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; also 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 dogcatcher 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 he 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-man-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 feeble-minded 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. 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 glumly 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 corner of newspaper, and began writing in a crabbed hand.
As she wrote she muttered, only half to me: “Eveni
ng 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.”
* * * *
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 nerves were showing.
While Jerry called Bill’s attention to the waitress’s walk, I dropped a 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 Jerry 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.
Almost without exception, they professed themselves well pleased. Of course, that was what the sales department wanted to hear about—satisfied customers.
As to why our subjects felt better after trying a new dentifrice, they couldn’t say because they didn’t know. It was merely that their outlook on life seemed to have become sunnier, and their personal relations more agreeable—apart from a few unfortunate domestic upsets, about which, however, the victims themselves seemed remarkably cheerful.
I thought I knew why. My pet theory was working out. Though I was no psychologist, I’d always been sure that a lot of people’s mental difficulties and prevailing unhappiness was due solely to their inveterate habit of deceiving themselves. But these people who’d tried Grandma’s lie soap couldn’t even lie to themselves any more.
This outcome made our brave new world look braver in prospect—as well as likelier. A couple of days later the company’s directors made the decision to go into production; and it was rumored that another of the biggest firms was already dickering for a look at the formula.
We had no trouble with the Bureau of Standards. After all, we only had to satisfy them that the stuff was harmless. Presumably they tried it on mice . . .
To celebrate the directors’ decision, I invited Alice and her new fiancé to dinner. I was rather vague about what we were celebrating, so that they left no wiser than when they came. But they were much more candid, since I had a supply of the little white tablets on hand.
I gave the leaven most of the evening to work, and at eleven o’clock called Alice’s apartment. I’d timed it correctly. She was in. In tears, too—judging by her voice.
“You and he must have said some pretty nasty things to each other,” I remarked sympathetically. “Too bad about the engagement.”
“Oh, it was awful! He said—he admitted that if it weren’t for my b-bosom— And I told him—oh, how could I say that? But Oliver, how did you know?”
“I saw it coming. And now you’re home all alone, and sort of wishing I was there to console you . . . aren’t you?”
There was one of those pauses I’d learned to recognize. Then she said strangledly, “Y-Yes. I was. I am. But Oliver— people don’t—”
“Sometimes they do,” I said. “Hold on. I’ll be right up.”
When a woman has once told the truth to a man, either everything is over between them, or everything has just begun.
From then on the story is mostly history.
Gorley and Gorley’s new improved toothpaste with Verolin began outselling all other brands. Other companies saw that the new ingredient—for reasons nobody quite understood—was becoming more indispensable than chlorophyll had been somewhat earlier, and paid through the nose for the right to use it. G and G added a Verolin mouthwash to their line, and it was also a snowballing success. All the time, of course, Verolin was really Grandma’s lie soap.
These products blanketed the country and went into the export market. They went all over civilization, if you define civilization as those regions of the Earth where people use toothbrushes and seek to avoid halitosis—or, anyway, all over what was then called “the free world” by its inhabitants and “the enslaved world” by the publicists of the “free world” on the other side.
The returns began coming in.
* * * *
A well-known radio news commentator paused for a refreshing gargle in the mid-break of his program, was unable to continue broadcasting, and resigned the same day.
Various other commentators and newspaper columnists suffered more or less similar fates, while a good many newspapers and periodicals underwent violent shifts of editorial policy.
Half a dozen magazines having th
e word ‘True” in their titles suspended publication.
Quite a few authors, including some more than usually successful ones, abandoned their profession. Surprisingly, those who quit included some who had been praised by the critics for the stark realism of their work, and among those who did not quit were some whose writings were regarded as sheer imaginative flights.
As for the critics, most of them took up useful trades.
A number of university professors conscientiously resigned, stating that they could not teach “facts” which they did not know to be true.
Several hitherto popular and, to their founders, profitable religious cults abruptly disintegrated. In one case there was a riot, when the Prophet of the Luminous Truth appeared in a mass meeting and told his followers some home truths about himself, his doctrines, and themselves.
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