My jaw dropped. ‘The whole thing? Gags, continuity, everything for the Hymie Davis show?”
“We’re dropping Hymie Davis. No more comics for Navigator.” He paused and sat back in his chair, fixing me all the time with his eyes. It was a familiar item out of his bag of tricks, something to preamble any announcement of more than usual weight. At one time it had had an effect on me, but I had grown much too accustomed to it, and the suspense had worn thin. As he looked at me, I could think only of a carnivorous lizard peering through jungle foliage with unblinking eyes.
“You’re OK, sport,” he said at last. “You’ve been doing a good job. I think it’s time I let you in on my long-range planning.” He paused again, not as long this time. “Know why I hired you?”
“No.”
“To shut you up. I didn’t know, at the time, that I’d got myself such a good man in the bargain. Main thing was to have you here where I could watch you—not out somewhere writing a TV column read by millions.” He fished in his desk and came up with a yellowed clipping. He handed it to me. It was a piece out of my old column. In one phrase, “. . . their relaxed, mesmeric commercials . . . ,” one word had been heavily circled in pencil: mesmeric.
“You see?” said Beaumont “You were catching on. I had to get to you, keep you from spilling the beans.”
“Catching on? Spilling the beans about what?”
He took time out to light a cigarette. I noticed it was not a Navigator. “That’s a touchy word, mesmeric.”
I nodded, adding, “But isn’t our method essentially the hypnotic technique?”
He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Sure. What advertising isn’t? They all use repetition and such devices to hammer home the message. They all try to induce a conditioned reflex of sorts. What we’re doing is no different—except that it’s more efficient. Talk about penetration!” He chuckled, broke off and shot a question at me. “Ever smoke a Navigator?”
“Just one.”
“Lousy, wasn’t it?”
“Terrible.”
“Seen the latest sales reports?”
“Not the latest . . .”
“Then I’ve got news for you. Navigator is outselling every other cigarette on the market, cancer scare or not. And it’s junk. Can you tell me why?”
It didn’t take long for that to sink in. “You’re not serious, Ted.”
“I am serious. There’s no other explanation. No person in his right mind would smoke a Navigator unless he had been ordered to smoke it”
He leaned forward. “I discovered Navigator. I looked around to find the shoddiest product on the market. Something absolutely without merit, slated to collapse. Navigator fitted the description perfectly. I offered them my services for a fee so ridiculously cheap they couldn’t refuse. And until sales began to pick up, I even bought air time out of my own pocket.”
“I don’t get it, Ted. Why would you deliberately go out of your way to promote a weed like Navigator?”
“You’re slow, boy. It was a test. A dry run. A preliminary before the main event.” His lips pulled back and revealed his teeth: I guess you’d call it a smile for want of a better word. “It worked. That’s all I wanted to know. Now I’m ready for the real thing. Are you with me?”
I felt almost hypnotized myself. At any rate, I had always found it difficult to say no to Beaumont. So I nodded, swallowing hard. Yes, I was with him.
He mapped it out. Hymie Davis was to be replaced by a daily quarter-hour of news comment. The standard Navigator commercial would be given by the commentator himself (Hatfield Crain, no less) at the start of the telecast. Almost without modulation of any kind, he would slip into the news of the day: reportage, comment, opinion. Lots of opinion. And, all the while, next to him, a globe of the world would spin slowly, evenly.
I stayed with Beaumont for nearly two years after the news show began. It took that long for me to grasp how really “long-range” his planning was. By that time, it was too late. All I could do was quit. Don’t think it was easy. Leaving big money like that is never easy. One morning, however, I didn’t go down to the office. Instead, I packed my effects and got on a train to another city. I’m there now, writing catalog copy for an obscure mail-order house. I’m making $65 a week and the work is pure drudgery, but Beaumont won’t find me here.
Once in a great while I sell a piece to a magazine, under a nom-de-plume, to bring in a little extra revenue. That’s really the only reason I wrote this. It won’t do any good you understand. It’s too late for that. But at least you’ll know the reason when an overwhelming majority votes for Theodore Beaumont at the next presidential election.
Because they will. Just as sure as they lit up Navigators this morning, they will.
<
* * * *
GRANDMA’S LIE SOAP
by Robert Abernathy
I do not know Roger Thorne. I had never read anything of his, before “Take a Deep Breath,” and I do not know whether he is an established author, whether he has written any fantasy before, or for that matter, whether his story is fantasy at all.
I do know Robert Abernathy, and I am, I think, inclined to regret my certainty that his story could not be anything but fantasy. It can’t happen here. . . .
* * * *
Of course you’ll believe this story. Everybody will. The funny thing is that it could be a lie . . .
To make that point clearer: A little while ago I happened to be at a gathering of literary amateurs and critics, one of those sprawling aimless affairs where people mill around with drinks in their hands, congealing in little clusters to talk or listen to somebody talk.
I listened. I heard a serious, bespectacled young man discourse not unintelligently on Proust, and I heard a plump gentleman make some safe, sound comments on Faulkner.
Nobody disagreed with them. Nobody argued. Nobody even said, “But—”
I can remember when arguments were the order of the day.
After I’d had a little more of it than I could stand, I spoke up. “Say what you like about those scribblers,” I declared firmly, “none of them can hold a candle to Wolf.”
“Thomas?” someone asked—not with the air of being about to contradict me, but merely as one sincerely, infuriatingly desiring instruction.
“No, Howling,” I retorted with flamboyant irony. “Do you mean to say you never heard of Howling Wolf, the genius of the North Woods, the greatest author of all time? The one writer who grasped the human soul in all its depth, breadth, and angular momentum? Who painted Life in its true colors on a canvas vast as all Nature, with a non-union brush? Who sounded every note of emotional experience, and rang all the bells in belles lettres? Who—”
I ran out of breath, paused, and added, “Of course, unfortunately all of Wolf’s mighty works were written in his native language, which happened to be Chinook Trade Jargon, and they’ve never been translated. So if you don’t know the Jargon . . .”
At my age I should have known better. Naturally, every word I uttered was gospel but all I got back were earnest requests for more information about the great Wolf. To explain that I’d just been kidding—that I say such things experimentally and to keep in practice as one of the few remaining liars in a truthful world—would have been worse than useless. It would have been cruelty to talking animals.
I mumbled, “Pardon me,” to all the nice, candid, inquisitive, credulous faces. I grabbed my hat and pulled it over my eyes and ducked out. Not that I imagined I’d get away from the consequences. I could already envisage how the ripples would spread. For a long while to come I’d get inquiries in the mail from literary clubs, collectors, compilers of biographical dictionaries. Probably there’d be a Howling Wolf Commemorative Society organized, and if I told them he was buried at the bottom of the Chicago Drainage Canal, they’d go and strew posies there.
But this is not the story of Howling Wolf. It is the story of Grandma’s lie soap.
When I first remember Grandma, back wh
en I was one of the numerous grandchildren—my brothers, sisters, and assorted cousins who overran the old hill-country farm during vacations—she was already a dried-up little old lady who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, with a brown, wrinkled face and intolerant black eyes.
She ruled the farm with an iron hand and my two taciturn uncles, who did the heavy work, moved silently about, tending to chores, crops, and stock in obedience to her orders. The farm thrived, too. Even in bad years, when other people’s corn was stunted and wells ran dry, nothing of the sort befell Grandma.
Sometimes—though I didn’t know this until I was older— the neighbors muttered, and insisted, obviously out of envy, there was something queer about Grandma. Queerness they detected, I suppose, in her fondness for cats—which most of the country people tolerated without affection—and in her long walks in the woods by herself, gathering plants that she dried and kept in unlabeled jars.
Too, a tradition had it that back in England in the seventeenth century one of her female ancestors had been accused of bewitching cattle by the celebrated witchfinder, Mr. Samson Broadforks, who fell ill shortly afterward of an ailment believed to be foot-and-mouth disease. Be that as it may, the ancestor in question emigrated to America around that time.
But we children, of course, saw nothing odd about our Grandma. Childishly, we assumed that everybody had a grandmother who kept a piece of lie soap on the high shelf over the washstand.
This was a chunk of strong brown soap, like all the rest of the boiled-fat products that Grandma made in the old iron wash-kettle after hog-killing. But it wasn’t ordinary soap. It was made separately and privately, from some of the herbs that Grandma had in her jars, from a recipe she kept in her head and nowhere else.
Because, you see, another thing about Grandma was that she couldn’t abide being lied to. Not, I’m sure, out of any abstract devotion to Truth, but simply because the idea of anyone fooling her made her furious. If somebody tried it, and that somebody was one of her own grandchildren, she knew what to do . . .
For instance, I can still vividly recall the time when my city cousin Richard first came visiting on the farm. This Richard was a pale, supercilious brat who lived in New York City. As soon as he made sure that no one else on the farm had been similarly blessed, he sized us up for yokels and set about overawing us with the marvels of the metropolis.
Grandma, busy round the kitchen range, listened silently for a while. But we who knew her well could see the storm warnings going up—the tightening lips and the dangerous gleam in her eye. Richard didn’t see anything, naturally. He finished describing the George Washington Bridge and went on to the skyscrapers.
That did it. Grandma slammed a skillet down and fastened a harpy grip on Richard’s collar. “Come along, young man,” she said grimly. “You needn’t think you can pull my leg!”
And she wagged him off to the washstand, the rest of us trailing after in delighted horror.
“Oliver”—Grandma addressed me, because I was already a gangling thirteen then “—reach me down the lie soap!”
I did so, gingerly, and before the bawling Richard knew what was happening he was sputtering through a haze of suds, his mouth thoroughly washed out with the strong soap.
“Now!” said Grandma briskly, releasing him and stepping back. “Take a dipper of water, and then answer me: Were you or weren’t you exaggerating when you said there was buildings there ten miles high?”
Richard opened and closed his mouth. He grew red in the face with effort. He said, “N . . . N . . . Yes, ma’am, I was exaggerating.”
You could see that he was thunderstruck to find that he couldn’t do anything but tell the truth. He had yet to learn what the rest of us knew and took for granted. Once anybody had his mouth washed out with Grandma’s lie soap, he could never again in this life speak a falsehood, however much he might want to.
A quarter of an hour later, Grandma had mollified Richard with bread and jam and encouraged him to talk some more. She listened with keen interest as he described the Holland Tunnel, nodding her head occasionally and exclaiming, “My, my! Who would have thought it?”
Now, you see, she knew that every word was true.
If I’d been smarter—but maybe I’m still not smart, except in hindsight—I might have seen the shape of things to come in that incident. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.
* * * *
At one time or another, all of Grandma’s grandchildren got their mouths washed with the lie soap—all but me. Why I was spared, I’ve often wondered. It wasn’t for lack of provocation, that’s certain. I’ve thought perhaps Grandma had an intuitive grasp of scientific method, and kept me as a control. Or . . . well, so far as I know, Grandma was the only one of the family in her generation who possessed the secret of the lie soap, and she didn’t pass it on to any of her children, who were all sober, truthful, financially unsuccessful citizens. But I’m pretty sure that Grandma herself never got the lie soap treatment as a child.
I grew up, and summers on the farm receded into memory. I went to college, specialized in chemistry, and emerged with rosy visions of science remaking the world. I fell then, naturally, into a research job with Gorley and Gorley, who at that time were one of the bigger companies making chemicals, synthetics, cleansers, pharmaceuticals and the like.
The laboratories which I shared with a number of other young and not-so-young research men were magnificent, their chrome-and-porcelain splendor making the university labs seem small and dingy by comparison.
Here I had the facilities and—assigned work being light at the time—the spare time to follow up a project of which I’d become enamored in school—a line on antibiotic synthesis. I almost lived in that lab until I had enough results to make up a summary of them, together with an urgent request for materials needed to carry the investigation through.
I submitted this report to the Co-ordinator, a fussy, harassed little man, who nervously promised to call it to the attention of the front office, and assigned me to work on the problem of producing a red detergent powder that would not make pink suds.
Time went by and nothing happened. Naturally I reminded the Co-ordinator, but he assured me that the matter had merely slipped his mind. To make a sad story short, I finally found out how things worked. Communications between the research department and the front office, i.e. the sales department, went only one way.
When the latter had decided just what sort of epoch-making miracle of modern science the buying public was ripe for, word would come down, and if we happened to have such a miracle on hand, well and good. Otherwise, we could produce it, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in time for the scheduled start of the advertising campaign.
It was O’Brien who first explained this system in full to me. O’Brien was an Assistant Sales Manager and an advertising man from way back. But he was also a human being.
“Over there with your test tubes, kid,” he said bluntly. “You’re playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Sometimes you hit, oftener you miss. But you’re never quite sure in advance. Right?”
I had to admit he had hit on a pretty fair description of scientific research in general.
“But,” said O’Brien, “by us in Sales it’s hit, hit, hit, all the time. We can’t wait for you boys to get that tail pinned on straight. But sometimes you do, don’t you?” He sighed.
“God help us, some of the characters I associate with don’t even know that. They can’t see any difference between having something to sell and having to sell something. So when you do hit, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do at my end.”
He was as good as his word, too. A couple of times when we’d fumbled around and come up with a product that people really needed, something to keep them from dying, for instance, or to make not dying worth their while, he went to bat for us in the sales department.
I’ve described at length the situation at Gorley and Gorley, first because it had a direct bearing on what happened later, and second because
it was typical of a way of life which is past, and which the younger generation nowadays has difficulty even in imagining. I’m referring, of course, to the middle of the twentieth century with its feverish atmosphere of compulsory Progress or a reasonable facsimile thereof and of the glitter that was sometimes gold.
It was the era of the false front, the false rear and the questionable middle, of scandal, slander, and the Hard Sell. It was also the Age of the Big Lie, as somebody called it. But it was even more the age of the little half-truth.
During those years when I was growing up—a painful process then, though it doesn’t seem to be so any more—my education progressed along other lines as well.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology] Page 21
