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 seven-league 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, 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.
So he dug into the regulation manual of the deceased paymaster and carefully closed out the accounts of the dead, noting in each case the amounts due each man’s dependents “in lawful money of the United States,” even while wondering despondently if that neat phrase would ever mean anything again. 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 discovered that Jeff Thomas, the cook’s helper, could use a typewriter with facility and had a fair head for figures. 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. Ardmore’s highstrung disposition required someone to talk to. Thomas turned out to be intelligent and passively sympathetic, and he found himself speaking with more and more freedom to the man. It was not in character for the commanding officer to confide in a private, but he felt instinctively that Thomas would not abuse his trust — and he needed nervous release.
Calhoun brought up the matter which forced Ardmore to drop his preoccupation with routine and turn his attention to more difficult matters. Calhoun had called to ask permission to activate Ledbetter’s apparatus, as modified to suit their current hypotheses, but he added another and embarrassing question.
“Major Ardmore, can you give me some idea as to how you intend to make use of the ‘Ledbetter effect’?”
Ardmore did not know; he answered with another question. “Are you near enough to results to make that question urgent? If so, can you give me some idea of what you have discovered so fax?”
“That will be difficult,” Calhoun replied in an academic and faintly patronizing manner, “since I am constrained not to speak in the mathematical language which, of necessity, is the only way of expressing such things — “