Thomas said nothing. At length Ardmore went on.
“All right, all right suppose you are right. I’ve got to have military information. How am I going to get it if I don’t go myself?”
Thomas was a little slow in replying. Finally, he said quietly, “I could try it.”
“You?” Ardmore looked him over and wondered why he had not considered Thomas. Perhaps because there was nothing about the man to suggest his potential ability to handle such a job — that, combined with the fact that he was a private, and one did not assign privates to jobs requiring dangerous independent action. Yet perhaps
“Have you ever done any work of that sort?”
“No, but my experience may be specially adapted in a way to such work.”
“Oh, yes! Scheer told me something about you. You were a tramp, weren’t you, before the army caught up with you?”
“Not a tramp,” Thomas corrected gently, “a hobo.”
“Sorry — what’s the distinction?”
“A tramp is a bum, a parasite, a man that won’t work. A hobo is an itinerant laborer who prefers casual freedom to security. He works for his living, but he won’t be tied down to one environment.”
“Oh, I see. Hm-m-m — yes, and I begin to see why you might be especially well adapted to an intelligence job. I suppose it must require a good deal of adaptability and resourcefulness to stay alive as a hobo. But wait a minute, Thomas — I guess I’ve more or less taken you for granted; I need to know a great deal more about you, if you are to be entrusted with this job. You know, you don’t act like a hobo.”
“How does a hobo act?”
“Eh? Oh, well, skip it. But tell me something about your background. How did you happen to take up hoboing?”
Ardmore realized that he had, for the first time, pierced the man’s natural reticence. Thomas fumbled for an answer, finally replying, “I suppose it was that I did not like being a lawyer.”
“What?”
“Yes. You see, it was like this: I went from the law into social administration. In the course of my work I got an idea that I wanted to write a thesis on migratory labor and decided that in order to understand the subject I would have to experience the conditions under which such people lived.”
“I see. And it was while you were doing your laboratory work, as it were, that the army snagged you. ”
“Oh, no,” Thomas corrected him. “I’ve been on the road more than ten years. I never went back. You see, I found I liked being a hobo.”
The details were rapidly arranged. Thomas wanted nothing in the way of equipment but the clothes he had been wearing when he had stumbled into the Citadel. Ardmore had suggested a bedding roll, but Thomas would have none of it. “It would not be in character,” he explained. “I was never a bindlestiff. Bindlestiffs are dirty, and a self-respecting hobo doesn’t associate with them. All I want is a good meal in my belly and a small amount of money on my person.”
Ardmore’s instructions to him were very general. “Almost anything you hear or see will be data for me,” he told him. “Cover as much territory as you ran, and try to be back here within a week. If you are gone much longer than that, I will assume that you are dead or imprisoned, and will have to try some other plan.
“Keep your eyes open for some means by which we can establish a permanent service of information. I can’t suggest what it is you are to look for in that connection, but keep it in mind. Now as to details: anything and everything about the PanAsians, how they are armed, how they police occupied territory, where they have set up headquarters, particularly their continental headquarters, and, if you can make any sort of estimate, how many of them there are and how they’re distributed. That would keep you busy for a year, at least; just the same, be back in a week. ”
Ardmore showed Thomas how to operate one of the outer doors of the Citadel; two bars of “Yankee Doodle,” breaking off short, and a door appeared in what seemed to be a wall of country rock — simple, and yet foreign to the Asiatic mind. Then he shook hands with him and wished him good luck.