The Penultimate Truth

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.

As Joseph Adams fitted his eyes to the spool-scanner he thought to himself that they should have been able to _remember_ enough to recognize what they saw on their TV screens to be pure lie.

Before his eyes appeared the tiny, illuminated and clear image of Adolf Hitler, addressing the hired flunkies who constituted the Reichstag of the late 1930s. Der Fuhrer was in a sardonic, jovial, mocking, excited mood. This famous scene--and every Yance-man knew it by heart--was the moment in which Hitler answered the plea from President Roosevelt of the United States that he, Hitler, guarantee the frontiers of a dozen or so small nations of Europe. One by one Adolf Hitler read off the nations comprising this list, his voice rising with each, and with each the hired flunkies jeered in synchronization with their leader's mounting frenzy of glee. The emotionality of it all--der Fuhrer, overcome with titanic amusement at this absurd list (later he was to invade, systematically, virtually every nation named), the roars of the flunkies... Joseph Adams watched, listened, felt inside him a resonance with the roars, a sardonic glee in company with Hitler's-- and at the same time he felt simple, quite childlike wonder that this scene could ever have truly taken place. And it had. This clip, from Episode One of Documentary A, was--crazily enough, considering its fantastic nature--authentic.

Ah, but now came the artistry of the Berlin film maker of 1982. The scene of the Reichstag speech dimmed, and there segued in, clearer and clearer, another scene. That of hungry, empty-eyed Germans during the Depression of the Weimar days, the pre-Hitler days. Unemployed. Bankrupt. Lost. A defeated nation without a future.

The aud-track commentary, the purring but firm voice of the trained actor whom Gottlieb Fischer had hired--Alex Sourberry or some such name--began to lift into being, to superimpose its aural presence as interpretation of the visual. And the visual, now, consisted of an ocean scene. The Royal Navy of Great Britain, as it maintained the blockade into the year following World War One; as it deliberately and successfully starved into permanent stuntedness a nation which had long ago surrendered--and was now utterly helpless.

Adams halted the scanner, sat back, lit a cigarette.

Did he really need to listen to the firm, purring voice of Alexander Sourberry to know the message of Documentary A? Did he have to sit through all twenty-five hour-long episodes and then, when the ordeal was over, turn to the equally long and intricate version B? He knew the message. Alex Sourberry for version A; some East German professional equal of Sourberry for version B. He knew _both_ messages... because, just as there existed two distinct versions, there existed two distinct messages.

Sourberry, at the moment the scanner had been shut off, giving Adams a respite which he thanked god for, had been about to demonstrate a remarkable fact: a connection between two scenes set apart in history by twenty-odd years. The British blockade of 1919 and the concentration camps of the starving, dying skeletons in striped clothes in the year 1943.

It was the British who had brought about Buchenwaid, was Gottlieb Fischer's revised history. Not the Germans. The Germans were the _victims_, in 1943 as much as in 1919. A later scene in Documentary A would show Berliners, in 1944, hunting in the woods surrounding Berlin, searching for nettles to make into soup. The Germans were starving; all continental Europe, all people inside and outside the concentration camps, were starving. Because of the British.

How clear it was, as this theme emerged throughout twenty-five expertly put-together episodes. This was the "definitive" history of World War Two--for the people of Wes-Dem, anyhow.

_Why run the thing?_ Adams asked himself as he sat smoking his cigarette, trembling with muscular and mental weariness. I know what it shows. That Hitler was emotional, flamboyant, moody, and unstable, but of course; it was natural, the film lied. Because he was pure and simply a genius. Like Beethoven. And we all admire Beethoven; you have to forgive a great world figure genius type its eccentricities. And, admittedly, Hitler was at last pushed over the edge, driven into psychotic paranoia... due to the unwillingness of England to understand, to grasp, the looming, _real_ menace--that of Stalinist Russia. The peculiarities of Hitler's personal character (after all, he had been subjected to great and prolonged stress during World War One and the Weimar Depression period, as had all Germans) had misled the rather phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon peoples into imagining that Hitler was "dangerous." Actually--and in episode after episode, Alex Sourberry would purr out this message--the Wes-Dem TV viewer would discover that England, France, Germany and the United States should all have been allies. Against the authentic evil-doer, Josef Stalin, with his megalomaniacal plans for world conquest... proved by the actions of the USSR in the postwar period--a period in which even Churchill had to admit that Soviet Russia was _the_ enemy.

--And had been all along. Communist propagandists, fifth columnists in the Western Democracies, however, had deceived the people, even the governments... even Roosevelt and Churchill, and right up into the postwar world. Take, for instance, Alger Hiss... take the Rosenbergs, who had stolen the secret of The Bomb and given it to Soviet Russia.

Take, for instance, the scene which opened episode four of version A. Advancing the spool, Joseph Adams halted it at this episode and put his eyes to the scanner, this modern technological crystal ball into which one gazed to know--not the future--but the past. And...

Not even the past. Instead, this fake which he now witnessed.

Before his eyes a film sequence, narrated by the maddeningly ubiquitous Alex Sourberry and his oily, skillful murmur. A scene vital to the overall moral of version A which Gottlieb Fischer, backed angelwise by the Wes-Dem military establishment, had wished to drive home--in other words this was the _raison d'être_ of the whole twenty-five hour-long episodes of version A.

The scene enacted in miniature before him showed the meeting of the heads-of-state, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The location: Yalta. Ominous, fateful Yalta.

There they sat, the three world leaders,s in adjoining chairs, to be photographed; this was an historic occasion the magnitude of which was intolerable. And no one alive could afford to forget it, because here--Sourberry's voice purred--the momentous decision was made. You are now seeing it with your own eyes.

_What_ decision?

In Joseph Adams' ears the professional smooth voice whispered, "At this spot, at this moment, the deal was hatched which was to decide the future fate of mankind down unto generations yet unborn."

"Okay," Adams said aloud, startling the harmless Yance-man using the scanner across from him. "Sorry," Adams apologized, and then merely thought, did not speak it aloud, _Come on, Fischer. Let's see the deal. Like they say; don't just tell us; show us. Put up or shut up. Prove the basic contention of this great prolonged "documentary" or get out_.

And he knew, because he had seen it so many times before, that the film producer was going to show it.

"Joe," a woman's voice said, close to him, shattering his taut attention; he sat back, glanced up, found himself confronted by Colleen.

"Wait," he said to her. "Don't say anything. For just one second." Again he put his eyes to the scanner, fervid and frightened, like some poor tanker, he thought, who in his phobic terror has caught--imagines, rather--the Stink of Shrink, the olfactory harbinger of death. But I am not imagining this; Joseph Adams knew. And the horror inside him grew until he could stand not a bit more; and yet he continued to watch, and all the time, Alexander Sourberry murmured and whispered away, and Joseph Adams thought, _Is this how it feels down below, to them? If they get the intimation, the scent, of what it truly is they're seeing? That what is given them is our adaptation of this_--and this petrified him.

Sourberry purred, "A loyal American Secret Serviceman took these remarkable sequences with a telescopic-lens camera disguised as a collar button; that is why these particular moments are a trifle blurred."

And, a trifle blurred, as Sourberry had said, two figures moved together along a rampart. Roosevelt and--Josef Stalin, the latter standing, Roosevelt in a wheelchair with a robe over his lap, pushed by a uniformed servant.

"Special long-range microphonic equipment," Sourberry purred, "in the loyal Secret Serviceman's possession, permitted him to pick up--"

Okay, Joseph Adams thought. It seems fine. Camera the size of a collar button; who in 1982 remembered that no such miniaturized spy gadget existed in 1944? So that gets by unchallenged--got by, when this horrible thing was put on the coax to all Wes-Dem. No one wrote in to the Washington, D.C. government and said, "Dear Sirs: Regarding the 'collar button' camera of the 'loyal Secret Serviceman' at Yalta; this is to inform you that--" No, this hadn't happened; or if it had the letter had quietly been buried... if not the person who had written it.

"What episode are you looking at, Joe?" Colleen asked.

Again he sat back, stopped the spool. "The great scene. Where FDR and Stalin agree to sell out the Western Democracies."

"Oh yes." She nodded, seated herself beside him. "The blurred, long-distance shot. Who could forget that? It's been drummed into us--"

"You realize," he said, "of course, what the flaw in it is."

"We were _taught_ what the flaw was. Brose himself, and since he was alive and Fischer's pupil--"

"Nobody now," Adams said, "makes errors like that. In preparing reading matter. We've learned; we're more expert. Want to watch? Listen?"

"No thanks. I frankly don't care for it."

Adams said, "I don't care for it either. But it fascinates me; it fascinates me in that it got by--and was accepted." Again putting his eyes to the scanner he started the spool up.

On the aud-track the voices of the two blurred figures could be made out. A high background hiss--proof of the long-range aspect of the hidden mike employed by the "loyal Secret Serviceman" --made it a little hard to understand, but not impossible.

Roosevelt and Stalin were, in this version A scene, talking in English; Roosevelt with his Harvard intonations, Stalin in heavy, Slavic-accented, guttural near-grunts.

You therefore could understand Roosevelt better. And what he had to say was quite important, inasmuch as he was saying, candidly, not knowing about the "hidden mike," that he, Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, was--a Communist agent. Under Party discipline. He was selling out the U.S. to his boss Josef Stalin, and his boss was saying, "Yes, comrade. You understand our needs; it is arranged that you will hold back the Allied armies in the West so that our Red Army can penetrate deeply enough into Central Europe, in fact to Berlin to establish Soviet mastery as far as--" And then the guttural, heavy accented voice dimmed as the two world leaders passed out of aud range.

Shutting it off again, Joseph Adams said to Colleen, "Despite the one flaw it was a top-notch job that Gottlieb did, there. The guy who played Roosevelt really looked like Roosevelt. The guy who played Stalin--"

"But the flaw," Colleen reminded him.

"Yes." It was a major one, the worst Fischer had made; in fact the only serious one among all the faked sequences of version A.

Josef Stalin had not known English. And, since Stalin could not speak English, this scene could not have taken place. The crucial scene, just now shown, revealed itself for what it was--and by doing so, revealed the entire "documentary" for what it was. A deliberate, carefully manufactured fraud, constructed for the purpose of getting Germany off the hook in regard to the deeds done, the decision taken, in World War Two. Because in 1982, Germany was once again a world power, and most important, a major shareholder in the community of nations titling itself "The Western Democracies," or more simply, Wes-Dem, the UN having disintegrated during the Latin American war of 1977, leaving in its place a power vacuum into which the Germans had expertly, eagerly rushed.

"I'm sick," Adams said to Colleen as he shakily picked up his cigarette. To think, he thought, that _what we are now_ derives from such crude sleight-of-hand as that scene--Stalin conversing in a language he didn't know.

After a pause Colleen said, "Well, Fischer could have--"

"Easily fixed it up. One, sole, minor interpreter. That's all that was needed. But Fischer was an artist--he liked the idea of them talking tête-a-tête, no intermediary; he felt it would have more dramatic impact." And Fischer had been correct, since the "documentary" had been universally accepted as historically correct, as documenting the "sell-out" at Yalta, the "misunderstood" Adolf Hitler who had really only been trying to save the Western Democracies from the Commies

and even the death camps; even that was explained away. And all it took was a few juxtaposed shots of British warships and starving camp victims, a few entirely faked scenes that simply never had actually occurred, some genuine footage from Wes-Dem military archives... and the soothing voice which tied it all in together. Soothing--but firm.

Neat.

"I don't see," Colleen said presently, "why it upsets you so. Is it because the error is so glaring? It wasn't glaring then, because who in 1982 knew that Stalin couldn't--"

"Do you know," Adams broke in, speaking slowly, carefully, "what the corresponding central hoax is in version B? Have you ever put your finger on it? Because even Brose, in my opinion, never saw into version B as he did version A."

Pondering, she said, "Let's see. In version B, for the Communist world of 1982..." She continued to introspect, frowning, and then she said, "It's been a long time since I scanned any part of B, but--"

Adams said, "Let's start with the operational hypothesis underlying B. That the USSR and Japan are attempting to save civilization. England and the U.S. are secret allies of the Nazis, of Hitler; they brought him to power for the sole purpose of attacking the Eastern countries, of preserving the status quo against the new rising nations of the East. This we know. In World War Two England and the U.S. only _seemed_ to fight Germany; Russia did all the land fighting on the Eastern Front; the Normandy landings--what did they call it? The Second Front?--only took place _after_ Germany had been defeated by Russia; the U.S. and Britain wanted to rush in and greedily grab as much of the spoils--"

"Spoils," Colleen said, "which rightfully belonged to the USSR." She nodded. "But where did Fischer commit a technical error in B? The idea is credible, just as the idea in A is; and the genuine footage in B of the Red Army at Stalingrad--"

"Yes. All real. Authentic and properly convincing. The war really was won at Stalingrad. But--" He clenched his fist, injuring his cigarette; he then carefully dropped it into a nearby ashtray. "I'm not going," he said, "to scan B. Despite what the master monad told me. So I'm failing; I've ceased to grow and that means I'll be overtaken and that'll be it--I knew that last night before you left. I knew it again today when I heard Dave Lantano's speech and realized how much better it was than anything I can do--or will ever do. He's about nineteen. Twenty at the most."

"David is twenty-three," Colleen said.

Glancing up, Adams said, "You've met him?"

"Oh, he's in and out of the Agency; he likes to get back to the hot-spot of his so he can supervise his leadies, see that his villa is going to come out the way he wants it--in my opinion he's anxious to view it now because he knows he probably won't live to see it completed. I like him but he's so strange and enigmatic; a recluse, actually; comes here, feeds his speech to the 'vac, stands around, talks a little, very little, then is gone again. But what's the error in version B, the Pac-Peop version, that you know about and no one else, even Brose, ever noticed in all these years?"

Adams said, "It's in the scene where Hitler makes one of his secret flights to Washington, D.C. during the war to confer with Roosevelt."

"Oh yes. Fischer got the idea from Hess' flight to--"

"The important secret meeting between Roosevelt and Hitler. In May of 1942. Where Roosevelt--with Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prinz Batten von Battenberg, representing Britain--informs Hitler that the Allies will hold back the Normandy landings for at least a year so that Germany can use all her armies on the Eastern Front to defeat Russia. And tells him, too, that the plot-points of all supply convoys carrying war material to Russian northern ports will be regularly made known to the German Intelligence under Admiral Canaris, so that Nazi subs can sink them wolf-packwise. You remember the blurred distance shots that a 'Party comrade employed at the White House' made of that meeting... Hitler and Roosevelt seated together on the sofa, and Roosevelt assuring Hitler that he had nothing to worry about; the Allied bombing will be done at night so as to miss their targets, all information from Russia as to their military plans, troop dispositions and so forth will be available to Berlin within twenty-four hours of their entering U.K. and U.S. hands, via Spain."

"They converse in German," Colleen said. "Right?"

"No," he said angrily.

"In _Russian?_ So the Pac-Peop audience can understand it? It's been so long since I--"

Adams said harshly. "It's the arrival of Hitler at the 'secret U.S. Air Force base near Washington, D.C.' that the technical error occurs, and it's incredible that no one's noticed it. First of all, in World War Two there was no U.S. Air Force."

She stared at him.

"It was still called the Army Air Corps," Adams said. "Not yet a separate branch of the military. But that's nothing; that could be a minor error in the aud commentary--a mere nothing. Look." He swiftly removed the spool from the scanner, picked up the spool of version B; eyes to the scanner he deftly ran the spool, on and on, until he arrived at the scene, in episode sixteen, that he wanted; he then sat back and motioned her to follow the scene.

For a time Colleen was silent as she watched. "Here comes his jet now," she murmured. "In for the landing, late at night, at the--yes, you're right; the commentator is calling it a 'U.S. Air Force base,' and I dimly recall--"

"His _jet_," Adams grated.

Halting the spool, Colleen looked up at him.

"Hitler lands secretly in the U.S. in May of 1942," Adams said, "in a Boeing 707 fan-jet. Those didn't come into use until the mid-i 960s. There was only one jet plane extant during World War Two, a German-made fighter, and it never saw service."

"Oh my god," Colleen said, open-mouthed.

"But it worked," Adams said. "People in Pac-Peop believed it--by 1982 they were so used to seeing jets that they forgot that in '42 there were only what they called--" He couldn't remember.

"Prop planes," Colleen said.

"I think I can see," Adams said, "why the master monad of the archives referred me back to these, to the original source. All the way back to the work of Gottlieb Fischer, the first Yance-man; the man in fact who dreamed up the idea of Talbot Yancy." But who, unfortunately, had not lived to see the simulacrum actually built--and brought by the two power blocs into use. "The monad wanted me to see," he said, "that my anxiety about the quality of my work is undue. Excessive, because our work, our collective, historic efforts from the very beginning, starting with these two documentaries, _has been marred_. When you and I go out to fake things you and I and all the rest of us are just plain bound, at some place, sooner or later, to slip up."

"Yes." She nodded. "We're just mortals. We're not perfect."

"But the strange thing is," Adams said, "I didn't have that feeling about David Lantano. I had a fear reaction and now I see why. He's different. He is--or could be--perfect. Not like us. So what does that make him? Not a human?"

"God knows," Colleen said, nervously.

"Don't say that," he said. "For some reason I don't care to think about God in connection with David Lantano." Maybe, he thought, because the man is so close to the forces of death, living there as he does in that hot-spot, seared day after day by the radiation. As if, although it's burning him, killing him, he's imbibing back some mystical power.

He was again aware of his own mortality, the delicate stability of forces that, from the bio-chemical level on up, permitted a human being to exist.

But David Lantano had learned to live at the heart of those forces, and even to draw on them. How had he done this? Lantano, he thought, has a right to draw on something beyond our range; I'd just like to know how he manages it; I'd like to do it, too.

To Colleen he said, "I've learned the thing from these spoils of Fischer's two documentaries of 1982 that I'm supposed to learn, so I guess I can knock off." He rose, picked up the spools. "What I learned was this. Earlier today I saw and heard a speech by a twenty-two-year-old young new Yance-man and it scared me, and then I scanned these two versions of Fischer's 1982 documentary, and what I learned was this."

She waited, expectantly, with feminine, earth-mother patience.

"Even Fischer," he said, "the greatest of us all, couldn't have competed with David Lantano." This was what he had learned, certainly. But he was--at least right now--not sure exactly what it meant.

He had a feeling about it, however. One of these days he and the Yance-man class as a whole, including Brose himself, were going to find out.