Sixth Column

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Keep out of the way, boy!” He spoke in English, but in a light, singing tone which lacked the customary American accentuation.

  Thomas jumped into the gutter—“They like to look down, not up”—and clasped his hands together in the form required. He ducked his head and replied, “The master speaks; the servant obeys.”

  “That’s better,” acknowledged the Asiatic, apparently somewhat mollified. “Your ticket.”

  The man’s accent was not bad, but Thomas did not comprehend immediately, possibly because the emotional impact of his experience in the role of slave was all out of proportion to what he had expected. To say that he raged inwardly is meaninglessly inadequate.

  The swagger cane cut across his face. “Your ticket!”

  Thomas produced his registration card. The time the Oriental spent in examining it gave Thomas an opportunity to pull himself together to some extent. At the moment he did not care greatly whether the card passed muster or not; if it came to trouble, he would take this one apart with his bare hands.

  But it passed. The Asiatic grudgingly handed it back and strutted away, unaware that death had brushed his elbow.

  It turned out that there was little to be picked up in town that he had not already acquired secondhand in the hobo jungles. He had a chance to estimate for himself the proportion of rulers to ruled, and saw for himself that the schools were closed and the newspapers had vanished. He noted with interest that church services were still held, although any other gathering together of white men in assembly was strictly forbidden.

  But it was the dead, wooden faces of the people, the quiet children, that got under his skin and made him decide to sleep in the jungles rather than in town.

  Thomas ran across an old friend at one of the hobo hideouts. Frank Roosevelt Mitsui was as American as Will Rogers, and much more American than that English aristocrat, George Washington. His grandfather had brought his grandmother, half Chinese and half wahini, from Honolulu to Los Angeles, where he opened a nursery and raised flowers, plants, and little yellow children, children that knew neither Chinese nor Japanese, nor cared.

  Frank’s father met his mother, Thelma Wang, part Chinese but mostly Caucasian, at the International Club at the University of Southern California. He took her to the Imperial Valley and installed her on a nice ranch with a nice mortgage. By the time Frank was raised, so was the mortgage.

  Jet Thomas had cropped lettuce and honeydew melon for Frank Mitsui three seasons and knew him as a good boss. He had become almost intimate with his employer because of his liking for the swarm of brown kids that were Frank’s most important crop. But the sight of a flat, yellow face in a hobo jungle made Thomas’ hackles rise and almost interfered with his recognizing his old acquaintance.

  It was an awkward meeting. Well as he knew Frank, Thomas was in no mood to trust an Oriental. It was Frank’s eyes that convinced him; they held a tortured look that was even more intense than that found in the eyes of white men, a look that did not lessen even while he smiled and shook hands.

  “Well, Frank,” Jeff improvised inanely, “who’d expect to find you here? I should think you’d find it easy to get along with the new regime.”

  Frank Mitsui looked still more unhappy and seemed to be fumbling for words. One of the other hobos cut in. “Don’t be a fool, Jeff. Don’t you know what they’ve done to people like Frank?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, you’re on the dodge. If they catch you, it’s the labor camp. So is Frank. But if they catch him, it’s curtains—right now. They’ll shoot him on sight.”

  “So? What did you do, Frank?”

  Mitsui shook his head miserably.

  “He didn’t do anything,” the other continued. “The empire has no use for American Asiatics. They’re liquidating them.”

  It was quite simple. The Pacific coast Japanese, Chinese, and the like did not fit into the pattern of serfs and overlords—particularly the half-breeds. They were a danger to the stability of the pattern. With cold logic they were being hunted down and killed.

  Thomas listened to Frank’s story. “When I got home they were dead—all of them. My little Shirley, Junior, Jimmy, the baby—and Alice.” He put his face in his hands and wept. Alice was his wife. Thomas remembered her as a brown, stocky woman in overalls and straw hat, who talked very little but smiled a lot.

  “At first I thought I would kill myself,” Mitsui went on when he had sufficient control of himself, “then I knew better. I hid in an irrigation ditch for two days, and then I got away over the mountains. Then some whites almost killed me before I could convince them I was on their side.”

  Thomas could understand how that would happen, and could think of nothing to say. Frank was damned two ways; there was no hope for him. “What do you intend to do now, Frank?”

  He saw a sudden return of the will to live in the man’s face. “That is why I will not let myself die! Ten for each one”—he counted them off on his brown fingers—“ten of those devils for each one of my babies—and twenty for Alice. Then maybe ten more for myself, and I can die.”

  “Hm-m-m. Any luck?”

  “Thirteen, so far. It is slow, for I have to be very sure, so that they won’t kill me before I finish.”

  Thomas pondered it in his mind, trying to fit this new knowledge into his own purpose. Such fixed determination should be useful, if directed. But it was some hours later before he approached Mitsui again.

  “How would you,” he asked gently, “like to raise your quota from ten to a thousand each—two thousand for Alice?”

  Chapter Three

  The exterior alarms brought Ardmore to the portal long before Thomas whistled the tune that activated the door. Ardmore watched the door by televisor from the guard room, his thumb resting on a control, ready to burn out of existence any unexpected visitor. When he saw Thomas enter his thumb relaxed, but at the sight of his companion it tightened again. A PanAsian! He almost blasted them in sheer reflex before he checked himself. It was possible, barely possible, that Thomas had brought a prisoner to question.

  “Major! Major Ardmore! It’s Thomas.”

  “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, I 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, doc. 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 apound of beefsteak 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 m
uch 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.”