The Penultimate Truth Read online

  "I presume," Adams said, "that you get the hell out of Cheyenne as often as is legal." Twelve out of every twenty-four hours, according to Recon Dis-In Council law, had to be spent within the new demesne area.

  "I come here. I work. As you see me now." Lantano returned to the keyboard of Megavac 6-V; Adams trailed after him. "As you say, Adams, I have a job to do. I expect to live to perform it." Once more Lantano seated himself at the keyboard, facing his copy.

  "Well, at least it hasn't impaired your mind," Adams said.

  Smiling, Lantano said, "Thanks."

  For one hour Joseph Adams stood by while Lantano fed his speech to Megavac 6-V, and when he had read it all and then, as it emerged from the 'vac to the sim, had heard it actually delivered by the dignified, gray-haired father-figure Talbot Yancy himself, he felt, overwhelmingly, the futility of his own speech. The dreadful contrast.

  What he himself gripped in his briefcase was beginner's prattle. He felt like slinking away. Into oblivion.

  Where does a barely grown radiation-burned unestablished new Yance-man get such ideas? Adams asked himself. And the ability to express them. And—the knowhow as to exactly what the 'vac's treatment of the copy would result in . . . how it would ultimately emerge as spoken by the sim before the cameras. Didn't it take years to learn this? It had taken him years to learn what he knew. To write a sentence and, after examining it, know approximately—that is, sufficiently accurately—how it would in its terminal stage sound, be. What, in other words, would appear on the TV screens of the millions of tankers subsurface, who viewed and believed, were taken in day after day by what was fatuously called reading matter.

  A polite term, Adams reflected, for a substance lacking substance. But this wasn't strictly true; as for instance young Dave Lantano's speech here and now. It preserved the essential illusion—in fact, Adams had grudgingly to admit—the illusion of Yancy's reality was heightened. But—

  "Your speech," he said to Lantano, "isn't just clever. It has real wisdom. Like one of Cicero's orations." Proudly, he traced his own work to such eminent ancient sources as Cicero and Seneca, to speeches in Shakespeare's history plays, and to Tom Paine.

  As he stuffed the pages of his copy back into his own briefcase, David Lantano said soberly, "I appreciate your comment, Adams; especially coming from you it means something."

  "Why me?"

  "Because," Lantano said, thoughtfully, "I know that, despite your limitations—" He shot Adams a keen, quick glance, then. "—you have sincerely tried. I think you know what I mean. There are things, easyway things and bad things, that you've scrupulously avoided. I've watched you for several years and I've seen the difference between you and most of the others. Brose knows the difference, too, and despite the fact that he axes rather than coaxes much of your stuff, he respects you. He has to."

  "Well," Adams said.

  "Has it frightened you, Adams, to see your best work axed at the Geneva level? After getting that far? Do you find it merely frustrating or—" David Lantano scrutinized him. "Yes, it does frighten you."

  After a pause Adams said, "I get scared. But at night, when I'm not here at the Agency but alone with my leadies in my villa. Not when I'm actually writing or feeding it to the 'vac or watching the sim itself . . . not here where—" He gestured. "It's busy. But—always whenever I'm alone." He was silent, then, wondering how he had managed to confide his deepest proclivities to this young stranger. Normally, one took care as to what one revealed about oneself to a fellow Yance-man; any personal info could be used against one, in the incessant competition to be the speech writer for Yancy; in effect, the Yancy itself.

  "Here at the Agency," Dave Lantano said somberly, "in New York, we may compete against each other, but underneath we're a group. A corporate body. What the Christians used to call a congregation . . . a very meaningful special term. But then each of us, at six p.m., goes off in his flapple. Crosses an empty countryside to a castle inhabited by mental constructs that move and talk but are—" He gestured. "Cold, Adams; the leadies, even the advanced types who dominate the Council; they are cold. Get a couple of your retinue, all the leadies of your household staff that you can cram into your flapple with you, and go visit. Every night."

  "I know that the smart Yance-men do that," Adams said. "Are never at home. I've tried; I've arrived at my demesne, eaten dinner and then gone right out again." He thought of Colleen, and then, when he had lived, his neighbor Lane. "I have a girl," he said deftly. "A Yance-man or I suppose one would have to say a Yance-woman; we visit and talk. But the big front window of the library of my demesne—"

  "Don't look out over that fog and coastline of rocks," David Lantano said. "That stretches south of San Francisco a hundred miles; one of the most bleak on Earth."

  Blinking, Adams wondered how Lantano had known so exactly what he meant, his fear of the fog; it was as if Lantano had read his deepest mind.

  "I'd like to see your speech, now," Lantano said. "Since you've given mine about as thorough a study as possible—and, for you, Adams, that's rather thorough." He glanced toward Adams' briefcase, especially alert, now.

  Adams said, "No." He couldn't show his speech, not after the strong, fresh declaration he had just now seen and heard.

  The reading matter concocted by David Lantano which had emerged from the Yancy-simulacrum so effectively, dealt with deprivation. Hit at the heart of the tankers' main problem-area . . . at least as he understood it from the reports of the pol-coms in the tanks which the Estes Park Government, the apparatus there, received—received and made accessible as a feedback to all Yance-men, in particular the speech writers. Their sole source of knowledge as to how well they were getting their reading matter through.

  Reports from the pol-coms on this speech of Lantano's, when it had been coaxed, would be interesting. It would take at least a month, but Adams made a note of it, noted the official code-designation of the speech, and promised himself to be alert for the feedback responses as they emerged from the ant tanks all over the world . . . Wes-Dem, anyhow, and possibly, if the response was good enough, the Soviet authorities would take the top-copy of the spooi from Megavac 6-V which contained the speech, give it to their own 'vac in Moscow to program their own sim . . . and, in addition, Brose in Geneva, if he wished, could sequester the spool, the original, not the top-copy, and decree it officially and formally to be primary source-material from which Yance-men the world over were mandatorily to draw on for later reading matter. Lantano's speech, if it were as good as Adams thought it to be, might become one of those few rare "eternal" declarations, incorporated in permanent policy. What an honor. And the guy was so damn young.

  "How can you face it," Adams asked the dark young new Yanceman, who did not even have a demesne, yet, who lived in a lethal hot-spot by night, dying, being scorched, suffering, but still doing this superb job, "how can you openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are systematically deprived of what they're entitled to? You actually said it in your speech." He remembered Lantano's exact words as they had issued from the firm-jawed mouth of the Yancy. What you have, Talbot Yancy, the synthetic and in a sense actually nonexistent Protector, told the tankers—would be telling them in a couple of weeks, when the tape had passed Geneva's scrutiny as of course it would—is not enough. Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, born brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. Only here, in this day and age, as the speech had just pointed out, they had been born onto the surface of a world and now that surface with its air and sunlight and hills, its oceans, its streams, its colors and textures, its very smells, had been swiped from them and they were left with tin-can submarine—figuratively—dwelling boxes in which they were squeezed, under a false light, to breathe repurified stale air, to listen to wired obligatory music and sit daylong at work-benches making leadies for a purpose which—but even Lantano could not go on here. Could not say, for a purpose
you don't know. For each of us here above to augment our retinues with, our entourages which wait on us, follow us, dig for us, build, scrape and bow . . . you've made us barons in baronial castles, and you are the Nibelungen, the dwarves, in the mines; you labor for us. And we give back—reading matter. No, the speech hadn't said that—how could it? But it had admitted the truth, that the tankers were entitled to something they did not have; they were the victims of robbers. Theft had been committed against all the millions of them, and there had been no moral or legal remedy all these years.

  "My fellow Americans," the Talbot Yancy simulacrum had said gravely in its stern, stoic, military, leadership, fatherly voice (Adams would never forget this moment of the speech) "there is a certain ancient Christian idea, which you may know, that life on Earth, or in your instance, beneath Earth, is a transition. An episode between a life that came before and an eternal, other-kind-of-life to follow. Once a pagan king in the British Isles was converted to Christianity by the image of this life being the short flight of a nocturnal bird which has flown in through one window of a warm and lighted dining hall of a castle, for a moment passed above a scene of motion and talk, of tangible fellow-life; the comfort of being within a place inhabited by others. And then the bird in its flight has gone on out of the lighted dining hall, out of the castle once more, through a second window. Into the empty, black, unending night on the far side. And it will never see that lit-up, warm hail of murmur and motion and fellow-life again. And—" And here the Yancy, in all its pomp and dignity, the authority of its words that reached so many, many human beings in so many anywhere in the world tanks, had said, "—you, my fellow Americans in subsurface shelters, you have not got even this moment to cling to. To remember or anticipate or enjoy, this short flight through the lighted hall. Brief as it is, you are entitled to it, and yet, because of a terrible madness fifteen years ago, a hell-night, you are doomed; you are paying every day for the insanity that drove you from the surface exactly as the whips of the furies drove our two grandparents from the original garden eons ago. And this is not right. Somehow, one day, I assure you, the alienation will end. The abridgment of your reality, the deprivation of your rightful life—with the swiftness said to accompany the last trump's first sound, this terrible calamity, this inequity will be abolished. When it comes it will not be gradual. It will hurl you all, expel you, even if you resist it, back to your own land that is waiting for you above, awaiting your claim. My fellow Americans, your claim is staked and we guard it; we are the securing agents only for the present. But everything up here will disappear and you will come back. And even the memory, even the idea of us who are up here now, will forever vanish." And the Yancy simulacrum had finished, "And you will not be able to curse us because you will not even recall that we existed."

  God, Adams thought. And this man wants to see my speech.

  Seeing his reluctance, David Lantano said quietly, "But I've watched you, Adams. You can take some credit."

  "Damn little," Adams said. "You know, all I've ever tried to do, and it was right, but just not enough—I tried to assuage their doubts. As to the necessity of their situation. But you—my good god, you've actually called it not merely a necessity that they have to live down there but an unjust, temporary, evil curse. There's a big difference between my using the Yancy sim to persuade them that they have to go on because it's even worse up here on the surface, it's germs and radioactivity and death, and what you've done; you've given them a solemn promise—you made a compact with them, gave them your word—Yancy's word—that someday it would all be justified."

  "Well," Lantano said mildly, "the Bible does say, 'It is God Who shall justify.' Or some such utterance; I forget exactly." He looked tired, more so even than Lindblom had; they were all tired, all of their class. What a great burden, Adams thought, the luxury of this way we live. Since no one makes us suffer we have elected to volunteer. He saw this on Lantano's face, as he had seen it, or something like it, on Verne Lindblom's. But not on Brose's, he thought suddenly. The man with the most power and responsibility feels the least—if he feels any—weight.

  No wonder they all trembled; no wonder their nights were bad. They served—and knew it—a bad master.

  CHAPTER 9

  His speech still—it seemed eternally—in his briefcase, undisclosed to David Lantano and never fed to Megavac 6-V, Joseph Adams made his way by horizontal express belt from the building at 580 Fifth Avenue to the Agency's titanic repository of reference material, its official archives of every known datum of knowledge from before the war retained and fixed for perpetuity and of course instantly available to the elite, such as himself, whenever needed.

  He needed it—some fragment of it—now.

  At the great central station he lined up, and when he found himself facing the combination type XXXV leady and Megavac 2-B which acted as ruling monad of the labyrinthine organism of spool upon spool of microtape—whole twenty-six volume reference books reduced to the size of a yo-yo, and merely a yo-yo's shape and width and weight—he said, rather plaintively, it seemed to him as he heard himself speak, "Um, I'm sort of confused. I'm not looking for any one particular source, as for instance Lucretius' De Rerum Natura or Pascal's Provincial Letters or Kafka's The Castle." Those had been instances of his past: sources which had molded him along with the eternal John Donne and Cicero and Seneca and Shakespeare et al.

  "Your ident-key, please," the ruling monad of the archives buzzed.

  He slid his key into the slot; it registered, and now the ruling monad, after consulting its memory bank, knew and remembered every source item he had ever utilized, and in what sequence; it comprehended the entire pattern of his formal knowledge. From the archives' standpoint, it now knew him without limit, and so it could declare—or so he hoped—the next point on the graph of his growing, organic, mentationlife. The historic development of him as a knowing entity.

  God knew he didn't have any notion of what the next point on the graph would be; David Lantano's reading matter had completely knocked the slats from under him and he wobbled in a horrid daze—crisis, for the last and critical time, perhaps, in his professional career. He faced, at least potentially, what all speech writers for the Talbot Yancy sim feared: the cessation of their powers. The drying-up of their ability to program the 'vac, in fact to program anything at all.

  The ruling monad of the Agency's official archives clicked a few times, as if gnashing its electronic gearteeth, and then it said, "Mr. Adams, do not be alarmed at this."

  "Okay," he said, thoroughly alarmed already. Behind him those in line, his fellow Yance-men, waited impatiently. "Let's have it," he said.

  The ruling monad said, "You are respectfully referred back to Source One. The two documentaries of 1982, both versions, A and B; with no criticism intended you will, if you step to the counter directly to your right, be handed the spools of Gottlieb Fischer's original work."

  The bottom, the support and structure, the form itself, of Joseph Adams' world, fell out. And, as he made his way to the counter to his right, to receive the spools, he died inside, and died in great pain, deprived of the fundamental metabolic rhythm of existence.

  Because if he didn't yet understand Gottlieb Fischer's two documentaries of 1982, he didn't understand anything.

  For the fabric of Yancy, what he was and how he had come into being—and hence their existence, the hive of Yancy-men such as himself and Verne Lindblom and Lantano, even horrible, powerful old Brose himself—all this rested on documentaries A and B. A, which had been for Wes-Dem; B, produced for Pac-Peop. Beyond these, one could not go.

  He had been thrown back years. To the inception of his professional career as a Yance-man. And if it could happen to him the entire edifice could totter; he felt the world he knew melt under his feet.

  CHAPTER 10

  Accepting the spools he sightlessly made his way to a vacant table and scanner, seated himself—and then realized that somewhere along the line he had set down his briefcase
and not picked it up—had gone on without it; in other words, deliberately, and for good reason, thoroughly lost and parted company forever with his agonized-over, handwrought speech of last night.

  This proved his thesis. He was in real trouble.

  Which, of the two documentaries, he asked himself, must I endure first?

  He honestly did not know. At last, more or less aimlessly, he picked Documentary A. Since after all he himself was a Wes-Dem Yance-man. Documentary A, which had been the first of Gottlieb Fischer's two efforts, had always appealed to him more. Because if it could be said that there were any truth to either of them, it lay perhaps here in the A version. Buried, however, under a refuse heap of manufactured fraud so vast as to constitute—and this was the factor which made both documentaries the primal, venerated source for all Yancy-men—an anomaly.

  For sheer "the big lie" crust, Gottlieb Fischer had long ago out-classed them all. No one living or who would ever be born, could possibly, with a straight face, tell the yarns of those innocent, halcyon days. The West German film maker Gottlieb Fischer, inheritor of UFA, the older Reichs film trust which had in the 1930s been so deeply interwoven with Dr. Goebbels' office—that really superb, unique fabricator of the convincingly visual had gotten things rolling not with a whimper but with a goddam terrible, awesome bang. But of course Fischer had possessed great resources. Both military establishments, those of Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop, had provided him with financial and spiritual assistance—as well as the fabulous film clips of World War Two which each establishment held in its "classified" film libraries.

  The twin documentaries, contrived so as to be released simultaneously, had dealt with World War Two, which, for many people in 1982, lay clearly within memory, it having ended only thirty-seven years before the release of the documentaries. A G.I. of that war who had been twenty in 1945 would, when he sat before his TV set in his living room in Boise, Idaho and saw Episode One (of twenty-five parts) of Documentary A, would have been only fifty-seven years old.