The Penultimate Truth (30 page)

     "It's over," Nicholas said to him, and not trying or wanting to be kind. "Over for you personally and over for all of them." _Because_, he said to himself, _I'm going to tell them the truth_.

     They looked at each other, silently. Adams blinking out of the recess into which he fell and fell. Both of them without friendliness, and utterly without warmth. Divided, each from the other. Absolutely.

     And, second by second, the hollowness, the space between, enlarged. Until finally even Nicholas felt it, felt the grip of what Joseph Adams had always called--the fog. The inner, soundless fog.

     "Okay," Adams gasped. "You blab the truth; you rig up some dinky little ten-watt shortwave radio transmitter and raise the next tank, pass your Word along--but I'm going back up to my demesne and I'm going to hole up in my library where I have to be right now and write a speech. Beyond doubt, without qualifications, the best one I ever did in all my years. The culmination. Because that's what we need. Even better than Lantano can do; when I really have to I can surpass even him--there isn't anyone who can get beyond me at my job; I know I have it. So we'll see, Nick; we'll wait a while and see who wins, who believes what and whom when all this is finally over; you have your chance and I'm not going to let mine slip by--I'm not going to be left. Discarded." He stared at Nicholas.

     Rita, breathless and excited, hurried up the hall to her husband. "Nicholas, I just heard--the war's over and we're going to be able to go back up. We can finally start to--"

     "But not quite yet," Nicholas said. "They haven't quite got it ready; conditions on the surface aren't quite right, yet." He returned Adams' fixed, goaded, suffering stare. "Are they?"

     "No, not yet," Adams said in slow, mechanical response, as if he had already gone and little, very little of him, remained here now, by which to answer. "But conditions will be," he said. "Like you said. Okay in time."

     "But it's true," Rita said, gasping. "We won; they, Pac-Peop; they surrendered to our armies of leadies. Yancy said so; it was piped to every cubby in the tank, I heard it down below." Seeing the expression of her husband's face she said falteringly. "It's not just a rumor. Yancy himself, the Protector, personally said it."

     To Adams, Nicholas said, "What about this. You could tell them-- tell us--that it's a surprise. For our birthday."

     "No," Adams said vigorously, thinking once more at high speed, weighing each of Nicholas' words. "Not good enough; it won't do."

     "The radiation level," Nicholas said. He felt tired, considering, and not too pessimistic, not by any manner of means despairing. Despite what both he and Adams saw: the task which had step by step approached unnoticed, all of these waiting, and for each of them, unproductive years. "The radioactivity," Nicholas said.

     At that, Adams' eyes flickered intensely.

     "The radioactivity," Nicholas said, "has just now finally, after all this time, at last dropped to a tolerable level. There it is; what about that? And throughout all these years you were forced to say--you had no choice, just no choice at all in the matter; it was morally and practically _necessary_ to say--that the war was still going on. Or otherwise people, and you know how they always do, would have rushed to the surface."

     "Foolishly," Adams agreed, nodding slowly.

     "Too soon," Nicholas said. "The way they naturally act in their stupidity, and the radiation; it would have killed them. So actually when you get right down to it, this was self-sacrificing. The sort of moral responsibility that your leadership entailed. How about that?"

     "I know," Adams said quietly, "that we can come up with something."

     Nicholas said, "I know you can, too." Except for that one thing, he said to himself, and put his arm around his wife to draw her closer.

     You're not going to.

     Because we will not allow you.

In the Mold of 1964: An Afterword

     by Thomas M. Disch

     In December of 1961 the U.S. Defense Department announced a fallout shelter program aimed at establishing 235,000,000 fallout shelter spaces. At that time the entire population of the country had yet to exceed 200,000,000.

     In October of 1962, Kennedy had his moment of macho glory when he declared a quarantine around Cuba, where the Russians were building missile bases. For a few days everyone was waiting for the bombs to fall. The sensation of dread and helplessness was just the stuff nightmares are made of. For those who had read more than the government's bromidic brochures on the subject of nuclear destruction and who were living at that time in a major (i.e., targeted) city, there was little to be done but figure the odds for survival. Fifty-fifty seemed the general consensus among the New Yorkers I knew. The poet Robert Frost, legend has it, reckoned doomsday even likelier than that, and when he appeared at a symposium at Columbia University, he declared himself to be delighted that now he would not die alone (he was then eighty-eight) but would take all humanity along with him.

     A year and a month later, in November of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated--probably as a quid pro quo for his earlier efforts to play a similar dirty trick on Castro. However, at the time we were asked to believe that the deed was accomplished by a single bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Earl Warren, having been admonished by President Johnson that continued doubts of the scapegoat's sole guilt could lead to nuclear war, was directed to write a scenario to this effect. The Warren Commission issued its report in 1964, the same year in which _The Penultimate Truth_ was published. Neither was nominated for a Hugo, for indeed both books were much too hastily written to deserve such an honor. But as a snapshot of the angst that characterized that period--and of the blackly humorous emotional antidote to that angst--_The Penultimate Truth_ is an essential document.

     According to the records of The Scott Meredith Literary Agency, the outline for _The Penultimate Truth_ was received in March of 1964, and the completed manuscript in May. Conceptually it represented the splicing together of two short stories Philip K. Dick had written in the earliest years of his apprenticeship. The first of these, "The Defenders," appeared in the January 1953 issue of _Galaxy_. It duplicates, in miniature, the Nicholas St. James portion of the plot, in which all humanity has been tricked into believing it must continue living underground to escape the radiation and other dangers of a nuclear war. In this story it is the leadies (robots) that have perpetrated the deception in order to keep mankind from self-extinction, and the story's last wistfully liberal tableau represents two groups of escaped U.S. and Russian troglodytes blasting off into the sunset, reconciled by the rational leadies:

     "It has taken thousands of generations to achieve," the A-class leady concluded. "Hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and destruction. But each war was a step toward uniting mankind. And now the end is in sight: a world without war. But even that is only the beginning of a new stage of history."

     "The conquest of space," breathed Colonel Borodsky.

     "The meaning of life," Moss added.

     "Eliminating hunger and poverty," said Taylor.

     The leady opened the door of the ship. "All that and more. How much more? We cannot foresee it any more than the first men who formed a tribe could foresee this day. But it will be unimaginably great."

     The door closed and the ship took off toward their new home.

     The second source-story for the novel was published in _If_ (August 1955), and its title, "The Mold of Yancy," was intended, in a slightly emended form, _In the Mold of Yancy_, as the original title of the book. It concerns the conspiracy of the yance-men of Callisto, a satellite of Jupiter, to brainwash the guileless Callistotes into a condition of abject conformity by means of the televised speeches of a (nonexistent) homespun philosopher who is a cross between Arthur Godfrey and George Orwell's Big Brother. The problem is resolved not by revealing the deception to the gullible population but by _using_ the Yancy mannikin to inculcate a preference for Greek tragedy and Bach fugues among those who formerly were satisfied by Westerns and the songs of Stephen Collins Foster.

     It is clear, even in that early story, that Dick's interest in the premise is more with the secret power exercised by hidden persuaders, such as advertising copywriters, speechwriters, and filmmakers, than with the moral question of the legitimacy of such persuasion. It's less clear whether, as he wrote "The Mold of Yancy," Dick recognized his personal fascination and identification with the yance-men of Callisto, but surely by the time he had decided to rework that old material into a novel, he knew himself to be a yance-man--albeit one employed in the lower echelons of the power structure--as a hack writer producing sci-fi paperbacks. By way of signaling that fact and of sharing it with the unhappy few who could be counted on to read his hack novels as a phantasmal form of autobiography, Dick gave the Agency that is responsible for this global deception the then-current address of his own literary agent, Scott Meredith, at 580 Fifth Avenue.

     What it meant, for Dick--as for his novel's protagonist, Joseph Adams--to be a yance-man was that he knew, as most of his fellow citizens did not, that the real sociopolitical function of the cold war and the arms race was to guarantee comfortable "demesnes" for corporate executives and other officials of the military-industrial establishment. Only as long as there was the menace of an external enemy would a majority of people agree to their own systematic impoverishment. But if one's "enemy" was in the same situation with respect to its captive populations, then a deal could be struck to keep their reciprocal menace ever-threatening--not at all a difficult task with the unthinkable power of the nuclear arsenals both sides possessed.

     In another novel, _The Zap Gun_, conceived and written in the same few months of spring 1964 that produced _The Penultimate Truth_, Dick hypothesized a very similar conspiracy between the superpowers. The hero of that novel, Lars Powderdry, is a weapons fashions designer whose imposing but impotent creations are derived, telepathically, from an Italian horror comic, _The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan_. The moral of both novels is clear: Government is a conspiracy against the people, and it is maintained by the illusion of a permanent crisis that exists, for the most part, as a media event.

     Such a view of world affairs was much less common in the early sixties than it has become since Watergate, but it was surely not original to Philip Dick. Its most forceful expression is probably found in George Orwell's _1984_, in which a perpetual state of war and shifting alliances among the three superpowers provide the basis for totalitarian rule, and in which the head of state is, like Talbot Yancy, a chimera. Many critics have pointed out that _1984_ is intended, not as a prediction or a warning against some dire possible future, but rather a nighmarishly hyperbolic picture of the actual state of affairs at the time it was being written, a meaning concealed in the title: 1984 = 1948.

     The great difference between Orwell's world-nightmare and Dick's is that the possibility of nuclear holocaust has not yet informed Orwell's vision, while it dominates Dick's-and often obscures it. Never mind that the future Dick has imagined _could not_ come into being, that the radiation released by a nuclear war would have had far more awful and widespread consequences than the singeing represented in _The Penultimate Truth_. The emotional basis of the inability to comprehend nuclear reality has been compellingly discussed by Jonathan Schell in _The Fate of the Earth_, where, after demonstrating the virtual certainty of human extinction as a result of a large-scale nuclear war, he argues:

     It thus seems to be in the nature of extinction to repel emotion and starve thought, and if the mind, brought face to face with extinction, descends into a kind of exhaustion and dejection it is surely in large part because we know that mankind cannot be a "spectator" at its own funeral, any more than any individual person can.

     Might not the congruent sense of "exhaustion and dejection" pervading the first chapters of _The Penultimate Truth_ be symptomatic of Dick's natural inability to think the unthinkable--that is, to imagine the aftermath of nuclear war in plausibly dire terms?

     Of course, Dick never intended to write a plausible, realistic postholocaust novel. Readers who wanted a verismo version of their own future deaths might read _On the Beach_ (novel, 1959; movie, 1959). Dick has another zeitgeist to summon, a new wisdom that is at once happier and blacker, the Spirit of '64.

     He simply denies that the cold war is happening.

     It is a denial we all learned to make, having passed through the twin crises of 1962 and 1963, the Missile Crisis and the Assassination. Robert Frost died alone, after all, and the rest of us, by and large, survived. If we'd never bothered listening to the news, there'd have been no reason to be fussed. Life went on. The Beach Boys produced new and better songs. Ditto Detroit and cars. That segment of the entertainment industry devoted to politics had an election, Johnson versus Goldwater, and the plot was that Goldwater would lead us into war. So we voted, by and large, for Johnson.

     But that's getting ahead of the story, since this cannot chronicle the entire unreality of the nuclear era, but only the particular slice represented by _The Penultimate Truth_--spring of 1964.