By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  “Even those of us who pay only lip service to the truth know what it is, deep down in our hearts. And we all believe in it, and know it when we see it. Even the best rationalization can fool only the surface mind that manufactures it; there is something beneath, call it the heart or the conscience, that knows better. It tenses up like a stiff neck muscle when you lie, in proportion to the size of the lie, and if it stiffens enough it can kill you for revenge. Ask Richard Corey. Most people seem to me, in my cynical moments, to keep things stabilized at about the discomfort of a dislocated shoulder or a tooth about to abscess. They trade honesty off in small chunks for pleasure, and wonder that their lives hold so little joy. Joy is incompatible with tensed shoulders and a stiff neck. You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

  “I have stumbled across a psychic muscle relaxant.”

  “Truth serum’s been around a long time,” Zack said.

  “This is no more Pentothal than acid is grass!” George thundered, an Old Testament prophet enraged. He caught himself at once—in a single frantic instant he seemed to extrude his anger, stare at it critically, tie it off, and amputate it, in deliberate steps. “Sorry—rushed. Look: Pentothal will—sometimes—get you a truthful answer to a direct question. My drug imbues you with a strong desire to get straight with all the people you’ve been lying to regardless of the consequences. Side effects include the usual accompaniments of confession—cathartic relief, euphoria to the point of exaltation and a tendency to babble—and a new one: visual color effects extremely reminiscent of organic mescaline.”

  He winced again, clamped his jaw for a moment, then continued.

  “That alone might have been enough to stand the world on its ear—but the gods are jollier than that. The stuff is water-soluble—damn near anything-soluble—and skin-permeable and as concentrated as hell. Worse than acid for dosage, and it can be taken into the body just about every way there is. For Pentothal you have to actually shoot up the subject, and you have to hit the vein. My stuff—Christ, you could let a drop of candle wax harden on your palm, put a pinpoint’s worth on the wax, shake hands with a man and dose him six or seven hours’ worth. You could put it on a spitball and shoot it through a straw. You could add it to nail polish or inject it into a toothpaste tube or roll it up in a joint or simply spray it from an atomizer. Put enough of it into a joint, in a small room, and even the nonsmokers will get off. The method Sziller has used to assassinate me would work splendidly. There may be some kind of way to guard against it—some antidote or immunization—but I haven’t found it yet. You see the implications, of course.”

  At some point during George’s speech Zack had reached the subconscious decision to believe him implicitly. With doubt had gone the last of his paralysis, and now his mind was racing faster than usual to catch up. “Give me a week and a barrel of hot coffee and I think I could reason out most of the major implications. All I get now is that you can make people be truthful against their will.” His expression was dark.

  “Zack, I know this sounds like sophistry, but that’s a matter of definition. Whoa!” He held up his hands. “I know, son, I know. The Second Commandment of Leary: ‘Thou shalt not alter thy brother’s consciousness without his consent.’ So how about retroactive consent?”

  “Say again.”

  “The aftereffects. I’ve administered the drug to blind volunteers. They knew only that they were sampling a new psychedelic of unknown effect. In each case I gave a preliminary ‘attitude survey’ questionnaire with a few buried questions. In fourteen cases I satisfied myself that the subject would probably not have taken the drug if he or she had known its effect. In about three-quarters of them I damn well knew it.

  “The effects were the same for all but one. All fourteen of them experienced major life upheaval—usually irreversible and quite against their will—while under the effects of the drug. They all became violently angry at me after they came down. Then all fourteen stormed off to try and put their lives back together. Thirteen of them were back within a week, asking me to lay another hit on them.”

  Zack’s eyes widened. “Addictive on a single hit. Jesus.”

  “No, no!” George said exasperatedly. “It’s not the drug that’s addictive, dammit. It’s the truth that’s addictive. Every one of those people came back for, like, three-four hits, and then they stopped coming by. I checked up on the ones I was in a position to. They had just simply rearranged their lives on solid principles of truth and honesty and begun to live that way all the time. They didn’t need the drug anymore. Every damn one of them thanked me. One of them fucked me, sweetly and lovingly—at my age.

  “I was worried myself that the damned stuff might be addictive. So I had at least as many subjects who would probably have taken the drug knowingly, and all of them asked for more and I told them no. Better than three-fourths of them have made similar life adjustments on their own, without any further chemical aid.

  “Zack, living in truth feels good. And it sticks in your memory. Like, it’s a truism with acid heads that you can never truly remember what tripping feels like. You think you do, but every time you trip it’s like waking up all over again, you recognize the head coming on and you dig that your memories of it were shadows. But this stuff you remember! You’re left with a vivid set of memories of just exactly how good it felt to not have any psychic muscles bunched up for the first time since you were two years old. You remember joy; and you realize that you can recreate it just by not ever lying any more. That’s goddamn hard, so you look for any help you can get, and if you can’t get any you just take your best shot.

  “Those people ended up happier, Zack.

  “Zack, Jill…a long long time ago a doctor named Watt slapped me on the ass and forced me to live. It was very much against my will; I cried like hell and family legend says I tried to bite him. Now my days are ended, and taking it all together I’m very glad he went to the trouble. He had my retroactive consent. It wasn’t his fault anyhow: my parents had already forced me to exist, before I had a will for it to be against—and they have my retroactive consent. Many times in my life, good friends and even strangers have kicked my ass where it needed kicking; at least twice women have gently and compassionately kicked me out—all against my will, and they all have my retroactive consent, God bless ’em. Can it be immoral to dose folks if you get no complaints?”

  “What about the fourteenth person?” Jill asked.

  George grimaced. “Touché.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Nothing’s perfect. The fourteenth man killed me.”

  “Oh.”

  The temperature in the room was moderate, but George was drenched with sweat; his ruddy complexion was paling rapidly.

  “Look, you two make up your own minds. You can help them haul me out to the ambulance in a few minutes and then walk away and forget you ever met me, if that’s what you want. But I have to ask you: please, take over this karma for me. Someone has to, one way or the other: I seriously doubt that the drug will ever be found again.”

  “Is there like a set of instructions for the stuff?” Zack asked. Involved, his head told him. “Notes, molecule diagrams—” Somebody’s getting infuckingvolved…

  “Complete instructions for synthesis, and about ten liters of the goods, in various forms. That’s about enough to give everything on earth with two legs a couple of hits apiece. I tell you, it’s easy to make. And it’s fucking hard to stumble across. If I die, it dies with me, maybe forever. Blind luck I found it, just blind—”

  “Where?” Zack and Jill interrupted simultaneously.

  “Wait a minute, you’ve got to understand. It’s in a very public place—I thought that was a good idea at the time, but…never mind. The point is, from the moment you pick up the stuff, you must be very very careful. They don’t have to physically touch you—try not to let anyone come near you if you can help it, anyone at all—”

  “
I’ll know a fed when I see one,” Zack said grimly, “north or south.”

  “No, NO, not feds, not any kind of feds! Think that way and you’re dead. It wasn’t feds that killed me.”

  “Who then?” Jill asked.

  “In my line of work, I customarily do business with a loosely affiliated organization of non-Syndicate drug dealers. It has no name. It is international in scope, and if it ever held a meeting, a substantial fraction of the world’s wealth would sit in one room. I offered them this drug for distribution, before I really understood what I had. Sziller is one of the principals of the group.”

  “Jesus God,” Zack breathed. “Dealers had Wesley George snuffed? That’s like the apostles offing Jesus.”

  “One of them did,” George pointed out sadly. “Think it through, son: dope dealers can’t afford honesty.”

  “But—”

  “Suppose the feds did get hold of the stuff,” Jill suggested.

  “Oh.”

  “Or the Syndicate,” George agreed. “Or their own customers, or—”

  “What’s the drug called?” Jill asked.

  “The chemical name wouldn’t mean a thing to some of the brightest chemists in the world, and I never planned to market it under that. Up until I knew what it was I called it The New Batch, and since then I’ve taken to calling it TWT. The Whole Truth.” Suddenly urgency overtook him and he was angry again. “Listen, fuck this,” he blazed, “I mean fuck all this garbage. OK? I haven’t got time to waste on trivia. Will you do it is the important thing; will you take on the karma I’ve brought you? Will you turn Truth loose on the world for me? Please, you aaaAAAAAAHHH-EE shit.” He clutched at his right arm, screamed again in awful pain and fell to the floor.

  “We promise, we promise,” Jill was screaming, and Zack was thundering “Where, where? Where, dammit?” and Jill had George’s head on her lap and Zack had his hands and they clutched like steel and “Where?” he shouted again, and George was bucking in agony, breathing in with great whooping gargles and breathing out with sprays of saliva, jaw muscles like bulging biceps on his face, and “Hitch” he managed through his teeth, and Zack tried, “Hitch. Hitchhike, a locker at the hitching depot” very fast and then added “Key in your pocket?” and George borrowed energy from his death struggle to nod twice, “Okay, right Wesley, it’s covered, man,” and George relaxed all over at once and shat his pants. They thought he was dead, then, but the blue-grey eyelids rolled heavily up one last time and he saw Jill’s face over his, raining tears. “Nice tits…” he said “…Thanks…children…thanks…sorry,” and in the middle of the last word he did die, and his glowing aura died with him.

  The Shadow was standing in the doorway, filling it full, breathing hard. “I heard the sound, man, what—oh holy shit, man. What the fuck happenin’ here?”

  Zack’s voice was perfect, his delivery impeccable, startled but not involved. “What can I tell ya, Shadow? The old guy comes back to talk blues and like that and his pump quits. Call the croaker, will ya? And pour me a triple.”

  “Shee-it,” the Shadow rumbled. “Nev’ a dull night aroun’ this fuckin’ joint. Hey, Finnegan! Finnegan, God damn it.” The big black bouncer left to find his boss.

  Zack found a numbered key in George’s pants, and turned to Jill. Their eyes met and locked. “Yes,” Jill said finally, and they both nodded. And then together they pried Zack’s right hand from the clutching fingers of the dead dope wizard, and together they made him comfortable on the floor, and then they began packing up their instruments and gear.

  Zack and Jill held a hasty war council in the flimsy balcony of their second-floor apartment. It overlooked a yard so small it would have been hard put not to, as Zack loved to say, and offered a splendid view of the enormous oil refining facility across the street. The view of Halifax Harbour which the architect had planned was forever hidden now behind it, but the cooling breezes still came at night, salt-scented and rich. Even at two A.M. the city was noisy, like a dormitory after lights out, but all the houses on this block were dark and still.

  “I think we should pack our bags,” Zack said, sipping coffee.

  “And do what?”

  “The dealers must know that Wesley brought a large amount of Truth with him—he intended to turn it over to them for distribution. They don’t know where it’s stashed, and they must be shitting a brick wondering who else does. We’re suspect because we’re known to have spoken with him, and a hitching depot is a natural stash—so we don’t go near the stuff.”

  “But we’ve got to—”

  “We will. Look, tomorrow we’re supposed to go on tour, right?”

  “Screw the tour.”

  “No, hon, look! This is the smart way. We do just exactly what we would have done if we’d never met Wesley George. We act natural, do the tour as planned—we pack our bags and go down to the hitching depot and take off. But some friend of ours—say, John—goes in just ahead of us and scores the bag. Then we show up and ignore him, and by and by the three of us make up a full car for somebody, and after we’re out of the terminal and about to board, out of the public eye, John changes his mind and fades and we take over the bag. Zippo bang, off on tour.”

  “I’ll say it again. Screw the tour. We’ve got more important things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “?”

  “What do you wanna do with the stuff? Call the reporters? Stand on Barrington Street and give away samples? Call the heat? Look. We’re proposing to unleash truth on the world. I’m willing to take a crack at that, but I’d like to live to see what happens. So I don’t want to be connected with it publicly in any way if I can help it. We keep our cover and do our tour—and we sprinkle fairy dust as we go.”

  “Dose people, you mean?”

  “Dose the most visible people we can find, and make damn sure we don’t get caught at it. We’re supposed to hit nineteen cities in twenty-eight days, in a random pattern that even a computer couldn’t figure out. I intend to leave behind us the God-damnedest trail of headlines in history.”

  “Zack, I don’t follow your thinking.”

  “Okay.” He paused, took a deep breath, slowed himself visibly. “Okay…considering what we’ve got here, it behooves me to be honest. I have doubts about this. Heavy doubts. The decision we’re making is incredibly arrogant. We’re talking about destroying the world, as we know it.”

  “To hell with the world as we know it, Zack, it stinks. A world of truth has to be better.”

  “Okay, in my gut something agrees with you. But I’m still not sure. A world of truth may be better—but the period of turmoil while the old world collapses is sure going to squash a lot of people. Nice people. Good people. Jill, something else in my gut suspects that maybe even good people need lies sometimes.

  “So I want to hedge my bets. I want to experiment first and see what happens. To do that I have to make another arrogant decision: to dose selected individuals, cold-bloodedly and without giving them a chance, let alone a vote. Wesley experimented himself, with a lab and volunteers and procedure and tests, until he proved to his satisfaction that it was okay to turn this stuff loose. Well, I haven’t got any of that—but I have to establish to my satisfaction that it’s cool.”

  “Do you doubt his results?” Jill asked indignantly.

  “To my satisfaction. Not Wesley’s, or even yours, my darling, or anyone else’s. And yes, frankly, I have some doubts about his results.”

  Jill clouded up. “How can you—”

  “Baby, listen to me. I believe that every word Wesley George said to us was the absolute unbiased truth as he knew it. But he himself had taken the drug. That makes him suspect.”

  Jill dropped her eyes. “That retroactive consent business bothered me a little too.”

  Zack nodded. “Yeah. If everybody comes out of prefrontal lobotomy with a smile on his face, what does that prove? If you kidnapped somebody and put a droud in their head, made ’em a wirehead, they’d thank you on the
ir way out—but so what? Things like that are like scooping out somebody’s self and replacing it with a new one. The new one says thanks—but the old one was murdered. I want to make sure that Homo veritas is a good thing—in the opinion of Homo sapiens.

  “So I propose that neither of us take the drug. I propose that we abstain, and take careful precautions not to accidentally contaminate ourselves while we’re using it. We’ll dose others but not ourselves, and then when the tour is over—or sooner if it feels right—we’ll sit down and look over what we’ve done and how it turned out. Then if we’re still agreed, we’ll take a couple of hits together and call CBC News. By then there’ll be so much evidence they’ll have to believe us, and then…then the word will be out. Too far out for the dealers to have it squashed or discredited. Or the government.”

  “And then the world will end.”

  “And a new one will begin…but first we’ve got to know. Am I crazy or does that make sense to you?”

  Jill was silent a long time. Her face got the blank look that meant she was thinking hard. After a few minutes she got up and began pacing the apartment. “It’s risky, Zack. Once the headlines start coming they’ll figure out what happened and come after us.”

  “And the only people who know our schedule are Fat Jack and the Agency. We’ll tell ’em there’s a skip tracer after us and they’ll both keep shut—”

  “But—”

  “Jill, this ain’t the feds after us—it’s a bunch of dealers who dasn’t let anybody know they exist. They can’t have the resources they’d need to trace us, even if they did know what city we were in.”

  “They might. A dealers’ union’d have to be international. That’s a lot of weight, Zack, a lot of money.”

  “Darlin’—if all you got is pisspoor dope…” He broke off and shrugged.

  Jill grinned suddenly. “You make cigars. Let’s get packed. More coffee?”

  They took little time in packing and preparing their apartment for a long absence. This would be their third tour together; by now it was routine. At last everything that needed doing was done, the lights were out save for the bedside lamp, and they were ready for bed. They undressed quickly and silently, with no flirting byplay, and slid under the covers. They snuggled together spoon fashion for a few silent minutes, and then Zack began rubbing her neck and shoulders with his free hand, kneading with guitarist’s fingers and lover’s knowledge. They had not yet spoken a word of the change that the events of the evening had brought to their relationship, and both knew it, and the tension in the room was thick enough to smell. Zack thought of a hundred things to say, and each one sounded stupider than the last.