Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  I did so, gingerly, and before the bawling Richard knew what was happening he was sputtering through a haze of suds, his mouth thoroughly washed out with the strong soap.

  “Now!” said Grandma briskly, releasing him and stepping back. “Take a dipper of water, and then answer me: Were you or weren’t you exaggerating when you said there was buildings there ten miles high?”

  Richard opened and closed his mouth. He grew red in the face with effort. He said, “N . . . N . . . Yes, ma’am, I was exaggerating.”

  You could see that he was thunderstruck to find that he couldn’t do anything but tell the truth. He had yet to learn what the rest of us knew and took for granted. Once anybody had his mouth washed out with Grandma’s lie soap, he could never again in this life speak a falsehood, however much he might want to.

  A quarter of an hour later, Grandma had mollified Richard with bread and jam and encouraged him to talk some more. She listened with keen interest as he described the Holland Tunnel, nodding her head occasionally and exclaiming, “My, my! Who would have thought it?”

  Now, you see, she knew that every word was true.

  If I’d been smarter—but maybe I’m still not smart, except in hindsight—I might have seen the shape of things to come in that incident. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.

  II

  AT ONE time or another, all of Grandma’s grandchildren got their mouths washed with the lie soap—all but me. Why I was spared, I’ve often wondered. It wasn’t for lack of provocation, that’s certain. I’ve thought perhaps Grandma had an intuitive grasp of scientific method, and kept me as a control. Or . . . well, so far as I know, Grandma was the only one of the family in her generation who possessed the secret of the lie soap, and she didn’t pass it on to any of her children, who were all sober, truthful, financially unsuccessful citizens. But I’m pretty sure that Grandma herself never got the lie soap treatment as a child.

  I grew up, and summers on the farm receded into memory. I went to college, specialized in chemistry, and emerged with rosy visions of science remaking the world. I fell then, naturally into a research job with Gorley and Gorley, who at that time were one of the bigger companies making chemicals, synthetics, cleansers, pharmaceuticals and the like.

  The laboratories which I shared with a number of other young and not-so-young research men were magnificent, their chrome-and-porcelain splendor making the university labs where we’d studied seem small and dingy by comparison.

  Here I had the facilities and—assigned work being light at the time—the spare time to follow up a project of which I’d become enamored in school—a line on antibiotic synthesis. I almost lived in that lab for some weeks, at the end of which time I had sufficient promising results to make up a summary of them, together with an urgent request for materials needed to carry the investigation through to a successful conclusion.

  I submitted this report to the Coordinator, a fussy, harassed little man, who nervously promised to call, it to the attention of the front office, and assigned me to work on the problem of producing a red detergent powder that would not make pink suds.

  Time went by, and nothing happened. Naturally I reminded the Coordinator, but he assured me that the matter had merely slipped his mind. To make a sad story short, I finally found out how things worked. Communications between the research department and the front office, i.e. the sales department, went only one way.

  When the latter had decided just what sort of epoch-making miracle of modern science the buying public was ripe for, word would come down, and if we happened to have such a miracle on hand, well and good. Otherwise we could produce it, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in time for the scheduled start of the advertising campaign.

  It was O’Brien who first explained this system in full to me. O’Brien was an Assistant Sales Manager and an advertising man from way back. But he was also a human being.

  “Over there with your test tubes, kid,” he said bluntly. “You’re playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Sometimes you hit, oftener you miss. But you’re never quite sure in advance. Right?”

  I had to admit he had hit on a pretty fair description of scientific research in general.

  “But,” said O’Brien, “by us in Sales it’s bit, bit, bit, all the time. We can’t wait for you boys to get that tail pinned on straight. But sometimes you do, don’t you?” He sighed.

  “God help us, some of the characters I associate with don’t even know that. They can’t see any difference between having something to sell and having to sell something. So when you do hit, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do at my end.”

  He was as good as his word, too. A couple of times when we’d fumbled around and come up with a product that people really needed, something to keep them from dying, for instance, or to make not dying worth their while, he went to bat for us in the sales department.

  I’ve described at length the situation at Gorley and Gorley, first because it had a direct bearing on what happened later, and second because it was typical of a way of life which is past, and which the younger generation nowadays has difficulty even in imagining. I’m referring, of course, to the middle of the twentieth century with its feverish atmosphere of compulsory Progress or a reasonable fascimile thereof and of the glitter that was sometimes gold.

  It was the era of the false front, the false rear and the questionable middle, of scandal, slander, and the Hard Sell. It was also the Age of the Big Lie, as somebody called it. But it was even more the age of the little half-truth.

  During those years when I was growing up—a painful process then, though it doesn’t seem to be so any more—my education progressed along other lines as well.

  There was my baptism of politics. I joined with the enthusiasts working for nomination of a reform slate of candidates against those of the city machine. We were too innocent to know that it was an unpropitious time. For one thing, it wasn’t a Presidential year and the vote was bound to be light, and for another, the last reform administration was still too fresh in public memory, and the machine was riding high.

  The opposition called us idealistic crackpots, conniving scoundrels, and dimwits who didn’t know what it was all about. They had the money and they spent it on a flood of lies from the platform, through the mail, and from sound trucks that rolled bellowing through the streets. Finally, our candidates were snowed under in the primaries and not so much as a reform dog-catcher appeared on the ticket.

  That was another bruising experience for an easy bruiser such as I was. After the crescendo of activity, the speeches, the leaflets, the house-to-house canvasses, after the starry-eyed phrases about cleaning up local government as a first step toward cleaning up the country and the world . . .

  I took a freshly disillusioned look at that world. It was a world where the leaders of great nations daily pointed to one another as conspirators plotting to exterminate the human race, and where “security” and fear grew rankly intertwined as the ordinary man learned to swallow the idea that be couldn’t be trusted with the truth about anything really important. It was a world where, consequently, the scaremongers, the inside scoopers, and the genuine conspirators throve mightily.

  And, finally, there was Alice.

  Alice was in the bookkeeping department at Gorley and Gorley. She didn’t have the kind of looks that make cover photographers and movie scouts drool and lunge. But she had something, a spontaneous allure, a magnetism that must surely have upset the IBM machines she worked with.

  I met Alice, was magnetized, polarized, and lost. Lost and happy. When I proposed to her, and she said Yes, I felt that my good fortune was too good to be true. And it was. Some three weeks later she handed back the ring. She couldn’t marry me. It had all been a mistake, and so on.

  Two days afterward I encountered her by accident in a corridor at the plant. She wore another ring, with a bigger diamond. I stopped her, and roughly demanded: “Who?”

  Stumblingly, she told me. He was a junior executive, a young-m
an-who-would-go-far with family connections and stock in the company. Alice was a smart girl, and she’d simply bettered herself. I guess I said some rather bitter things on that subject.

  “No, Oliver,” she insisted. “It’s not like that at all. It’s just that I don’t love you. I never did.” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  When I’d cooled down a bit, I realized that she was being honest with me after a fashion. She was lying to me in just the same terms she was lying to herself. And at the same time, recalling little details of her behavior, I realized why.

  Alice was afraid. Her people had been poor, and she knew what it meant. Anyway, who wasn’t afraid in those days, except for the feebleminded and some of the insane? So she was looking for security, a place to hide, in that world of the nineteen-fifties where there wasn’t any place to hide. But what was the use of telling her that?

  I did some serious drinking, enough to convince me that I wasn’t cut out to make a career of it. It was during the sobering-up process that I got the Idea. I wonder how many of the thoughts that changed the world have been fathered by hangovers?

  I had some days vacation with pay coming, so it was comparatively easy. I took a plane, a train, and a ramshackle bus. I then swung in on a grapevine and there I was, walking up the familiar path to the old farmhouse door, where I hadn’t been for a span of years that astonished me when I counted them.

  Grandma was out in the back yard hanging out a wash of patched work shirts and faded blue overalls. She said without surprise, “How do, Oliver,” and went right on finishing her task, while I watched with suppressed impatience.

  Finally she picked up the empty clothes basket and led the way into the house. It was getting dusk, so she lit a kerosene lamp in the kitchen, where supper was simmering on the cast-iron range.

  “Grandma,” I fumbled, “I came down here—”

  “I can see that,” Grandma interrupted. “How do you like my new teeth, Oliver?” She grinned at me alarmingly. “Today’s my birthday—ninety-first or ninety-fourth or something like that, I forget—so I went to town and got me my new teeth. Pretty, eh, boy? Figure they ought to do me another ten or twelve years.”

  “Yes, Grandma,” I said, a little dazedly.

  She peered at me searchingly. “Well, Oliver? Speak up. You’ve got troubles written all over you.”

  I’d more or less rehearsed a persuasive speech, but sitting there in Grandma’s lamplit kitchen I felt as if the years had fallen away and I was like a little boy who had run away from home and come back sorry.

  In considerable disorder I poured out the story of how I’d gone out into the world and what I’d found it like. I covered all of it, my work and how little it amounted to compared to what it could have meant to me, and my experience with the way people were governed—even Alice. Above all, I told her how at every turning I had been lied to, and had heard people lie to one another, and seen them lie to themselves.

  Grandma nodded once or twice as she listened, which encouraged me. I remembered a scrap from the arguments I’d meant to muster: “Some philosopher once said that a lie is the Original Sin itself. Without it, all other crimes become impossible.”

  “So,” Grandma broke in, “you want the recipe for my lie soap.”

  “Uh . . . yes, that’s right,” I admitted. “It’s the answer. Your ancestors and mine had no right to hold it back this long. Look, Grandma. The company I work for makes mouth washes, toothpastes, and the like. Millions of people use their products; and if a new ‘miracle ingredient were publicized the right way, other companies with more millions of customers would have to adopt it too.”

  I was counting on O’Brien. I’d explain it to him squarely, and somehow we’d manage to put it over.

  Grandma got up to stir a kettle.

  She took her time, while I held my breath. Finally she said, “I’m going to give you the recipe, Oliver—”

  My heart leaped.

  “—but not for ten or twenty years yet. Not until you’ve learned a mite of caution. I was your age once, myself, and I thought how nice it would be to make the world over tomorrow morning, and sit down and admire it tomorrow afternoon. Now I know better, and so will you.”

  I pleaded and argued, but it was no use. The old lady was adamant. Finally I fell glumily silent, while Grandma went about setting the table for supper.

  On the train coming down I’d bought a newspaper out of sheer habit, and, preoccupied, hadn’t even opened it. It lay now on the table, and Grandma picked it up to glance at the headlines. Suddenly I realized she’d been standing motionless, staring at the paper, for a remarkably long time. There was a look I’d never seen before on her wrinkled face.

  I heard her whisper to herself, “The Moon!” But that didn’t make any sense until I looked over her shoulder and read:

  Air Force Rocket Lands

  on Moon

  Still I didn’t understand Grandma’s agitation. I said banally, “Well, we’ve known for quite a while they were going to try it.”

  “The Moon!” Grandma repeated. She went on wanderingly, “You know, that just reminds me of one night in a buggy . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she brooded darkly, which was strange indeed in her.

  Then she let the paper fall, and said briskly, “I’ve changed my mind, Oliver.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes. You can have the lie soap. I’ll write the recipe out and give it to you for a birthday present.”

  I said stupidly, “It’s not my birthday, though.”

  “No, it’s mine.” She cackled with a return of the old merriment. She found a stub of pencil, tore off a comer of newspaper, and began writing in a crabbed hand.

  As she wrote she muttered, only half to me: “Evening of the day they dropped the Bomb, your Uncle Henry told me: ’Ma, the time’s come.’ But I said, ‘No.’ ‘I said, ‘People may be crazy, but they’re not crazy enough to blow the whole world up and them on it.’

  “But now . . . If there’s a Man in the Moon, and he’s got a Bomb in his hand and all he’s got to do is fling it, what’s to stop him? Him, he’s safe in the Moon . . . There!” She held out the scrap of paper. “Go on, boy, do what you like with-it, and I hope you like what you do! I held back, I never thought I’d live to see times like these. But there’s some duties you just can’t shirk, boy, I don’t have to tell you that.”

  III

  BILL, Jerry and I slipped into a booth at the tavern near the plant. Looking across the table at Jerry, I marveled at how well he was keeping up the act, the casual off-hours good-fellowship. As for me, I felt sure my tense nerves were showing.

  While Jerry called Bill’s attention to the waitress’ walk, I dropped a little, fast-dissolving white tablet into Bill’s drink.

  As he picked it up and sipped, I felt a qualm which I ruthlessly stifled. This test had to be made. We—Jerry and I, since I’d taken him into my confidence as a man I could trust and a wizard at organic chemistry—had studied the lie-soap formula backward and forward. We’d analyzed samples of it I’d obtained from Grandma, and isolated—or so we thought—the active ingredients. But we had to know, and we could hardly experiment on animals.

  Bill set down an empty glass. I grew tenser. Jerry inquired, “Another?” and when Bill shook his head, asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “So—you’ve decided to quit lushing around, and get some work done for a change?”

  That was one of the trick questions we’d settled on—a variation of the old “Have you stopped beating your wife?” formula. If Bill had been quite normal, he’d have answered, “Hell no,” or, “Yeah, guess I better,” or some answer as jocular and meaningless as the question. But if our elixir of lie soap worked, he’d answer—with a peculiar, embarrassed gulp of hesitation:

  “ ‘But I don’t lush around, and I get a good deal of work done.”

  Which was what he did say. Because it was the truth, silly and pompous as it sounded there and then.

  I could see Jerr
y rallying himself to ask some more telling questions, and I knew he was feeling an emotion exactly like mine—exultation curiously mixed with shame.

  Both of us realized at that moment, I guess, that it was going to mean no more friendly kidding over a couple of beers, no more harmless insults and bragging, no more fish stories . . . But of course there’s always a price.

  I went to O’Brien.

  He heard me out without changing expression. When I’d laid all the cards on the table, he said slowly, “If this stuff will really do what you say—”

  “It will,” I assured him. “It has.”

  “In that case, my young scientific friend, do you realize what you’re asking me to do? I’ve spent twenty years in the advertising game. You might say I’ve devoted my life to it. Now you want me to help you with a scheme that’ll wipe out advertising as we know it—lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “I—I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “In other words,” O’Brien went on, “you’re offering me the fulfillment of my fondest dreams. Shake on it, kid!”

  Then he settled back and grew thoughtful. “But it isn’t going to be easy. I guess you still have trouble believing it, but I can’t just walk into a sales conference and say, ’See here, I’ve got wind of a product that’s the greatest boon to humanity since fire and the wheel, and expect them to fall all over me. We need a good promotion angle.”

  “There’s got to be some way.”

  “Keep your shirt on. I’ll find one. I haven’t been in the business for twenty years for nothing. But one thing anyway. Until this deal is swung, keep your witch’s brew away from me!”

  The convincer came, after all, from an idea I had. But it was O’Brien who saw the possibilities and, by dint of massive doses of double-talk and cajolery, arranged for a test survey of a hundred volunteer subjects. These human guinea pigs were furnished gratis with a thirty days’ supply of a new toothpaste—a standard base, plus Grandma’s lie soap—and, when the time was up, were quizzed as to their reactions to the experiment.