The Penultimate Truth

5

Over green countryside, the fields, the meadows, the open world of North American forests with occasional clusters of buildings, demesnes at odd, unexpected locations, Joseph Adams flew by flapple from his own demesne on the Pacific where he was dominus to the Agency in New York City, where he was one Yance-man among many. His work day, the longed-for and at last achieved Monday, had come.

Beside him on the seat lay a leather briefcase, initialed JWA in gold, which contained his handwritten speech. Behind him, crowded together in the rear seat, four leadies from his personal entourage.

Meanwhile, by vidphone, he discussed biz with his associate from the Agency, Verne Lindblom. Verne, not an idea man, not a user of words but an artist in the visual sense, was in a better position than Joseph Adams to know exactly what their superior Ernest Eisenbludt in Moscow had in mind scenewise, was up to at the studio.

"It's San Francisco next," Lindbiom said. "I'm building it now."

"What scale?" Adams asked.

"No scale,"

"_Life-size?_" Adams was incredulous. "Brose has okayed it? This isn't another of Eisenbludt's hare-brained storms of creative--"

"Just a segment. Nob Hill and overlooking the bay. Should take about a month to construct; there's no rush. Hell, they just ran that Detroit sequence last night." Lindblom sounded relaxed. And, as a master craftsman, he could afford to be. Idea men were one-fourth poscred a dozen, but the actual fabricators--they were a closed guild which even Brose, with all his agents, couldn't crack. They were like the red-stained-glass makers of France in the Thirteenth century; if they perished their skills perished with them.

"Want to hear my new speech?"

"God no," Lindblom said genially.

"It's hand-done." Adams spoke with humility. "I kicked out that gadget; it was getting me into a rut."

"Listen," Lindblom said, all of a sudden serious. "I heard a rumor. You're going to be pulled off speeches and put onto a special project. Don't ask me what; my source didn't know." He added, "A Footeman told me."

"Hmm." He tried to look calm, to show poise. But inside he felt queasy. Undoubtedly--since it took priority over his regular job--this emanated from Brose's bureau. And there was something about Brose and his special projects that he did not like. Although just what .

"It's something you might enjoy," Lindblom said. "Has to do with archeology."

Adams grinned. "I get it. Soviet missiles are going to destruct Carthage."

"And you're going to program Hector and Priam and all those fellas. Get out your Sophocles. Your pony or cribsheet or whatever."

"'My friends,'" Adams intoned in solemn parody, "'I have grave news for you, but we shall overcome. The new Soviet ICBM Hatcheck Girl A-3 missile, with a C-warhead, has strewn radioactive common table salt over an area surrounding Carthage fifty square miles wide, but this only goes to show--' " He paused. "What did Carthage produce, autofac-wise? Vases?" Anyhow that was Lindblom's job. The display of postcards, scanned by the multifax lens-system of the TV cameras at Eisenbludt' s mammoth, intricate--in fact endlessly prop-filled--studios in Moscow. " 'This, my good people and friends, is all that remains, but I am informed by General Holt that our own strike, utilizing our newly developed offensive terror weapon, the Polyphemus X-B peashooter, has decimated the entire war fleet of Athens, and with god's help we shall--'"

"You know," Lindblom said meditatively, from the tiny speaker of the flapple's vidset. "You'd feel damn funny if one of Brose's people were monitoring this."

Below, a wide river like wet silver wiggled from north to south, and Joseph Adams leaned out to view the Mississippi and acknowledge its beauty. No reconcrews had accomplished this; what glistened in the morning sun was an element of the old creation. The original world which did not need to be recreated, reconned, because it had never departed. This sight, like that of the Pacific, always sobered him, because it meant that something had proved stronger; something had escaped.

"Let him monitor," Adams said, filled with vigor; he drew strength from the wavering silver line below--strength enough to ring off, cut the switch of the vidset. Just in case Brose was monitoring.

And then, beyond the Mississippi, he saw a manmade focus of upright, hard structures, and these, too, gave him a funny feeling. Because these were the Ozymandias-who-he? great conapt dwellings erected by that busy builder, Louis Runcible. That one-man ant army that, in its marches, did not gnaw down with its mandibles but set up, with its many metal arms, one gigantic dormlike structure, including kids' play-grounds, swimming pools, ping-pong tables and dart boards.

Ye shall know the truth, Adams thought, and by this thou shalt enslave. Or, as Yancy would put it, "My fellow Americans. I have before me a document so sacred and momentous that I am going to ask you to--" And so on. Now he felt tired, and he had not even reached 580 Fifth Avenue, New York and the Agency, had not begun his day. Alone, at his demesne on the Pacific, he felt the weedy, twisted fog of loneliness grow by day and by night and clog the passages of his throat; here, in transit across the reconned and not-yet-oh-lord but soon-to-be-reconned areas--and of course the still hot-spots, which lay like ringworm circles every so often--he felt this uneasy shame. He glowed with guilt, not because recon was bad, but--it was bad, and he knew who and what _it_ was.

I wish there was one missile left, he said to himself. In orbit. And we could touch one of those quaint old-time buttons the brass once had at their disposal, and that missile would go _pfoooooom!_ At Geneva. And Stanton Brose.

By god, Adams thought, maybe I will program the 'vac one day not with a speech, even a good speech like the one here beside me that I got off last night finally, but the very simple, calm statement of what gives. I'll get through the 'vac to the sim itself, then onto aud and vid tape, because since that's autonomic there's no editing, unless of course Eisenbludt happens to stroll in... and even he, technically, can't touch the speech part of the reading matter.

And then the sky will fail in.

But that ought to be interesting to watch, Adams mused. If you could get far enough off to watch.

"Listen," he would program to Megavac 6-V. And all those funny little dingbats that the 'vac had in it would spin, and out of the sim's mouth would come the utterance but transformed; the simple word would be given that fine, corroborative detail to supply verisimilitude to what was--let us face it, he thought caustically---an otherwise _incredibly_ bald and unconvincing narrative. What entered Megavac 6-V as a mere _logos_ would emerge for the TV lenses and mikes to capture in the guise of a pronouncement, one which nobody in his right mind--especially if encapsulated subsurface for fifteen years-- would doubt. But--it would be a paradox, because Yancy himself would be pontificating it; like the old saw, "Everything I say is a lie," this would confound itself, tie its skinny, slippery self into a good hard sailor's knot.

And what would be achieved? Since, after all, Geneva would pounce on it... and we are not amused, Joseph Adams articulated within his own mind, the voice which he, like every other Yance-man, had long ago introjected. The super ego, as the prewar intellectuals had called it, or, before that the ayenbite of inwyt, or some such rustic Medieval old phrase.

Conscience.

Stanton Brose, holed up in his castlelike _Festung_ in Geneva like some pointed-hat alchemist, like a corrupted, decayed but, as they say, shining and stinking, glowing pale white fish of the sea, a dead mackerel with clouded-over glaucomalike eyes... or did Brose look like this?

Only twice in his life had he, Joseph Adams, actually seen Brose in the flesh. Brose was old. What was it, eighty-two? And not lean. Not a stick, ribboned with the streamers of smoked, dried flesh; Brose at eighty-two weighed a ton, waddled and rolled, pitched, with his mouth drizzling and his nose as well... and yet the heart still beat, because of course it was an artiforg heart, and an artiforg spleen and an artiforg and so on.

But yet the authentic Brose remained. Because the brain was not artiforg; there was no such thing; to manufacture an artiforg brain--to have done so, when that firm, Arti-Gan Corporation of Phoenix, existed, back before the war--would have been to go into what Adams liked to think of as the "genuine simulated silver" business... his term for what he considered with its multiform spawned offspring: the universe of authentic fakes.

And that universe, he reflected, which you would think you could enter the IN door of, pass through and then exit by the OUT door of in say roughly two minutes... that universe, like Eisenbludt's propheaps in the Moscow film studios, was endless, was room beyond room; the OUT door of one room was only the IN door for the next.

And now, if Verne Lindblom were correct, if the man from the private intelligence corporation, Webster Foote, Limited of London, were correct some new IN door had swung open, given momentum by the hand that reached in all its trembling senility from Geneva... in Adams' mind the metaphor, growing, became visual and frightening; he actually experienced the doorway ahead, felt the darkness breathed by it--room lacking light, into which he would soon tread, faced by god knew what task that was not a nightmare, not, like the black, listless fogs from within and without, formless, but--

Too distinct. Spelled out, in graphically unambiguous words, in a memo originating from that damn monster pit, Geneva. General Holt, even Marshal Harenzany who after all was a Red Army officer and not in any sense a Bunthorne sniffing at a sunflower, even Harenzany sometimes _listened_. But the waddling, drizzling, eye-rolling old hulk chuck-full of artiforgs--Brose had greedily ingested artiforg after artiforg of the world's small and dwindling supply--was earless.

Literally. Years ago the organs of that sense had withered away. And Brose had declined artiforg replacements; he _liked_ not to hear.

When Brose reviewed each and every TV tape of Yancy's speeches, he did not listen; horribly, or so it seemed to Adams, the fat, semidead organism received the aud-portion by direct wire: through electrodes grafted, skillfully implanted years ago, in the proper section of his elderly brain... in the one original organ, which _was_ Brose, the rest now being, tin-woodmanwise, a mere procession of Arti-Gan Corporation's plastic, complex, never-failing (they had, before the war, proudly carried lifetime guarantees, and in the artiforg business the meaning of the word "lifetime," that is, whether it applied to the life of the object or of the owner was delightfully clear) replacements which lesser men, the Yance-men as a whole had a kind of nominal, formal claim on--in that, while still warehoused in the subsurface storage vaults under Estes Park, the artiforg supplies belonged to the Yancemen as a class and not merely to Brose.

But it didn't quite work out that way. Because when a kidney failed, as had occurred to Shelby Lane, whose demesne up in Oregon Adams had frequently visited--there was no artiforg kidney for Mr. Lane, although in the warehouse three were known to exist. It seemed, and for some reason as he lay in his bed in the master bedroom of his demesne, surrounded by his entourage of worrying leadies, Lane had not seemed convinced by the argument, Brose had put on these three artiforg kidneys what legally was called an _attachment_. He had attached the goddam organs, tied them up, stopped their use, by a complex quasi-legal "prior" claim... Lane, pathetically, had taken it to the Recon Dis-In Council which sat perpetually in session at Mexico City, passing judgment on the land-boundary quarrels between demesne owners, a council on which one leady of each type sat; Lane had not exactly lost, but he had quite certainly not won, in that he was dead. He had died while waiting for the issue of attachment to be settled. And--Brose lived on, with the knowledge that he could suffer three more total kidney-failures and survive. And anyone who chose to go before the Recon Dis-In Council would undoubtedly be dead, like Lane, and the litigation would, with the plaintiff, expire.

_The fat old louse_, Adams thought, and he saw ahead New York City, the spires, the postwar high-rise buildings, the ramps and tunnels, the hovering fruit fly flapples, which, like his own, carried Yance-men to their offices to begin Monday.

And, a moment later, he hovered fruit-fly-like himself, over the especially tall cardinal building 580 Fifth Avenue and the Agency.

The entire city was the Agency, of course; the buildings on each side were as much a part of the machinery as this one omphalos. But here his particular office lay; here he entrenched himself against the competing members of his own class. It was a top job that he held... and in his briefcase, which he now picked up expectantly, lay as he well knew top-drawer material.

Maybe Lindblom was right. Maybe the Russians were about to bomb Carthage.

He reached the down ramp of the roof field, touched the hi-speed button, and dropped like a plumb line for his floor and office.

When he entered his office, briefcase in hand, he utterly without a shade or glimpse of warning faced a mound of rubber, winking and blinking, flapping seal-like its pseudopodia and peeping at him while with its slitlike mouth it gaped and grinned, pleased at his dismay; pleased to horrify both by how it physically looked and who it was.

"Mr. Adams. A word with you, sir."

The thing, which had somehow managed to wedge itself into the chair at his desk, was Stanton Brose.