The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

know." He added, "A Footeman told me."
     
         "Hmm." He tried to look calm, to show poise. But inside he felt queasy. Undoubtedly--since it took priority over his regular job--this emanated from Brose's bureau. And there was something about Brose and his special projects that he did not like. Although just what .
     
         "It's something you might enjoy," Lindblom said. "Has to do with archeology."
     
         Adams grinned. "I get it. Soviet missiles are going to destruct Carthage."
     
         "And you're going to program Hector and Priam and all those fellas. Get out your Sophocles. Your pony or cribsheet or whatever."
     
         "'My friends,'" Adams intoned in solemn parody, "'I have grave news for you, but we shall overcome. The new Soviet ICBM Hatcheck Girl A-3 missile, with a C-warhead, has strewn radioactive common table salt over an area surrounding Carthage fifty square miles wide, but this only goes to show--' " He paused. "What did Carthage produce, autofac-wise? Vases?" Anyhow that was Lindblom's job. The display of postcards, scanned by the multifax lens-system of the TV cameras at Eisenbludt' s mammoth, intricate--in fact endlessly prop-filled--studios in Moscow. " 'This, my good people and friends, is all that remains, but I am informed by General Holt that our own strike, utilizing our newly developed offensive terror weapon, the Polyphemus X-B peashooter, has decimated the entire war fleet of Athens, and with god's help we shall--'"
     
         "You know," Lindblom said meditatively, from the tiny speaker of the flapple's vidset. "You'd feel damn funny if one of Brose's people were monitoring this."
     
         Below, a wide river like wet silver wiggled from north to south, and Joseph Adams leaned out to view the Mississippi and acknowledge its beauty. No reconcrews had accomplished this; what glistened in the morning sun was an element of the old creation. The original world which did not need to be recreated, reconned, because it had never departed. This sight, like that of the Pacific, always sobered him, because it meant that something had proved stronger; something had escaped.
     
         "Let him monitor," Adams said, filled with vigor; he drew strength from the wavering silver line below--strength enough to ring off, cut the switch of the vidset. Just in case Brose was monitoring.
     
         And then, beyond the Mississippi, he saw a manmade focus of upright, hard structures, and these, too, gave him a funny feeling. Because these were the Ozymandias-who-he? great conapt dwellings erected by that busy builder, Louis Runcible. That one-man ant army that, in its marches, did not gnaw down with its mandibles but set up, with its many metal arms, one gigantic dormlike structure, including kids' play-grounds, swimming pools, ping-pong tables and dart boards.
     
         Ye shall know the truth, Adams thought, and by this thou shalt enslave. Or, as Yancy would put it, "My fellow Americans. I have before me a document so sacred and momentous that I am going to ask you to--" And so on. Now he felt tired, and he had not even reached 580 Fifth Avenue, New York and the Agency, had not begun his day. Alone, at his demesne on the Pacific, he felt the weedy, twisted fog of loneliness grow by day and by night and clog the passages of his throat; here, in transit across the reconned and not-yet-oh-lord but soon-to-be-reconned areas--and of course the still hot-spots, which lay like ringworm circles every so often--he felt this uneasy shame. He glowed with guilt, not because recon was bad, but--it was bad, and he knew who and what _it_ was.
     
         I wish there was one missile left, he said to himself. In orbit. And we could touch one of those quaint old-time buttons the brass once had at their disposal, and that missile would go _pfoooooom!_ At Geneva. And Stanton Brose.
     
         By god, Adams thought, maybe I will program the 'vac one day not with a speech, even