John MacVeagh stood alone in his office, hearing the whir of presses and the rushing of feet outside. This was his, the greatest tool of good in the world’s history.
“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Genesis, as Chief Hanby would say, one, thirty-one.
He did not stay too late at the office that night.
John MacVeagh reached over to the night table for a cigarette. There are times when even a confirmed pipe smoker uses them. In the glow of the match he saw Laura’s face, relaxed and perfect.
“Want one?”
“No thanks, dear.”
He took in a deep breath of smoke and let it out slowly. “Do you love me?” he asked gently.
“What do you think?” She moved closer and laid her head on his shoulder.
He felt a stirring of discontent, of compunction. “But I— Do you really love me? Not just because of that interview—what I made you say, but—”
Laura laughed. “You didn’t make me say it. Except that your being you is what makes me love you, and that’s what made me say it. Of course I love you. I know I’ve been frightfully slow realizing it, but now—”
“I want you to love me. I want you really to love me, of your own self—”
But even as he spoke, he realized the hopelessness of his longing. That could never be now. He had forcibly made her into a thing that loved him, and that “love” was no more like true love than the affection of a female robot or—he shuddered a little—the attentions of the moronic ghost that brought love to Professor Guildea.
He could not even revoke this forced love, unless by figuring some means of printing that she did not love him. And that then would be true, and forbid all possibility of the real love that she might eventually have felt for him.
He was trapped. His power and his ingenuity had made him the only man on earth who had not the slightest chance of ever feeling the true, unfeigned, unforced love of his wife.
It was this that brought it all into focus. MacVeagh understood now the nagging discontent that had been gnawing at him. He looked at everything that he had made, and behold, he felt only annoyance and impatience.
He tried to phrase it once or twice:
“Jake, supposing you knew it was only a trick, this change in your beliefs. It was just a hoax, a bad practical joke played on you.”
“How could it be? I used to have crazy ideas. I used to think I was too smart to believe. Now I know different. That’s no joke.”
“Father Byrne, do you think this labor agreement could have been reached without outside pressure? That men and management really could have got together like this?”
“They did, didn’t they, John? I don’t understand what you mean about outside pressure—unless,” the priest added, smiling, “you think my prayers were a form of undue influence?”
MacVeagh did not try to explain what God had answered those prayers. Even if you could persuade people of the actual state of things, that he and the Sentinel had made them what they were, the truth would remain the truth.
He realized that when Molly came back to the office. For Molly knew the whole story and understood. She understood too well. Her first words when they were alone were, “Boss, I’m really dead, aren’t I?”
He tried to pretend not to understand. He tried to bluff through it, pass it off as nothing. But she was too sure. She insisted, “I died that night.” Her voice was a rough croak. He had forgotten to specify a miraculous recovery of the iodine-eaten vocal cords.
At last he nodded, without a word.
“I suppose I ought to thank you, boss. I don’t know if I do— I guess I do, though Laura came to see me in the hospital and talked. If she loves you, you’re happy. And if you’re happy, boss, life’s worth living.”
“Happy—” Then his words began to tumble out. Molly was the first person, the only person that he could talk to about his new discovery: the drawback of omnipotence.
“You see,” he tried to make it clear, “truth has a meaning, a value, only because it’s outside of us. It’s something outside that’s real and valid, that we can reckon against. When you make the truth yourself it doesn’t have any more meaning. It doesn’t feel like truth. It’s no truer than an author’s characters are to him. Less so, maybe; sometimes they can rebel and lead their own lives. But nothing here in Grover can rebel, or in the world either. But it’s worst here. I don’t know people any more.”
“Especially me,” said Molly.
He touched her shoulder gently. “One thing I didn’t make up, Molly. That’s your friendship for me. I’m grateful for that.”
“Thanks, boss.” Her voice was even rougher. “Then take some advice from me. Get out of Grover for a while. Let your mind get straightened out. See new people that you’ve never done anything to except end the war for them. Take a vacation.”
“I can’t. The paper’s such a responsibility that—”
“Nobody but me knows about it, and I promise to be good. If you’re away, it’ll run just like any other paper. Go on, boss.”
“Maybe you’re right. I’ll try it, Molly. But one thing.”
“Yes, boss?”
“Remember: this has got to be the best-proofread paper in the world.”
Molly nodded and almost smiled.
For an hour after leaving Grover, John MacVeagh felt jittery. He ought to be back at his desk. He ought to be making sure that the Senate didn’t adopt the Smith amendment, that the Army of Occupation in Germany effectively quashed that Hohenzollern Royalist putsch, that nothing serious came of Mr. Hasenberg’s accident at the plant—
Then the jitters left him, and he thought, “Let them make out by themselves. They did once.”
He spent the night at the Motel in Proutyville and enjoyed the soundest sleep he had known in months. In the morning he went next door to chat with the plump garage proprietor, who’d been good company on other trips.
He found a woman there, who answered his “Where’s Ike?” with “Ain’t you heard? He died last week. Too much beer, I guess.”
“But Ike lived on beer.”
“Sure, only he used to drink only as much as he could afford. Then for a while seems like there wasn’t no limit to how much he had, and last week he comes down with this stroke. I’m his daughter-in-law; I’m keeping the joint going. Not that there’s any business in times like these.”
“What do you mean, in times like these?”
“Mister, where you been? Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
“No,” said John MacVeagh dazedly. The daughter-in-law looked after him, not believing her ears.
MacVeagh hardly believed his, either. Not until he reached the metropolis of Zenith was he fully convinced. He studied newspapers there, talked with soldiers and defense workers.
There was no doubt at all. The world was at war.
He guessed the answer roughly. Something about relative truths and spheres of influence. He could work it out clearly later.
His head was spinning as he got back to his parked car. There was a stocky young man in a plain gray suit standing beside it, staring at the name plate GROVER attached to the license.
As MacVeagh started to get in, the young man accosted him. “You from Grover, Mac?”
MacVeagh nodded automatically, and the man slipped into the seat beside him. “We’ve got to have a talk, Mac. A long talk.”
“And who are you?”
“Kruger. FBI.” He flashed a card. “The Bureau is interested in Grover.”
“Look,” said MacVeagh, “I’ve got an appointment at the Zenith Bulletin in five minutes. After that, I’m at your disposal. You can come along,” he added as the G-man hesitated.
“OK, Mac. Start thinking up answers.”
Downtown traffic in Zenith was still fairly heavy, even in wartime. Pedestrian traffic was terrific. MacVeagh pulled his car up in the yellow zone in front of the Bulletin Building. He opened his door and stepped out. Kruger did
the same. Then in an instant MacVeagh was back in the driver’s seat and the car was pulling away.
He had the breaks with him. A hole opened up in the traffic just long enough to ensure his getaway. He knew there were too many bystanders for Kruger to risk a shot. Two blocks away, he deliberately stalled the car in the middle of an intersection. In the confusion of the resulting pile-up he managed to slip away unnoticed.
The car had to be abandoned anyway. Where could he get gas for it with no ration coupons? The important thing was to get away with his skin.
For he had realized in an instant that one of Kruger’s first questions would be, “Where’s your draft card, Mac?” And whatever steps he had to take to solve the magnificent confusion which his godhead had created, he could take none of them in Federal prison as a draft evader.
Molly stared at the tramp who had forced his way into the Sentinel office. “Well,” she growled, “what do you want?”
“Molly, don’t you know me?”
“Boss!”
The huskies on either side of him reluctantly relaxed their grips. “You can go, boys,” she said. They went, in frowning dumbness.
MacVeagh spoke rapidly. “I can’t tell it all to you now, Molly. It’s too long. You won’t believe it, but I’ve had the Feds on my tail. That’s why this choice costume, mostly filth. The rods were the only safe route to Grover. And you thought I should take a vacation—”
“But why—”
“Listen, Molly. I’ve made a world of truth, all right. But that truth holds good only where the Sentinel dominates. There’s an imaginary outside to go with it, an outside that sends me dispatches based on my own statements, that maintains banking relations with our banks, that feeds peacetime programs to our radios, and so on, but it’s a false outside, a world of If. The true outside is what it would be without me: a world at war.”
For a moment Molly gasped speechlessly. Then she said, “Mr. Johansen!”
“What about him?”
“You sent him to the Office of Peacetime Reconstruction. That’s in your world of If. What’s become of him?”
“I never thought of that one. But there are problems enough. It isn’t fair to the people here to make them live in an unreal world, even if it’s better than the real one. Man isn’t man all by himself. Man is in and of his time and the rest of mankind. If he’s false to his time, he’s false to himself. Grover’s going to rejoin the world.”
“But how, boss? Are you going to have to start the war all over?”
“I never stopped it except in our pretty dream world. But I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to reveal the whole fake—to call it all a fake in print.”
“Boss!” Molly gasped. “You . . . you realize this is suicide? Nobody’ll ever read the Sentinel again. And suicide,” she added with grim personal humor, “isn’t anything I’d recommend.”
“I don’t count beside Grover. I don’t count beside men. ‘For God,’ ” he quoted wryly, “ ‘so loved the world—’ ”
“This is it,” said John MacVeagh much later.
That edition of the Sentinel had been prepared by a staff of three. The large, fine new staff of the large, fine new Sentinel had frankly decided that its proprietor was mad or drunk or both. Storming in dressed like a bum and giving the craziest orders. There had been a mass meeting and a mass refusal to have anything to do with the proposed all-is-lies edition.
Luke Sellers had filled the breach again. He read the copy and nodded. “You never talked much, Johnny, but I had it figured pretty much like this. I was in at the start, so I guess it’s right I ought to be in at the end.”
This was the end now. This minute a two-sheet edition, its front page one huge headline and its inside pages containing nothing but MacVeagh’s confession in large type, was set up and ready to run.
The confession told little. MacVeagh could not expect to make anyone believe in Whalen Smith and wishes and variable truths. It read simply like the story of a colossal and unparalleled hoax.
“There won’t be enough rails in town for the guys that’ll want to run you out on one, Johnny,” Luke Sellers warned.
“I’m taking the chance. Go ahead: print it.”
The presses clanked.
There was a moment of complete chaos.
Somewhere in that chaos a part of MacVeagh’s mind was thinking. This was what had to happen. You gave your wish an impossible problem: to print that its truth is not truth. Like the old logical riddle about how you cannot say, “I am lying.” If you are, it’s the truth, and so you’re not. Same in reverse. And when the wish meets the impossible—
The wish gave up. It ceased to be. And in the timeless eternity where all magic exists, it ceased ever to have been.
IX
“All right then, tell me this: If God can do anything—” Jake Willis cleared his throat and paused, preparatory to delivering the real clincher.
The old man with the scraggly beard snorted and took another shot of applejack. “Why doesn’t He end the war? I’m getting tired of that, Jake. I wish you’d go back to the weight He can’t lift. Father’s explained this one before, and I’m willing to admit he makes a good case.”
“I don’t see it,” said Jake stubbornly.
Father Byrne sighed. “Because man must have free will. If men were mere pawns that were pushed around by God, their acts would have no merit in them. They would be unworthy to be the children of God. Your own children you love even when most they rebel. You do not love your chessmen. Man must work out his own salvation; salvation on a silver platter is meaningless.”
John MacVeagh stirred restlessly. This idea seemed so familiar. Not from hearing Father Byrne expound it before, but as though he had worked it out for himself, sometime, in a very intimate application.
“But if there is a God—” Jake went on undisturbed.
MacVeagh caught Ingve Johansen’s eye and grinned. He was glad Johansen had joined the crackerbarrel club. Glad, too, that Johansen’s marriage with Laura Hitchcock was working so well.
The man with the tired face was playing with the black Scottie and trying to think of nothing at all. When he heard footsteps, he looked up sharply. The tiredness was automatically wiped from his face by a grin, which faded as he saw a stranger. “How did you get in here?” he demanded.
The stranger was an old man with a beaked nose. In the dim light it was hard to tell whether or not he wore a beard. He said, “I’ve been working for you.”
The man with the Scottie looked at the defense worker’s identification card which said
WHALING, SMITH
He resumed the grin. “Glad to see you. Fine work they’ve been turning out at your plant. You’re a delegate to me?”
“Sort of. But just for me. You see, I’m quitting.”
“You can’t. Your job’s frozen.”
“I know. But that don’t count. Not for me. But it’s this way: Since the Army took over the plant, looks like you’re my employer. Right?”
The man seemed puzzled as he fitted a cigarette into a long holder. “I guess so. Smoke?”
“No, thanks. Then if you’re my employer, you’ve been a good one. You’ve got a wish coming to you.”
The man with the holder peered at the other. It was hard to make him out. And he’d come in so silently, presumably through the guards.
The grin was crooked as he said, “I don’t think you’re even here. And since you aren’t, there’s no harm in playing the game. A wish—” He looked at the globe on the table and at the dispatches beside it. “Yes,” he said finally, “I have a wish—”
John MacVeagh paused beside the Gypsy’s booth at the Victory Garden Fair. “Want to have your fortune told, Molly?”
Molly shuddered. “Maybe I’m silly. But ever since I was a child I’ve been scared of anything like magic. There’s always a catch.”
The Scottie had been trying to gather courage to bark at the stranger. Now he succeeded. “Be quiet, Fala,” his owner
ordered. “Yes, Whaling, I wish—”
MARY CELESTIAL
[with Miriam Allen deFord]
Xilmuch was discovered—once. It was discovered in 3942 by Patrick OstronskyVierra, a Two Star Scout of the Galactic Presidium.
It is easy to find—it is in fact Planet IV of Altair. If it were not a little off the beaten track it would have been discovered long before. It is almost precisely the size of our Earth, has similar atmosphere, rotation, gravity, and climatic conditions. It is two-thirds land surface, and in every way is admirably adapted to human habitation. It has been the home of beings indistinguishable from humans, and was once the seat of a high civilization very like our own of the 40th century, except in minor details. There are no noxious animal forms (the only beasts are herbivorous and inoffensive), and there are no human inhabitants who would resist colonization.
And yet, no matter how overcrowded the colonized planets may become, Xilmuch (that was its name in the dominant native language) will never be discovered again. It will never be colonized.
Not after the report Patrick Ostronsky-Vierra brought back in 3942.
He landed in what seemed to be its largest city, after a preliminary survey of the entire planet in his little one-man scout ship. There was a beautiful airport, equipped for planes of every description. It was not in good repair. Squirrel-like animals infested the hangars full of grounded atmosphere-ships. Grass was growing between cracks in the wide runways. A storm had leveled what had been a huge neo-neon beacon.
Patrick spent two days exploring the city on foot. There were multitudes of parked surface cars and of helicopter-like planes, some of which had crashed and were piles of junk. All had been propelled by some fuel unknown to him, all the tanks were empty, and he could not find any stores of fuel that he could recognize. A good many of the main streets had moving sidewalks under plastic roofs, and some were still operating by remote control. It was the sort of civilization which in his experience implied the services of robots, but no robots of any kind were visible.
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