The Penultimate Truth

"I wouldn't," Nicholas said.

Adams said, "I would." His face writhed, in suffering, and with what seemed to Nicholas as authentic and unmistakable devouring yearning. "I wish to god I were in on it; I wish I were sitting in my office at the Agency right now, at 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, monitoring this transmission as it goes out over the coax. It's my job. Was my job. But the fog scared me, the loneliness; I let it get me. But I could go back now and it wouldn't get me; I wouldn't let it. Because this is so important; we were working up to this all the time, this moment when we had to account for it all. Even if we didn't know. It added up to this _and I'm not there_, now that this moment's finally come; I'm off and hiding--I ran." His suffering, the sense of loss, the knowing he was severed from them and it, palpably grew, made him gag as if he had been brutally butted in the depths of his stomach; as if physically thrust back so that now he was falling, and helplessly, with nothing to cling to: Adams caught at the empty air, flailing, futile. And yet still he was trying.

"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 i

"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 ma

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 a

In October of 1962, Ke

A year and a month later, in November of 1963, President Ke

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: