Sixth Column Read Free Page B

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 Òf 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 sevenleague 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,