Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  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.

  IV

  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 the 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.

  Most of the churches lost grievously in membership, though at the same time they enjoyed an accession of new converts. Those whose rites included confession complained that, somehow, the act appeared to be losing its deep significance.

  Psychoanalysts at first rejoiced over their sudden wholesale success in overcoming their patients’ “resistances,” and a little later were appalled by their empty waiting rooms.

  The divorce rate skyrocketed, then plunged to a permanent record low. Conversely, the marriage rate at first fell off sharply, then climbed gradually back to normal. The birth rate was unaffected.

  Innumerable lawyers took down their shingles.

  Congressional investigating committees enjoyed a field day, but fell prey to an increasing nervous frustration as witness after witness refused to perjure himself.

  In Washington, D.C., a conservatively-dressed gentleman checked into a hotel, came down to the lobby after brushing his teeth, and in response to a commercial traveler’s casual question said, “My business? Well, I’m a secret agent for the Soviet Union. And you?”

  Police in scores of cities were swamped by confessions of offenses ranging from multiple murder to double parking, and were bewildered by the absence of the expected percentage of false confessions.

  For the first time in modern history, the number of homicides exceeded the number of suicides. In general, crimes of stealth virtually ceased to occur, while crimes of violence continued at about their previous level and reported cases of rape declined spectacularly.

  -Numerous government officials admitted themselves guilty of peculation and malfeasance in office. The business bureaucracy, was even harder hit. Among the casualties was a prominent board member of Gorley and Gorley.

  To my particular satisfaction, the mayor our local machine had elected made a public speech—apparently unaware that he was doing anything out of the way—in which he thanked by name the boys who had purchased the most votes for him in the last campaign, also those who had put in the strong-arm work.

  All the F.B.I. agents doing undercover work in the Communist Party were exposed, and as a result the party went bankrupt for lack of dues paying members.

  As O’Brien had predicted, the advertising business collapsed, burying many lesser enterprises under the ruins. But somehow no general financial panic took place.

  A man from Texas was heard to confess that he sometimes got tired of hearing about Texas, and even admitted it couldn’t be twice as large as the rest of the United States.

  Events such as these were the convulsions, the death throes of an old world and the birth pangs of a new.

  Their final phase was the breakdown of the international situation, which had continued for over a decade in a sort of deadly balance. The balance was destroyed when U. S. and other Western diplomats adopted a new tack which provoked, in their Eastern-bloc opponents, reactions first of suspicious alarm, then of bafflement, and finally of a dazed conviction that the spirit of Marxian history had at long last delivered the enemy into their hands—which last impression led directly to their undoing.

  Forgetting the chiseler’s basic precept—you can’t cheat an honest man—they set about exploiting the situation by extracting from the West all the technical information they coveted, and which was now theirs for the asking. Along with plutonium refinement methods and guided missile designs, they obtained, naturally, the formula for Grandma’s lie soap, alias Verolin.

  The counterparts of Gorley
and Gorley’s sales department, in their government-run industries, were also shrewdly alive to the importance of having satisfied customers. Clearly, they reasoned, studying our records, this is a good thing, this is a valuable bit of kul’tura . . .

  From there on developments followed pretty much the pattern already established in the West. There were some painful incidents, such as the Kiev massacre of former secret police agents, and the three days when Pravda shut down to retool. But on the whole, the reaction was more than anything else like that of a man who comes to the top and takes breath at last, after very nearly drowning.

  The Iron Curtain sagged, fell apart, and sank into oblivion. Grandma’s lie soap had conquered the world.

  V

  SINCE I retired, I’ve been using my leisure in exploration and observation of this world which I did a good deal to create, this world which differs so much from the one I grew up in and can remember better than most others even of my own generation. They’ve had the treatment, and they’ve changed. But I still brush my teeth with a salt-and-soda mixture.

  In many ways, the present era answers to the visions that were called Utopian when I was a boy—called that, usually, with a sneer.

  A lot of the social and political reforms we only dreamed about then have been carried out as a matter of course which was inevitable once people stopped lying themselves and one another black in the face.

  Mental diseases, tangled lives, crime have all been swept away—not to mention the threat of war that was the Great Shadow over-lying all the lesser shadows of the old world.

  An election campaign now is carried on in an atmosphere of sobriety and statesmanship that would have given an old-time politician the creeps. None of the old bandstand, circus stuff . . . Speaking of that, one thing I miss is the circus. I used to like to listen to the sideshow barkers—an extinct tribe. I know, they still have circuses, or call them that; but P. T. Barnum would disown them.

  But . . . people look one another in the eyes much more than they ever used to. They don’t seem afraid. There’s confidence—not the ballooning confidence that led to big economic booms and bigger busts, but a trust resting on solid foundations.

  Still, sometimes I wonder.

  Not long ago I ran into O’Brien, for the first time in years, in a bar. People don’t drink as much as they did, but O’Brien had been drinking a good deal.

  “How are you?” I said automatically, the sight of such a long-remembered face making me forget that that particular greeting wasn’t used nowadays.

  He began a detailed description of his general state of health and present state of intoxication. “Oh,” I said. “You’ve had it.”

  “Yeah,” said O’Brien.” I broke down and took the treatment. I got like everybody else. I couldn’t stand the temptation any more. You know what I mean?”

  I knew exactly what he meant. For him, with his background, it must have been much worse.

  “Maybe,” said O’Brien thickly,” I could have been dictator of the world if I’d wanted. But this way’s better.” He signaled the waiter, then looked at me curiously. “You—not yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Maybe never. I like to watch things.”

  “Watch the sheep run,” mumbled O’Brien. “All sheep . . .”

  He was drunk, but he’d had Grandma’s lie soap, and he spoke the truth.

  Perhaps there’s too much confidence.

  Once in a while I yield a little to that temptation O’Brien mentioned, but always in harmless ways, merely for amusement or out of curiosity to see just how much people will swallow. Like in that fabrication of Howling Wolf, the genius of the North Woods, which I told you about in the beginning. More and more I find that they’ll believe almost anything, especially the younger generation. Older people still have a residuum of skepticism.

  Now it’s plain—using hindsight—that we should easily have foreseen the secondary effect. But it developed very slowly. No physiological effect, this, but a psychological one—or simply logical. Once people stop lying, they’ll also stop suspecting deceit. They’ll believe as they expect to be believed. Little by little, particularly as the young ones who don’t remember grow up, they’ll become totally—gullible, it used to be called.

  A while back, down South, there was an unwashed prophet who made converts right and left to a weird sect of his own devising—until somebody seduced him into heathenish ways, and he tried brushing his teeth. But incidents like that don’t really disturb me. As the example shows, they all come out in the wash.

  Yet there is something that bothers me. Back before Grandma’s lie soap, we used to get sporadic reports of “mysterious airships,” “Flying saucers,” or similarly named equivalents for unexplained objects in the sky. We laughed them off, mostly, because people were always starting crazy rumors . . . After the great change, those reports might have been expected to stop coming.

  But they didn’t.

  And more recently there have been some queer phenomena noted by the space station and the bubbles on the Moon.

  So suppose we’re not alone in the Universe or even in the Solar System? And suppose that whoever is out there—circling us, observing us with immense caution for so long—are beings like we used to be—fierce, wary, enormously suspicious as their behavior suggests, capable of any falsehood, any treachery?

  Wolves, circling the sheep . . .

  Perhaps it’s all my imagination. I can’t be sure. There’s only one way I can be sure even of what I think myself.

  Pretty soon now I’ll go into the bathroom and wash my mouth with Grandma’s lie soap. Then I’ll look into the mirror and ask myself, face to face, with no possibility of deception: Did I do right?

  What will my answer be?

  ONE OF THEM?

  “You made me what I am—and now you treat me like this?”

  THE STOREROOM was black dark, a sightless, untenanted wilderness of piled boxes, drums, carboys, and steel pressure-bottles taller than a man. But at its end, a door gave on the workshop; and that great hall was a witches’ cavern of smoldering light.

  The light was red-hued—most of it, actually, was invisible, infrared, mixed with other knowingly-selected and precisely-metered wavelengths. It seeped upward through the heavy glass of the long banks of breeder vats, glinted back dully red from the jungle above them—pumps, cables, feeding tubes, valves, timers, indicators. A railed catwalk circled the dim cavern over the glowing vats, but no one was there now, no one on the floor below. Hours ago the workers had been herded to their barracks a mile away: the overseers had gone home to their families; and only the automatic machinery was on the job.

  He paused in the doorway, with feet braced wide and head held high, with arms and shoulders dragged downward by the wooden box he carried. He was going to have to pass through the light out there in the shop, but it didn’t matter. No one could look in from outdoors. The Factory was windowless, its controlled conditions sealed away from all changing weather . . .

  At that thought, his lips skinned back over his teeth. Here, he told himself, comes a condition They jailed to control.

  He stepped heavily out onto the walkway, and trudged along it, awkwardly lugging the box before him. Not hurrying any more; a curious confidence had come to him. Since he had got this far, nothing could come between him and his purpose.

  Certainly, nobody had cause to visit the Factory at this hour; and he had hit the watchman outside hard enough to put him out for a long time, if not forever.

  Besides, he somehow felt that to hurry now would be unseemly, out of keeping with the solemnity of the deed he had come to do.

  The catwalk seemed endless, sweeping from shadow to shadow. Beneath his feet, the ranked breeder vats glowed upward, their rounded translucent covers like enormous membranes engorged with blood, inwardly lit with varying luminosities, from staring ruby to smoky garnet. They seemed to pulse with silent heartbeats of light as he walked above them, but that was only imagination.

 
; In the silence beyond his footfalls he heard the quiet labor of the pumps, the faint snick of opening and closing valves, the measured trickle of nutrient fluids.

  The vats were a row of great swollen wombs, athrob with growing life. That was no imagination; it was fact. From the fine shadings of their light, a practised eye could gauge the development of the plasm within, estimate closely the time left until it must be discharged from the breeder to undergo its final processing on the reception line in the basement.

  AS HE STALKED onward with his burden, he noted mechanically that one of the vats set against the opposite wall was almost dark; only a ghost of red glow lingered. That meant that the contained plasm was virtually mature, the glass womb ready to give birth.

  Someone had slipped up badly, there. By time for the morning shift to come on duty, the critical moment would have gone by, the carefully nourished and irradiated fruit would be past-ripe, a total loss . . .

  Not that it mattered, he reminded himself, and his mouth twitched grimly again. Tomorrow morning They would have far more to worry about than one item of spoilage in the Factory’s daily output.

  The farther end of the shop solidified out of the red gloom; here the walkway terminated in a stage at its own level. Bins along the wall held small tools and replacement parts, and workers’ smocks hung from a row of hooks. On his right, steps led down to the floor level, and a door opened blackly on what he knew to be a locker room.

  With great care he set the wooden box down, close by the wall. He glanced upward, gauging distance, and slid the case gently a few inches along the floor, so it was directly below the black-painted steel switchbox bolted to the wall near the ceiling.

  He straightened, flexing stiff muscles. But this was the easy part. The hard steps—so hard there had been several moments when he almost despaired of carrying out his plan—had been getting over the high fence, stalking the watchman; then—fearful every second of being seen by a chance passerby, or stumbling on some alarm—opening outer gate and storeroom door and staggering painfully inside with double the load he’d just set down.