The Penultimate Truth

THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

 by Philip K. Dick

1

     A fog can drift in from outside and get you; it can invade. At the long high window of his library--an Ozymandiasian structure built from concrete chunks that had once in another age formed an entrance ramp to the Bayshore Freeway--Joseph Adams pondered, watched the fog, that of the Pacific. And because this was evening and the world was darkening, this fog scared him as much as that other fog, the one inside which did not invade but stretched and stirred and filled the empty portions of the body. Usually the latter fog is called loneliness.

     "Fix me a drink," Colleen said plaintively from behind him.

     "Your arm," he said, "it fell off? You can't squeeze the lemon?" He turned from the window with its view of dead trees, the Pacific beyond and its layer in the sky, darkness hanging and approaching, and for a moment actually considered fixing her the drink. And then he knew what he had to do, where he had to be:

     At the marble-top desk which had been salvaged from a bombed-out house in the Russian Hill section of the former city of San Francisco he seated himself at the rhetorizor, touched its _on_-tab.

     Groaning, Colleen disappeared to search for a leady to fix her the drink. Joseph Adams, at his desk and rhetorizor, heard her go and was glad. For some reason--but here he did not care to probe his own mind too deeply--he was lonelier with Colleen Hackett than without her, and anyhow late on Sunday night he fixed a dreadful drink; it was always too sweet, as if by mistake one of his leadies had dug up a bottle of Tokay and he had used it, not dry vermouth, in the martinis. Ironically, left to themselves, the leadies never made that error . . . was this an omen? Joe Adams wondered. Are they getting smarter than us?

     At the keyboard of the rhetorizor he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted. _Squirrel_. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective _smart_.

     "Okay," he said, aloud, and sat back, touched the rerun tab.

     The rhetorizor, as Colleen reentered the library with her tall gin drink, began to construct for him in the auddimension. "It is a wise old squirrel," it said tinnily (it possessed only a two-inch speaker), "and yet this little fellow's wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed it--"

     "Aw god," Joe Adams said savagely, and slapped off the sleek, steel and plastic machine with all its many microcomponents; it became silent. He then noticed Colleen. "Sorry. But I'm tired. Why can't they, Brose or General Holt or Marshal Harenzany, _somebody_ in a position of responsibility, put Sunday night somewhere between Friday noon and--"

     "Dear," Colleen said, and sighed. "I heard you type out only two semantic units. Give it more to ogpon."

     "I'll give it plenty to ogpon." He touched the _no_-tab, typed a whole sentence, as Colleen stood behind him, sipping and watching. "Okay?"

     "I just can never tell about you," Colleen said. "If you passionately love your job or hate it." She read the sentence aloud. " 'The well-informed dead rat romped under the tongue-tied pink log.'"

     "Listen," he said grimly. "I want to see what this stupid assist that cost me fifteen thousand Wes-Dem dollars is going to do with that. I'm serious; I'm waiting." He jabbed the rerun tab of the machine.

     "When's the speech due?" she asked.

     "Tomorrow."

     "Get up early."

     "Oh no." He thought, I hate it even more when it's early.

     The rhetorizor, in its cricket's voice, intoned folksily. "We think of rats, of course, as our enemy. But consider their vast value to us in cancer research alone. The lowly rat has done yeoman's service for huma--"

     Again, at his savage instigation, it died into silence.

     "--nity," Colleen said distantly; she was inspecting the authentic long-ago dug up Epstein bust in the niche that divided the west wall shelves of books, where Joseph Adams kept his reference texts on TV commercials of the last, past, great twentieth century, in particular the religious and the Mars candy bar inspired creations of Stan Freberg. "A miserable metaphor," she murmured. "A yeoman rat . . . yeomen were young villagers during the Medieval period, and I bet even though you're such a pro you didn't know that." She nodded to a leady which had come to the library door at her request. "Get my cloak and have my flapple brought to the main entrance." To Joe she said, "I'm flapping back to my own villa." When he didn't answer she said, "Joe, try it, the entire speech, without that assist; write it in your own words. And then you won't have 'yeoman rats' to make you so cross."

     He thought, I don't think honestly I could do it, in my own words, without this machine; I'm hooked on it now.

     Outside, the fog had managed a complete success; he saw, with one brief sideways glance, that it inhabited the world right to the window of his library. Well, he thought, anyhow we're spared another one of those brilliant, radioactive-particles-in-suspension-for-all-eternity sunsets.

     "Your flapple, Miss Hackett," the leady announced, "is at the main entrance and I hear by remote that your type II chauffeur holds the door open for you. And due to the evening vapors one of Mr. Adams' household servants will shed warm air about you until you are tucked safely inside."

     "Jeez," Joseph Adams said, and shook his head.

     Colleen said, "You teached it, dear. It got its precious jargony linguistic habits straight out of you."

     "Because," he said bitterly, "I like style and pomp and ritual." Turning to her, appealing, he said, "Brose told me in a memo, it showed up at the Agency directly from his own bureau in Geneva, that this speech has to use a squirrel as the operational entity. What can you say about them that hasn't already been said? They save; they're thrifty. We know that. Do they do anything else good that you know of, that you could _hang_ a goddam _moral_ on?" And he thought, they're all dead. There just isn't such a life form any more. But we still extol its virtues . . . after having exterminated it as a race.

     On the keyboard of the rhetorizor he vigorously, with deliberation, punched two new semantic units. _Squirrel_. And--_genocide_.

     The machine, presently, declared, "The funniest thing happened to me on my way to the bank, yesterday. I happened to pass through Central Park, and you know how--"

     Incredulous, staring at the machine, Joe said, "_You_ passed through Central Park yesterday? Central Park's been gone forty years."

     "Joe, it's just a machine." Cloak on, she returned momentarily to kiss him goodnight.

     "But the thing's insane," he protested. "And it said 'funny' when I fed in _genocide_. Did you--"

     "It's reminiscing," Colleen said, trying to explain it to him; she knelt briefly, touched his face with her fingers and peered at him, eye to eye. "I love you," she said, "but you're going to die; you're going to rupture yourself working. Through my office at the Agency I'll file a formal petition to Brose, asking if you can take two weeks off. I have something for you, a gift; one of my leadies dug it up near my villa; legally within the boundaries of my demesne, as per that recent little interchange my leadies had with those of my north neighbor's."

     "A book." He felt a flicker within him, the peaked flame of life.

     "An especially good book, the real prewar thing, not a Xeroxed copy. Know what of?"

     "_Alice in Wonderland_." He had heard so much about that, had always wanted to own it and read it.

     "Better. One of those outrageously funny books from the 1960s--in good shape: both front and back covers intact. A self-help book; _How I Tranquilized Myself by Drinking Onion Juice_ or some such thing. _I Made a Million Dollars by Leading Two-And-a-Half Lives For the FBI_. Or--"

     He said, "Colleen, one day I looked out the window and I saw a squirrel."

     Staring at him she said, "No."

     "The tail; you can't mistake the tail. It's as round and fat and gray as a bottle brush. And they hop like this." He made a wicket-motion with his hand, showing her, trying to recapture it, for himself, too. "I squalled; I got four of my leadies out there with--" He shrugged. "Anyhow they finally came back and said, 'There's no such thing out there, dominus,' or some darn remark." He was silent a moment. It had, of course, been a hypnagogic hallucination, based on too many drinks and too little sleep. He knew it. The leadies knew it. And now Colleen knew it. "But just suppose," he said, then.

     "Write, in your own words, how you felt. By hand on paper--not dictated into a recorder. What finding a thriving, living squirrel would have meant to you." She gestured scathingly at his fifteen thousand dollar rhetorizor. "Not what it thinks. And--"

     "And Brose himself," he said, "would strike it. Maybe I could get it through the 'vac, to the sim and then on tape; I think it'd go that far. But never past Geneva. Because I wouldn't be saying, in effect, 'Come on, fellas; carry on.' I'd be saying--" He considered feeling peaceful for a moment now. "I'll try," he decided, and rose to his feet, pushing his old-California wicker chair back. "Okay, I'll even do it in longhand; I'll find a--what do you call them?"

     "Ballpoint pen. Think of your cousin who was killed in the war: Ken. Then remember you're both men. Then you have it: pen."

     He nodded. "And program the 'vac direct from that. You might be right; it'd be depressing but at least it wouldn't make me sick stomachwise; I wouldn't get those pyloric spasms." He began searching around the library for--what had she called it?

     Still on rerun, the rhetorizor squeaked to itself, ". . . and that little fellow; inside that head was packed a powerful lot of savvy. Maybe even more than you or I can ever guess. And I think we can learn from him." It droned on. Inside it thousands of microcomponents spun the problem from a dozen drums of info-data; it could go on forever, but Joe Adams was busy; now he had found a pen and all he needed was blank white paper. Hell, he surely had _that_; he beckoned to the leady waiting to escort Colleen to her flapple.

     "Get the staff," he instructed it, "to search up paper for me to write on. Go through every room of the villa, including all the bedrooms, even those not currently in use. I distinctly remember seeing a folio or packet of it, however it used to come. It was dug up."

     By direct radio contact the leady passed on his command and he felt the building stir, through the villa's fifty-odd rooms, his staff moving into activity from the spot where each had halted after its last task. He, the dominus, sensed, with the soles of his feet, the burgeoning life of this his building and some of the inside fog went away, even though they were only what the Czechs had called _robots_, their crazy word for _workers_.

     But, outside, the fog scratched at the window.

     And when Colleen left, he knew, it would pluck and scrape, try to get in, more determinedly.

     He wished it were Monday and he were at the Agency, in New York at his office, with other Yance-men around him. And the life there would not be the movement of dead--or rather, to be fair, unliving--things. But the reality itself.

     "I can tell you," he said suddenly. "I love my work. In fact I've got to have it; there's nothing else. Not this--" He gestured at the room in which they stood, then at the murky, clouded-over window.

     "Like a drug," Colleen said, perceptively.

     "Okay." He nodded. "To use the archaic expression, 'I'll purchase that.'"

     "Some linguist," she said gently. "It's _buy_. Maybe you ought to use that machine after all."

     "No," he said, at once. "You were right; I'm going all the way back to trying it direct, on my own." Any moment now one of his staff of leadies would come clanking in with blank white paper; he was sure he possessed it, somewhere. And if he didn't he could swap some item with a neighbor, make a trip, surrounded and protected, of course, by his entourage of leadies, to the demesne and villa to the south, that of Ferris Granville. Ferris would have paper; he had told them on the open-channel vidline last week, composing his--god forbid--memoirs.

     Whatever in, on or over Earth memoirs were.