The Penultimate Truth (10 page)

     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.

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.

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.