Sixth Column Read Online Free PDF

fire was concealed by a jury-rigged oil-can stove,
    and shielded from chance observation.
    He slipped into the circle and sat down without comment, as custom
    required, and waited for them to look him over.
    Presently a voice said plaintively: "It's Gentleman Jeff. Cripes, Jeff, you
    gave me a turn. I thought you was a flatface. Whatcha been doin' with
    yourself, Jeff?"
    "Oh, one thing and another. On the dodge."
    "Who isn't these days?" the voice returned. "Everywhere you try, those
    slant-eyes-" He broke into a string of attributions concerning the progenitors
    and personal habits of the PanAsians about which he could not possibly have
    had positive knowledge.
    "Stow it, Moe," another voice commanded. "Tell us the news, Jeff."
    "Sorry," Thomas refused affably, "but I've been up in the hills, kinda
    keeping out of the army and doing a little fishing."
    "You should have stayed there. Things are bad everywhere. Nobody
    dares give an unregistered man a day's work and it takes everything you've
    got just to keep out of the labor camps. It makes the big Red hunt look like a
    picnic."
    "Tell me about the labor camps," Thomas suggested. "I might get hungry
    enough, to try one for a while." .
    "You don't know. Nobody could get that hungry." The voice paused, as if
    the owner were turning the unpleasant subject over in his mind. "Did you
    know the Seattle Kid?"
    "Seem to recall. Little squint-eyed guy, handy with his hands?"
    "That's him. Well, he was in one, maybe a week, and got out. Couldn't
    tell us how; his mind was gone. I saw him the night he died. His body was a
    mass of sores, blood poisoning, I guess." He paused then added reflectively:
    "The smell was pretty bad."
    Thomas wanted to drop the subject but he needed to know more. "Who
    gets sent to these camps?"
    "Any man that isn't already working at an approved job. Boys from
    fourteen on up. All that was left alive of the army after we folded up. Anybody
    that's caught without a registration card."
    "That ain't the half of it," added Moe. "You should see what they do with
    unassigned women. Why, a woman was telling me just the other day-a nice
    old gel; gimme a handout. She was telling me about her niece used to be a
    schoolteacher, and the flatfaces don't want any American schools or
    teachers. When they registered her they-"
    "Shut up, Moe. You talk too much."
    It was disconnected, fragmentary, the more so as he was rarely able to
    ask direct questions concerning the things he really wanted to know.
    Nevertheless he gradually built up a picture of a people being systematically
    and thoroughly enslaved, a picture of a nation as helpless as a man
    completely paralyzed, its defenses destroyed, its communications entirely in
    the hands of the invaders.
    Everywhere he found boiling resentment, a fierce willingness to fight
    against the tyranny, but it was undirected, uncoordinated, and, in any modern
    sense, unarmed. Sporadic rebellion was as futile as the scurrying of ants
    whose hill has been violated. PanAsians could be killed, yes, and there were
    men willing to shoot on sight, even in the face of the certainty of their own
    deaths. But their hands were bound by the greater certainty of brutal multiple
    retaliation against their own kind. As with the Jews in Germany before the
    final blackout in Europe, bravery was not enough, for one act of violence
    against the tyrants would be paid for by other men, women, and children at
    unspeakable compound interest.
    Even more distressing than the miseries he saw and heard about were
    the reports of the planned elimination of the American culture as such. The
    schools were closed. No word might be printed in English. There was a
    suggestion of a time, one generation away, when English would be an
    illiterate language, used orally alone by helpless peons who would never be
    able to revolt for sheer lack of a means of communication on any wide scale.
    It was impossible to form any rational estimate of the numbers of Asiatics
    now in