the same thing. And if you once catch on to how just one of them

works, you have the key to all of them. According to Wilkie, physicists up to

now, even after the A-bomb was developed, were just fooling around the

edges of the subject; they had the beginnings of a unified field theory, but

they didn't really believe it themselves; they usually acted as if these were all

as different as the names for them.

"Apparently Ledbetter hit on the real meaning of radiation, and that has

given Calhoun and Wilkie the key to everything else in physics. Is that clear?"

he added with a grin.

"Not very," Thomas admitted. "Can you give me some idea of what they

can do with it?"

"Well, to begin with, the original Ledbetter effect, the thing that killed

most of the personnel here, Wilkie calls an accidental side issue. Brooks

says that the basic radiation affected the colloidal dispersal of living tissue;

those that were killed were coagulated by it. It might just as well have been

set to release surface tension-in fact, they did that the other day, exploded a

half of b eefsteak like so much dynamite."

"Huh?"

"Don't ask me how; I'm just repeating the explanation given me. But the

point is, they seem to have found out what makes matter tick. They can

explode it-sometimes-and use it for a source of power. They can transmute it

into any element they want. They seem to be confident that they know what

to do to find out how gravity works, so that they will be able to handle gravity

the way we now handle electricity. "

"I thought gravity was not considered a force in the modern concepts."

"So it isn't but, then, `force' isn't force, either, in unified field theory.

Hell's bells, you've got me bogged down in language difficulties. Wilkie says

that mathematics is the only available language for these ideas."

"Well, I guess I'll just have to get along without understanding it. But,

frankly, I don't see how they managed to come so far so fast. That changes

just about everything we thought we knew. Honestly, how is it that it took a

hundred fifty years to go from Newton to Edison, yet these boys can knock

out results like that in a few weeks?"

"I don't know myself. The same point occurred to me, and I asked

Calhoun about it. He informed me in that schoolmaster way of his that it was

because those pioneers did not have the tensor calculus, vector analysis,

and matrix algebra."

"Well, I wouldn't know," observed Thomas. "They don't teach that stuff in

law school."

"Nor me," admitted Ardmore. "I tried looking over some of their work

sheets. I can do simple algebra, and I've had some calculus, though I haven't

used it for years, but I couldn't make sense out of this stuff. It looked like

Sanskrit; most of the signs were different, and even the old ones didn't seem

to mean the same things. Look-I thought that a times b always equaled b

times a."

"Doesn't it?"

"Not when these boys get through kicking it around. But we are getting

way off the subject. Bring me up to date."

"Yes, sir." Jeff Thomas talked steadily for a long time, trying very hard to

paint a detailed picture of everything he had seen and heard and felt.

Ardmore did not interrupt him except with questions intended to clarify points.

There was a short silence when he had concluded. Finally Ardmore said:

"I think I must have had a subconscious belief that you would come back

with some piece of information that would fall right into place and tell me what

to do. But I don't see much hope in what you have told me. How to win back

a country that is as completely paralyzed and as carefully guarded as you

describe the United States to be is beyond me."

"Of course, I didn't see the whole country. About two hundred miles from

here is as far as I got."

"Yes, but you got reports from the other hobos that covered the whole

country, didn't you?"

"Yes. "

"And it was all about the same. I think we can safely assume that what

you heard, confirmed by what you saw, gives a fairly true picture. How recent

do you suppose was the dope you got by the grapevine telegraph?"

"Well-maybe three or four days old news from the East coast-no more

than that."

"That seems reasonable. News always travels by the fastest available

route. It's certainly not very encouraging. And yet-" He paused and scowled

in evident puzzlement. "And yet I have a feeling that you said something that

was the key to the whole matter. I can't put my finger on it. I began to get an

idea while you were talking, then some other point came up and diverted my

mind, and I lost it."

"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."