Sixth column heinlein ebook

Baen's Bar. About Baen. Free Library. Monthly Bundles. Please login or sign up for a new account. Remember me not recommended for public devices. I forgot my password Password Reset. Sign up for a new account. Helena St. Lucia St. Martin St. Some of the techniques listed in Sixth Column may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to science fiction, fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. The totalitarian East has triumphed in a massive invasion and the United States has fallen to a dictatorial superpower bent on total domination.

That power is consolidating its grip via concentration camps, police state tactics, and a total monopoly upon the very thoughts of the conquered populace. A tiny enclave of scientists and soldiers survives, unbeknownst to America's new rulers.

It's six against six million—but those six happen to include a scientific genius, a master of subterfuge and disguise who learned his trade as a lawyer-turned-hobo, and a tough-minded commander who knows how to get the best out of his rag-tag assortment of American discontents, wily operators, and geniuses. It's going to take technological savvy and a propaganda campaign that would leave Madison Avenue aghast, but the U.

The situation had changed; perhaps he should not deliver it at all. He was to operate independently and prosecute the war against the invader according to his own judgment. This concentration of brain power in the Citadel was about the only remaining possible military asset.

Calhoun nodded. A defunct government sends orders to a defunct laboratory. Zero plus zero equals zero. What do you propose to do with them? What the hell is there to do? Six men against four hundred million. This is all the United States there is left. Ardmore wet his lips. The order was to take charge, and prosecute the war! He measured Calhoun before answering. Under the changed situation, in accordance with the articles of war, as senior line officer present I am assuming command of this detachment of the United States army!

It hung in the balance for twenty heartbeats. At last Calhoun stood up and attempted to square his stooped shoulders. What are your orders? Stall, brother, stall! Colonel, will you oblige me by having the remaining personnel gather around — say around that big table?

That will be convenient. Put him in the corridor for now. The commotion of getting one of the ubiquitous corpses out of the way and getting the living settled around a table broke the air of unreality and brought things into focus. Ardmore felt more self-confidence when he turned again to Calhoun.

I want to know what they do and something about them, as well as their names. He had expected to find, hidden here safely and secretly away under an unmarked spot in the Rocky Mountains, the most magnificent aggregation of research brains ever gathered together for one purpose.

Even in the face of complete military disaster to the regular forces of the United States, there remained a reasonable outside chance that two hundred-odd keen scientific brains, secreted in a hide-away whose very existence was unsuspected by the enemy and equipped with every modern facility for research, might conceivably perfect and operate some weapon that would eventually drive out the PanAsians.

For that purpose he had been sent to tell the commanding general that he was on his own, no longer responsible to higher authority. But what could half a dozen men do in any case? For it was a scant half a dozen. There was Dr. Lowell Calhoun, mathematician, jerked out of university life by the exigencies of war and called a colonel.

Randall Brooks, biologist and bio-chemist, with a special commission of major. Ardmore liked his looks; he was quiet and mild, but gave the impression of an untroubled strength of character superior to that of a more extroverted man-he would do, and his advice would be useful. His field, it developed, was radiation, and the attendant branches of physics too esoteric for a layman to understand. Ardmore had not the slightest way of judging whether or not he was any good in his specialty.

He might be a genius, but his appearance did not encourage the idea. No other scientist remained. There were three enlisted men: Herman Scheer, technical sergeant. He had been a mechanic, a die maker, a tool maker. When the army picked him up he had been making precision instruments for the laboratories of the Edison Trust. His brown, square hands and lean fingers backed up his account of himself. His lined, set face and heavy jaw muscles made Ardmore judge him to be a good man to have at his back in a tight place.

He would do. Total war had turned him from his profession as an artist and interior decorator to his one other talent, cooking. Ardmore was unable to see how he could fit into the job, except, of course, that somebody had to cook. He knew what he had to accomplish, some sort of a shot in the arm that would restore the morale of this badly demoralized group, some of the old hokum that men live by. He believed in hokum, being a publicity man by trade and an army man only by necessity.

That brought to mind another worry — should he let them know that he was no more a professional than they, even though he happened to hold a line commission? No, that would not be very bright; they needed just now to regard him with the faith that the layman usually holds for the professional. Thomas was the end of the list: Calhoun had stopped talking. Then he had it fortunately it would take only a short build-up.

I want to remind you that we derive our obligations not from. That Constitution is neither captured nor destroyed — it cannot, for it is not a piece of paper, but the. Only the American people can release us from it. Was he right? He turned to Calhoun.

It was a chanted chorus that echoed through the nearly empty room. Ardmore was surprised to discover that the show he had staged brought tears to his own cheeks.

Maybe there was more to it than he had thought. You are second in command, but I will carry out the duties of executive officer myself in order to leave you free to pursue your scientific inquiries.

Major Brooks and Captain Wilkie are assigned to you. If he does not need all of your service, I will assign additional duties later. You are also mess sergeant, mess officer, supply officer — in fact, you are the whole commissary department. Bring me a report later today estimating the number of rations available and the condition of perishables. Thomas works for you, but is subject to call by any member of the scientific staff any time they want him.

Put them in an unused room and hermetically seal it. Scheer will show you how. When did you have lunch? Graham, serve coffee and sandwiches here in twenty minutes. As they left, Ardmore turned back to Calhoun. I still want to find out what happened here! The other two scientists and Scheer hesitated; he picked them up with a nod, and the little party filed out.

Ardmore took his eyes from it and tried to make out the meaning of the set-up apparatus. It looked simple, but called no familiar picture to mind. Ledbetter had just closed this switch. It was open now, a self-opening, spring-loaded type.

When my head cleared, I saw that Ledbetter had fallen and went to him, but there was nothing that I could do for him. He was dead — without a mark on him. It killed my chief. Ardmore frowned and pulled a chair out from the wall. As he started to sit down there was a scurrying sound, a small gray shape flashed across the floor and out the open door. A rat, he thought, and dismissed the matter. But Dr. The thought flashed through his mind that the strain of events had finally been too much for the mild little biologist.

They had less than a minute to wait in order to find out. Brooks returned as precipitately as he had left. The exertion caused him to pant and interfered with articulation. None of the animals in the biological laboratory was hurt!

An action that kills a couple of hundred men through rock walls and metal, with no fuss and no excitement, yet passes by mice and the like. Over the coffee and sandwiches he pried further into the situation. If Einstein were alive, they might have talked as equals, but with the rest of us he discussed only the portions he wanted assistance on, or details he wished to turn over to assistants. Are you familiar with general field theory? You see, there are three types of energy fields known to exist in space: electric, magnetic, and gravitic or gravitational.

Light, X-rays, all such radiations, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Theory indicates the possibility of analogous spectra between magnetic and gravitic, between electric and gravitic, and finally, a three-phase type between electric-magnetio-gravitic fields.

Each type would constitute a complete new spectrum, a total of three new fields of learning. But we have no instruments with which to detect such spectra, nor do we even know that such spectra exist.

I had supposed that this laboratory was engaged in the single purpose of finding a military weapon to combat the vortex beams and A-bomb rockets of the PanAsians. I am a bit surprised to find the man whom you seem to regard as having been your ace researcher engaged in an attempt to discover things that he was not sure existed and whose properties were totally unknown.

Calhoun did not answer; he simply looked supercilious and smiled irritatingly. Ardmore felt put in the wrong and was conscious of a warm flush spreading up toward his face. I know that. Ledbetter had originally been engaged in a search for a means of setting up tractor and pressor beams — that would be in the magneto-gravitic spectrum — but the last couple of weeks he appeared to be in a condition of intense excitement and radically changed the direction of his experimentation.

He was close-mouthed; I got no more than a few hints from the transformations and developments which he had me perform for him. We should be able to follow his work and perhaps infer his hypotheses. Young Wilkie, who was seated beside Calhoun, bent toward him. If you had looked you would have seen them.

Wilkie ignored the thrust; he was already eating up the symbols set down in the opened book. As I understand it, your immediate task is to catch up with Dr. Ledbetter and to discover what it is that his apparatus does — without killing yourselves in the process.

Is that right? Brooks attached to the matter of the rats and mice. Wilkie was knocked out and very nearly died; Dr. He awaited a reply anxiously, being subconsciously afraid that the scientists would consider his remarks silly, or obvious. Calhoun started to reply, but Dr. Brooks cut in ahead of him. Dear me, I must be confused today. That establishes a gradient, an ordered relationship in the effect of the unknown action. Not while I know it! He cut it short.

But remember — no chances to your lives without notifying me. Ardmore went to bed that night from sheer sense 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.

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.

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. We had had how many stock-piled? A thousand, he had heard. Military intelligence had won the war for them, not secret weapons.

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. Suppose they did dig up a really powerful and new weapon? What was that old crack of Archimedes?

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.

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, records, pay accounts, inventories, and the like.

In his heart he felt it to be waste motion, senseless, yet as a publicity man, he was enough of a jackleg psychologist to realize intuitively that man is a creature that lives by symbols. At the moment these symbols of government were all important.

But he did it, and he assigned minor administrative jobs to each of the others in order that they might realize indirectly that the customs were being maintained. It was too much clerical work for one man to keep up. He impressed him into the job. It threw more work on Graham, who complained, but that was good for him, he thought — a dog needs fleas.

He wanted every member of his command to go to bed tired every night. Thomas served another purpose.